Operating systems

[Seob]

If chrome os is anything like android, i'm sure i don't want to try it. I want to be able to customize the startscreen. In android i hate the fixed position of the home button right under the space bar. No way to change the position to top or side like the startbar in windows. Something that simple isn't possible without rooting the device.

If chrome os is like that, it's a no go for me.

[Algus]

The "desktop" in Chrome OS is really just an illusion. Some apps don't even utilize the taskbar properly. It is a highly secure, very lightweight OS with good power management and speedy boot times but until more packaged apps actually offer offline functionality it will remain a glorified browser. As far as customization goes, it offers little more than what you can do with a browser. Theoretically though you could sudo the drive to read/write and make system changes through the CLI. I haven't seen anywhere where someone has done anything super cool with that yet though.

 

I find it reliable insofar as it makes for a great low - cost ultraportable but only because I have a Mac Mini I can remote into when I need to do some real work.

[Seob]

We'll for now i use a multitude of operating systems. My main pc has windows 7 64 bit installed using fences on top of that to organize desktop icons. Mac os 10.6.8 for both or macbook and imac. I use a old 486 laptop with dos 6.22 and windows 3.11 to hook up my 1541 commodore drive to transfer game images to a real floppy.

I have a pc with a linux version of xmbc, and i have a pc with beos installed, but i haven't done much with that system lately.

And i use amiga workbench to write disk images from my pc to amiga disks.

I also have a laptop with xp installed for my wife, for here embroidery software.

[Seob]

Today i had my first hands on with windows 8. My god microsoft really screawed there desktop operating system up. What a useless piece of os this is. Even a simple task as switching of the system is nearly impossible without going to internet and looking it up.

For me microsoft did dig its own desktop grave with this piece of cr...

Edited November 17, 2013 by Seob

[Rhomaios]

I haven't kept up with advances in Linux in years. Is Linux Mint still nice? Is Fedora still going strong? Is Ubuntu still changing too radically? Is Gentoo still a pain in the butt to install? Anything new and exciting recently?

[potatohead]

Yes. I don't know about new and exciting. I have a couple of Ubuntu Live distributions that I've added applications I need. Boot 'em, do the Linux thing, and move on. Nice.

 

I'll probably put a good Linux on my Thinkpad in the near future.

[Algus]

Ubuntu still wants to be OS X and the drama continues over different ways Canonical tries to profit off Ubuntu. I think people have come to terms with Unity and either taught themselves how to install a new Windows manager and/or desktop environment or embraced Unity. There has been a bit of optimization so Unity runs a little better on low end hardware now. And the bugs are worked out for the most part. Meanwhile, Mint has been pulling a lot of Ubuntu users and has projects that have forked both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 (Mate and Cinnamon) which both look and respond great and both of which have diehards arguing over which is best.

 

Speaking of Fedora, it has support for MATE now, which is kind of exciting if you're a GNOME 2 fan. Personally, XFCE is my desktop environment of choice

[Hatta]

One of the awesome developments with Linux is the rise of tiled window managers. Like the Awesome window manager. Or dwm, or xmonad, etc. These are designed to be used without the mouse, saving you a lot of reaching if you use the command line frequently. Tiling also uses your screen more efficiently. If you use overlapping windows, you're never using all of your screen. There's really little point to that UI metaphor. If you're using one app, it makes sense to give it all of your screen. If you're using two apps, you either want to see both of them at the same time(tiled), or you want to switch back and forth easily, which is really just using one app at a time, so you want it maximized. If you can see your desktop, you're wasting part of your screen.

 

They are highly configurable, and most of them are designed to be scripted in the language in which they were written. e.g. Awesome is written in C & lua, and configured with lua. DWM is written in C and configured with C. xmonad is written in Haskell and configured in Haskell. So basically you have all the power you could ever want to implement any function that will make your GUI easier to use.

