Windows

Windows Wins Another Small Battle over Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux

Because of updates availability

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

14th of July 2008, 14:44 GMT

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Windows is generally perceived as the perpetual bronze winner in a three horse race against Apple's Mac OS X and the open source Linux, despite the fact that Microsoft continues to account for in excess of 90% of the operating system market. According to the Redmond company, the operating system vulnerability counting games has been indisputably won by Windows, by Windows Vista, in fact. But the Windows operating system has also won

another small battle over rival products Mac OS X and the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, Pingdom informs.

In April, May and June 2008, Pingdom tested the software update "access point" availability for Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Windows. The aim of the test was to determine which operating system envoys the best update support from its vendor, considering strictly the accessibility factor.

"It turns out that Microsoft wins this one hands down. Their Windows software update was available 100% of the time," a Pingdom representative stated. "Apple had a respectable 99.9% uptime for its software update. It was only unavailable a total of 2 hours and 34 minutes. Ubuntu on the other hand came off worse, with only 98.64% availability for its main repository. That is a total of 1 day, 5 hours and 45 minutes in the three months of this survey."

Although Windows is the clear winner because of the perfect uptime of update.microsoft.com, the aspect that separates it from Mac OS X's swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog is insignificant to say the least, just 0.01%. At the same time, Ubuntu does not rely exclusively on archive.ubuntu.com, but also on additional repositories for serving updates to the homonym distro of Linux.

"It should be noted, though, that Ubuntu's repositories have mirrors around the world, so users can download packages from those as well," the Pingdom representative added. "The monitoring was done using Pingdom's uptime monitoring service, performing a test once every five minutes. Downtime was always confirmed from two different locations."

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Windows | Mac OS X | Ubuntu | Linux

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Comment #1 by: TripleII on 17 Jul 2008, 01:12 GMT

reply to this comment

How can you claim 100% uptime with there was a weekend where the WGA server was down, calling millions of install of Windows invalid?

A couple more points, Ubuntu != Linux, never had a problem with Mandriva, Suse and Redhat are probably rock solid, just have spare repositories too. Now, when the MS server updates and keeps every installed application on a Windows machine up to date, there might be something to report.

BTW, what were the other victories? You used the word "another" in the title.

TripleII

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