Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux?

5th August 2013

My answer to What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux? on Quora

Any and every operation you perform on a Linux server can be trivially automated by copying the commands you ran in to a text file. I haven’t managed a Windows server in years and I hear PowerShell is pretty great these days but an OS based around a GUI is always going to be harder to automate than one based around a command line.

Linux has a much stronger complement of high quality open source software—and new open source server software (stuff like node.js) usually becomes available for Linux first.

If you don’t know anything about Linux but are comfortable with Windows, you’ll find it easier to manage a Windows server in the short term.