 

Of course, like the command line and other scriptable interfaces, they take some time to learn. But that time spent learning pays back in spades. There are also similar keyboard driven web browsers, like Uzbl, luakit, or Firefox with the Pentadactyl add on.

[potatohead]

If you use overlapping windows, you're never using all of your screen. There's really little point to that UI metaphor....

 

Really, that depends on whether or not the window manager allows focus follows mouse type behavior and allows window input without popping it to the foreground. If those two things are available, then overlapping windows can really shine.

 

That said, I completely agree with you. Being able to select window managers is in and of itself a killer Linux feature.

[Metal Jesus]

I was a Windows guy for decades...and I played around with Ubuntu for a few years... but now I'm 100% Apple OSX and I'm not looking back. Doing Final Cut and photo editing on a 27" iMac is just so fast and efficient, especially when you get all the keyboard commands down.

[Hatta]

OS X is a fine operating system. It just needs a good terminal emulator and Fink to be really great. Never could stand file management with the finder, but file management is a job for the CLI anyway.

[Lumpbucket]

The computer system that always had the most impact on me was the Amiga, and I still use AmigaOS 4.1 today

 

Windows 7 is also good.

 

I never liked Linux, but since I have to write software for it for work, I've got used to it. I don't mind Fedora or Ubuntu.

[MarkO]

I still really like IBM's OS/2..

 

I have used everything from Apple DOS 3.2 to ProDOS, CP/M, the C64's 1541/1571/1581, PCDOS 2.10 to Windows 8, Coherent Unix Clone, Linux ( Red Hat, Debian, Mint ), OpenBSD and Mac OS 9.x and 10.2.xx..

 

I have some Sinclair ZX81's, but no Disk Systems.....

[roland p]

The OS that never crashes in my house is... (don't laugh) Windows Vista!

 

I might want to replace that machine with a macbook retina 15" (company laptop). I played around in the apple store and it was very snappy and clean. But I still have to install Windows somehow so I can run SQLServer.

[Algus]

Boot camp is a really smooth dual boot utility and when you do the setup, Apple packs up all the relevant drivers which is great. Some of the hardware support is rubbish though. Apple laptops have trouble with battery management among other things.

 

I use it on my Mac mini though and have no real complaints outside of the fact that Windows is noticeably slower than OS X on my system

[Kyle22]

I'm sure I have already had my say here, but, I would like to re-inforce it again:

 

CP/M (Z-System, NZCOM)

Windows-XP

SpartaDOS-X

 

And, as soon as I get an x86 tablet, I will REMOVE Win8 and install XP Tablet edition on it.

 

There is already a way to to UEFI boot an MBR partition, so that is the way to go....

It'll take a while b4 I get the money for one, but I will post my results here

 

-K

[rivercityrandom]

I have a soft spot in my heart for Mac OS 7-9. The interface was more quirky than it was elegant; but it got out of your way so you could do stuff. But sadly, today's OSes seem more interested in thrusting eye candy (or worse, targeted advertisements) in your face than doing what an OS is supposed to do: be a go-between between your hardware and your programs. Of course, right now, I run Ubuntu, which tries to be a poor man's Mac OS X as far as eye candy is concerned, but it's relatively simple to install a new desktop environment and window manager. The freedom of choice and the lack of viruses are the main reasons why I am going the Linux route, although I do run Windows 7 on my games machine and... it's not awful. Windows 8 on the other hand, I have heard nothing but bad stories about.

[eightbit]

I'm with you with BeOS. I ran it exclusively for about two years. I remember purchasing specific hardware just to make it run correctly Always wanted a BeBox....

 

First book I read was Scot Hacker's BeOS Bible (great book if it are new to BeOS) and purchased Soundplay right away for the neat ability of playing MP3's in reverse. To this day I cannot find a player that does this...

 

It was a multimedia powerhouse, and really could have been much more. Too bad Be shifted gears to "internet appliances".

