Oh my, what a discussion.
The term "Linux software" often describes GNU software and other open-source licensed software. Most of this software runs well on multiple platforms, and even the graphical programs like Gimp runs on Windows, too.
The difference between Linux, Solaris and Windows is, that Linux is often the platform that most developers of free software use, which makes Linux a very stable platform for free software. Windows, on the other hand, runs most free software unstable and slowly. The Gimp hasn't even been released in a non-beta version for Windows, yet, and maybe it never will because of the stability problems.
There are many examples of software, that all runs better on Linux and Solaris than on Windows, like VMware, Half-Life server, Oracle, Interbase, Apache, Gimp, etc. Typically, these programs do not exploit the richer API of Windows, but are regarded as more stable than competing software that does exploit the Windows APIs in full.
One comment on the post that wrote about "native Linux software". By the above mentioned definition of "native Linux software", it is delivered as source-code. Different distributions then compile the software for some processor, like Intel processors, Itanium, Sparc, StrongARM etc. To most Linux programmers, Solaris is just another but different Linux-like platform.
Lars. |
