If you would have read the whole thread, you would have seen that this was an edit. It did originally say 120 gig of ram, and it had been edited since then. Please try to avoid from duplicate posts.

Well, to be honest Linux is used extensively in the modern hosting world... and when looking at strictly at the facts, it is preferred over Windows (in this realm at least). Why? Well it could be because of the hosting software control panels available to the Linux OS, or it could be because people are more experienced with remote administration of Linux than that of Windows. Further I disagree with anyone saying that Linux is more secure then Windows, or vice versa, a server’s security lies within its administrator. In my experience I have enjoyed Linux more then Windows, simply because I find it’s easier to move around in and customize… but hey that’s my opinion. Every OS has its holes and vulnerabilities, a server’s security all depends on how active and skilled the administrator is

Exactly. This is why Windows Server 2003 will usually be more secure than linux will ever be. N00bish administrators only know how to point and click; and they arent going to know how to play with some obscure text setting file. So there you go; you just told us all that Windows Server 2003 is really better


Not to mention, on the same piece of hardware, Windows Server 2003 outperforms any linux serving task; usually exponentially. On an 8-Way Xeon webserver, Windows Server 2003 with IIS6 can serve like 8x the server load that a linux server could.

Microsoft.com: Get the Facts on Windows and Linux

I personally prefer Linux server because I have not found a Windows/Apache control panel. For my sites to work proply I have to have something like mod_rewrite and the windows exquivelent it costs money that I don't have

Alert! Entirely off topic! But...

That's not entirely true...Novell uses a kernel, just like everything else. It doesn't have a bootloader and needs a helping hand to get going doesn't mean it uses DOS. Back in the days when I ran Novell boxes I always used the "REMOVE DOS" command in the system startup...

I still think back to the day when the first server I ever personally built (NetWare 4.11) finally got switched off to replace it with a shiny new NT4 box. It was summat like 3 days shy of 2 years uptime...(quietly wipes a tear from the corner of his eye...)

N00bish administrators only know how to point and click? Gee... my 7-year old sister also knows how to point and click, so I guess a 'N00bish administrator' (whatever that is) is no better than her.

Regarding security, when NT first came out, it had so many holes it was worse than swiss cheese. Windows security has gotten somewhat better over the years, but that isn't really saying much and one look at the news and it is all but obvious how *bad* MS server technology security still is compared to *nix. We have yet to see how much of an impact MS' publicized security initiatives will really have. It is extremely hard to both secure an OS and make it easy to use at the same time and MS has traditionally chosen the latter over the former whereas *nix takes the opposite approach.

Pure, utter bunk. Do you even understand what the term 'exponentially' means? And where'd you pull out that 'can serve like 8x the server load' assertion?

One thing I've noticed, there's very little difference between a Linux zealot and a Windows zealot. Both are ill-informed about not only the OS they're ranting against, but the OS they're using as well.

Kernel techologies
=============
NT technology has certainly improved a whole lot since the days of NT 3.5 and it is starting to become a match for *nix. User-friendliness wise it has its advantages (but all that point-and-clickiness actually tends to get in the way of experienced administrators). However, *nix still holds important advantages in many critical areas. The new Linux 2.6 kernel, for instance, does a good job in keeping Linux core technology apace with, and in many key areas, ahead of NT (such as in thread scalability - i.e. you will get superior performance for servers which use one thread per connection). Linux 2.6 also finally supports asynchronous I/O - a very important performance feature which NT has had for some time now (called overlapped I/O in its case).

API design
========
OS API-wise, Linux's are far more elegant than the mind-numbing function calls that you see in Win32. This is the advantage of a development process which hies more to technical requirements than marketing ones. MS is forced to engineer compromises in the semantics of their APIs in order to get features out sooner. This rush, in conjunction with the need to maintain backwards compatibility with bad decisions of the past, is what's responsible for ugly, hard-to-use (from a programmer's standpoint) APIs. With Linux, the development process can be compared to that of aging a fine wine. A lot of thought and debate is put into it before it is approved, but once that happens, the API design scales gracefully to take new developments into account and doesn't need to keep on changing - very much unlike MS' style where, for example, you see a Winforms that's barely out there almost immediately being replaced with by a non-backwards compatible Avalon.


Linux's real shortcoming
=================
The one major area where Linux glaringly comes up short is in the desktop technologies department and I don't see that being resolved anytime soon although there are certainly very interesting efforts afoot. MS has a far from elegant graphics architecture in GDI and DirectX but it's still a helluva lot better than anything Linux has right now. But then this has zero to do with its appropriateness as a server platform.

Conclusion
========
Despite the ridiculous claims in the aforementioned post, NT technology is no longer something to be regarded with disdain. The Linux zealots are starting to look more and more foolish when they make their own stupid claims of unqualified Linux superiority. I've started becoming more and more of an MS fan ever since I started using Win2K on the desktop, but I still keep a close eye on Linux because it has its own very interesting set of advantages. Windows Server 2003 may (or may not) be closing the gap, but I have little doubt that at this point in time, Linux still makes for a much better server platform and the more experienced one is, the more obvious that will become.

Absolutely , OpenBSD always gets justifiably ragged on for this 'secure by default' claim.

Hackers use Linux boxes to learn how to hack, but what they learn on Linux they use to attack Microsoft boxes because administrators of the latter invariably have a shallower understanding of technologies and thus are unable to properly secure their systems beyond installing service packs and patches if and when they do come out.

Most serious *nix administrators understand the inner workings of their servers to a greater degree and have far far greater control of how their servers operate (it has to do with the design philosophy of the OS) and are thus more proactively in control of their machines - they are able to deal with security problems effectively even if a patch has not yet arrived.

/me really feals this topic should be closed. roflmao

I love these Windows vs. Linux discussions, looks like we have material to fill up databases with TB of opinions and points of view.