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Originally Posted by AnotherCat
I am not making a claim on this, just wondering. What about real time systems using Windows (Windows is widely used for SCADA, for example)?
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I don't know. What I mean is that nobody I know, including myself, uses the Windows operating system to get work done. In Linux, many people use the actual operating system, even if it's the command-line, to get real work done. You can do so in Windows, using Powershell, but it's too verbosive in comparison.
Linux provides an operating system, and on top of that you install applications you need to do stuff, if the operating system can't do it on the command line or if it's too inconvenient. You get to choose the applications.
Windows just provides a lot of crap built-in that sits there unused. The Win10 calculator is a joke. Why is there no Ti-84 or equivalent or something? Have you ever seen anyone seriously use Notepad, Wordpad or Paint to get stuff done? I use Firefox. I should be able to remove Internet Explorer. And so on...
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Perhaps it is junk now, I don't know except that it seems to still be around in real time systems.
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It is still the default windowing system in Linux/Unix-like operating systems (except for MacOSX). X-Windows is a client-server, network-based display server. It is *very* powerful and can do things Windows can only dream of (or needs third party applications to manage it), but large parts of its code are also *very* old and extremely hard to maintain and update. There are several projects underway (Wayland, Mir) trying to create a viable alternative display server, as the X-Window system is one of the oldest parts of Unix/Linux still in use.
The Ken Thompson quote was about the fact that the huge (by 1984/85 standards) X-Window system only existed to support graphics, but didn't do anything itself; you couldn't get any work done with it. It only served to graphically do what the command-line already did textually.