The Difference Between Gnome and Windows Operating System

The difference between GNOME and Windows operating system.

GNOME:

1. Linux is based on a long history of well fleshed-out multi-user design.

Linux does not have a history of being a single-user system. Therefore it has been designed from the ground-up to isolate users from applications, files and directories that affect the entire operating system. Each user is given a user directory where all of the user's data files and configuration files are stored. When a user runs an application, such as a word processor, that word processor runs with the restricted privileges of the user. It can only write to the user's own home directory. It cannot write to a system file or even to another user's directory unless the administrator explicitly gives the user permission to do so.

Even more important, Linux provides almost all capabilities, such as the rendering of JPEG images, as modular libraries. As a result, when a word processor renders JPEG images, the JPEG rendering functions will run with the same restricted privileges as the word processor itself. If there is a flaw in the JPEG rendering routines, a malicious hacker can only exploit this flaw to gain the same privileges as the user, thus limiting the potential damage. This is the benefit of a modular system, and it follows more closely the spherical analogy of an ideally designed operating system.

Given the default restrictions in the modular nature of Linux; it is nearly impossible to send an email to a Linux user that will infect the entire machine with a virus. It doesn't matter how poorly the email client is designed or how badly it may behave - it only has the privileges to infect or damage the user's own files. Linux browsers do not support inherently insecure objects such as ActiveX controls, but even if they did, a malicious ActiveX control would only run with the privileges of the user who is running the browser. Once again, the most damage it could do is infect or delete the user's own files.

Even services, such as web servers, typically run as users with restricted privileges. For example, Debian GNU/Linux runs the Apache server as the user "www-data", who belongs to a group with the same name, "www-data". If a malicious hacker manages to gain complete control over the Apache web server on a Debian system, that hacker can only affect files owned by the user "www-data", such as web pages. In turn, the MySQL SQL database server often used in conjunction with Apache, runs with the privileges of the user "mysql". So even if Apache and MySQL are used together to serve web pages, a malicious hacker who gains control of Apache does not have the privileges to exploit the Apache hole in order to gain control of the database server, because the database server is "owned" by another user.

In addition, users associated with services such as Apache, MySQL, etc., are often set up with user accounts that have no access to a command line. So if a malicious hacker somehow breaks into the MySQL user account, that hacker cannot exploit that vulnerability to issue arbitrary commands to the Linux server, because that account has no ability to issue commands.

In sharp contrast, Windows was originally designed to allow all users and applications to have administrator access to every file on the system. Windows has only gradually been re-worked to isolate users and what they do from the rest of the system. Windows Server 2003 is close to achieving this goal, but the methodology Microsoft has employed to create this barrier between user and system is still largely composed of constantly changing hacks to the existing design, rather than a fundamental redesign with multi-user capability and security as the foundational concept behind the system.

2. Linux is mostly modular by design.

Linux is for the most part a modularly designed operating system, from the kernel (the core "brains" of Linux) to the applications. Almost nothing in Linux is inextricably intertwined with anything else. There is no single browser engine used by help systems or email programs. Indeed, it is easy to configure most email programs to use a built-in browser engine to render HTML messages, or launch any browser you wish to view HTML documents or jump to links included in an email message. Therefore a flaw in one browser engine does not necessarily present a danger to any other application on the system, because few if any other applications besides the browser itself must depend on a single browser engine.

Not everything in Linux is modular. The two most popular graphical desktops, KDE and GNOME, are somewhat monolithic by design; at least enough so that an update to one part of GNOME or KDE can potentially break other parts of GNOME or KDE. Neither GNOME nor KDE are so monolithic, however, as to require you to use GNOME or KDE-specific applications. You can run GNOME applications or any other applications under KDE, and you can run KDE or any other applications under GNOME.

The Linux kernel supports modular drivers, but it is essentially a monolithic kernel where services in the kernel are interdependent. Any adverse impact of this monolithic approach is minimized by the fact that the Linux kernel is designed to be as minimal a part of the system as possible. Linux follows the following philosophy almost to a point of fanaticism: "Whenever a task can be done outside the kernel, it must be done outside the kernel." This means that almost every useful feature in Linux ("useful" as perceived by an end user) is a feature that does not have access to the vulnerable parts of a Linux system.

In contrast, bugs in graphics card drivers are a common cause of the Windows blue-screen-of-death. That's because Windows integrates graphics into the kernel, where a bug can cause a system failure. With only a few proprietary exceptions (such as the third-party NVidia graphics driver), Linux forces all graphics drivers to run outside the kernel. A bug in a graphics driver may cause the graphical desktop to fail, but not cause the entire system to fail. If this happens, one simply restarts the graphical desktop. One does not need to reboot the computer.

3. Linux does not depend upon RPC to function, and services are usually configured not to use RPC by default

As stated above in the section on Windows, RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. Simply put, an RPC allows one program to tell another program to do something, even if that other program resides on another computer. For example, one program can use an RPC to tell another program to calculate the average cost