Actually, all the Linux systems are very much alike. The libs are in /usr/lib, the bigger apps in /usr/bin, only the core system utilities in /bin and so on. Everything has it’s place, and with the LSB that is pretty well defined. And it’s not just the kernel and a text editor, this applies to most of your system. Including three office packages, a couple web browsers, a dozen IM applications and so on.

Windows however is very fragmented. Well, not really fragmented, because no two Windows systems are alike. On some systems it’s “C:\Program Files”, others use “C:\Programme”, maybe a dozen other translations. I’ve seen apps using “C:\Progra~1” which works with both of above path names, at least on FAT, due to the old 8+3 filename restriction. So I don’t know about NTFS.

This makes supporting Windows a PITA. You can test something on all your Windows boxes, and it just won’t work on the first clients box you need to run it on. Happens all the time. Not to mention surprises with actually different Windows versions.

Thats what I love with OpenSource, Linux and Debian. You just “apt-get install lyx” and you end up with a complete, working LaTeX and LyX environment on your system within minutes. Completely hassle free. The amount of “third party software” shipped with Linux is it’s biggest strength. Everything is there, and it’ll just work and still not really make your system different from anybody elses. Even across distributions. I have an Ubuntu workstation at one institute at the university. The CS computer lab is all OpenSuSE currently. But I don’t need to care. It works just like my system. I google how to change to page ordering when printing PDF slides 4-up, and it just works.