Quote Originally Posted by RealBeast View Post
Gary, next time engage your thinking cap before your search engine.

We all know that Windows is a copyrighted proprietary product of Microsoft. Your long diatribe on that obvious point makes it even more painfully clear that you missed the entire point of his post.

Windows will run on a HUGE range and combination of computers, parts, peripherals. Apply a little combinatorial math and the possibilities are mind boggling.

Macs cannot even come close. They had a chance once upon a time and then they killed Power Computing.
Ummmm..... Who is running a Mac? Not me.

Debian, which I use, runs on many more architectures than Windows does. Windows runs on x86 hardware. It's pretty much all it will run on. Debian runs on 11 different hardware architectures: alpha, arm, armel, hp pa-risc, mips, mipsel, powerpc, and sparc. Plus it runs on all the basic hardware platforms Windows runs on: i386, amd64, and ia64--which only Windows server will run on. I can run a Debian desktop or server on any of the 11 platforms Debian supports. Plus, applications are plentiful in all architectures, which is not true for even the 3 architectures Windows will run on. Windows 64-bit software support is getting better, but Linux has had almost universal 64-bit software support for several years. If it's in the 32-bit repositories the chances of it being in the rest of the hardware architecture repositories is very good. I run pure 64-bit on a couple of machines and I've never run across something in the 32-bit repositories that I couldn't install on pure 64-bit installations, other than proprietary packages such as flash, which is now available.

So, yeah, Windows is proprietary all the way around. When MS first started, and up through NT 4.0, they had better hardware support than they do now. Next time have some clue as to what you're talking about.