[Rex Dart]

To think BeOS, rather than BSD, almost became Mac OSX!

[BydoEmpire]

I've had really good luck w/ OSX. I've been running that at home for 6-7 years. It honestly has "just worked" for me - very, very few issues over a long period of time on multiple machines. Is it perfect? No, nothing is. There have been some issues, but a lot less frequent and less serious than on my Win machines overall.

 

I liked Win98, too, that was pretty solid for me for years.

 

For 8-bitters, I liked the stock Apple ][ DOS - fast and to-the-point.

Edited March 6, 2014 by BydoEmpire

[Nebulon]

_{My favorites:}

 

_{IRIX 6 (SGI) - A nice-looking GUI that ran great and was awesome for scripting. A bit core-dump-happy at times though.}

 

_{Amiga OS 3.1 (A4000/040) - I recall putting this one through a multi-tasking stress test, and it preformed brilliantly. Two disks formatting at the same time, a script running in the shell, thirty simultaneous downloads, music player running in the background, and a graphics app in the foreground (with a ton of open windows). I also like the right-click drag-select for quick file selection, the SHIFT-Backspace to delete all prior command-line text, the up-arrow for accessing previous commands, and all the free desktop tools that are available for it.}

 

 

_{The OS's that I've used in the past (some I still put to use):}

 

_{RS-DOS (Color Computer)}

_{Apple DOS}

_{MS-DOS (5 was my favorite)}

_{Windows 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 (I still regard XP as the best of the bunch with ME one of the worst).}

_{Microsoft BOB (hey, it wasn't by choice)}

_{OS/2 Warp (Seemed pretty good at the time)}

_{AmigaDOS 1.3, 2.x. 3.x}

_TOS

_{OS-9 (TRS-80 Color Computer) - this is one that I'd like to get to know better.}

_{Max OS 8.x}

_{Mac OS 9.x}

_{Max OS X}

Edited March 6, 2014 by Nebulon

[Nebulon]

Huh? Of course not. OS's doing what? A box for say, SQL Server will have totally different requirements to a desktop running Office apps. It's nothing like a simple task.

 

 

 

It'll tell me if it's faster than my last OS. The fact is though, most people buy a new OS when they buy new hardware because it comes bundled. Been like that forever.

 

 

 

As I said, it makes no sense to try and put Windows 7 on a low spec machine and try to draw conclusions from it. XP is finished, what do I care how it performs? DOS would fly on my laptop, but I'm not sure what it proves. DOS might therefore be a "faster" OS, but it'd also be rather rubbish.

 

Every OS has viruses. Every OS crashes. Every piece of hardware will eventually fail. tis life.

Then just turn it around and run XP on a machine spec'd to run Windows 7 smoothly.

 

I'm quite sure Windows XP would run the exact same cross-compatible apps more quickly than a Windows 7 machine. Even if the speed tests did turn out to be the same, XP would likely use less RAM and hard drive space than 7.

 

For example, try running the exact same multi-tracking audio app, 3D modeling/animation/rendering engine, or video editing app.

 

Based on the test results that I've read about, they're pretty darned close -- edging each other out in various categories.

 

Here's the differential for the RAM and hard drive requirements (7's requirements are considerably higher):

 

XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865

 

XP (64-bit):

http://www.ehow.com/list_6694828_windows-professional-x64-system-requirements.html

 

7:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865

[Nebulon]

Since I can't edit my own post for some reason, here's the actual Windows 7 system requirements link in a separate post:

 

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/products/system-requirements

[+Ripdubski]

Die hard OSX here since it came out. Zero problems for me as opposed to the many Win machines i have used. I will say I hve had good luck with Win 7 aside from the constant updates.

 

I ran OS/2 Warp for a couple of years and could not crash it, though I tried which was very unlike Windows of the day.

 

And of course who doesnt love the Atari "OS" as a general term. On the 8 bit I prefer Sparta, then MyDOS.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Ripdubski