Windows vs. Linux - The Ultimate Showdown

For our computer we were debating whether to use Windows or Linux as our operating system for the pillow tree. We were going to use Linux but we ran into a few problems. They are as follows:

1. We're using Panda3D, a free 3D game engine made by Carnegie Mellon. Our input devices, called phidgets, are compatible with this engine. However, the Linux version of Panda3D does not contain the code required. The Windows version ran on DLL files, and recreating the code to work for Linux would have taken some time.

2. We also have code to interface with DMX, which would control all the lighting effects. However, our code currently involves Windows API. Redoing it in Linux would have also required a lot of work.

3. Video playback just didn't work at all in Linux. The framerate was terrible and it just didn't seem that Linux could perform as necessary.

We then decided to go with Windows. We tried to use Windows XP at first, but we had driver issues. We couldn't find the right drivers for the network adapter or the sound card, and our hardware description didn't solve the problem.

We finally settled on Windows Vista. All of the code works in Vista, so our main goal now is to try to maximize the performance, as the operating system eats up quite a bit of memory.