Multi-platform OS Discussion

[Jason]

Ok lets get one thing straight, i dont want a flame war, but i do like enlightening discussion and debate about the different operating systems (even outside windows and osx, because there are some great linux builds etc).

anyways it would be interesting to see what people use, what you like, dislike etc about your operating systems etc :)

and once again, no insults or flames please, lets act civilized and have a good discussion :)

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anyways for me

my current systems are OSX 10.2.2, OS9 9.2.2 and Windows XP Sp1

OSX - What can i say? its pretty nifty in most regards, otherwise i wouldnt be here ;) it is most definately a beautiful system, and even though i dont like the aqua look so much, its rendering system is awesome and leaves quite a bit for customization, customization that looks good :) Its very stable, and decently quick, but there are somethings i would like to be able to turn on and off sometimes, like shadows and transparencies (i know there are ways around it, already implemented them :))

but i think apple should make some of these built in options for those who have lesser video cards or processors, a system IMO should cater to the hardware as much as possible while still trying to advance.. its a tough balance but i think it can be done :)

another amazing thing so far... shareware and free ware support, quite frankly this is some of the best ive seen, great great products by developers that are free or close and they are very high quality in general, its definately a good thing :)

the only thing i can say i dont like about osx, is the speed sometimes, i wish it would be snappier, even on machine it get the spinning ball more often then i would like, but hopefully speed comes with os updates ;) another thing i dont like, well more like feel comfortable with, is unix... im not a unix buff, and i know its good, its just not for me ;) but im warming up to it, i just prefer doing things the GUI way, so if i need to sudo copy in terminal, id rather log out and login as root and do it that way and avoid the terminal lol

oh well, over all its probably my favorite system :)

os9... well its old ;) but it is still great IMO its very snappy, very solid.. most of the time, and very minimalist (something i like in an OS) and really if it was "newer" with all the 3rd party stuff i would still use it, because it allows me to get more done usually... if apple could find a way to turn off lots of the cpu hogging crap in osx for some of us who dont mind minimal looks from time to time i would be very very happy :)

windows xp, this is very close to my favorite os... alot of people claim its dumb, stupid etc blah blah hehe

well i love it, its very much plug and play for the most part, compatible with ALOT, (not everything but alot), and IMO i like the look, (silver luna, or custom) its clean, good looking and very very functional... there are boat loads of customizability (word?) that i absolutely love, you can basically make windows look like anything, including OSX lol

things i dont like are some of the work arounds MS gives you obviously, and some of the privacy stuff, but i guess nothing is perfect.

windows has great shareware etc support, but more often then not its ads laden and thats kinda crappy, but often times there are cracks for popular ones to get rid of ads

anyways, there isnt much bad i can say about windows, alot of peoples problems IMO are either users fault, or a bad hardware mix (which happens) and thats not MS's fault IMO, but hey what can i say, to each their own :)

Mandrake Linux - I dont currently use this anymore cause i took the extra drive out of my pc, anyways when i did use it, i thought it was great, wonderful system, although very confusing lol

i can most definately see where OSX got alot of its inspiration from, to me OSX is just a linux build with mac flavor, taste and niceness etc added :) (and this is in NO way a bad thing :))

things i liked about linux... THE AMAZING AMOUNT of customization with it.. wow! i mean you can change EVERYTHING, it very cool :)

its pretty damned quick, and you get basically everything you need with the cd set (graphics with gimp to word processing etc etc)

if a user is tired of spending lots of money and doesnt want to pirate, i say have them use linux (if they are smart and patient) it is an amazing thing truly, and open source IMO is one of the best things to come out of computing

but unfortunately linux isnt for everyone, it was very confusing at times in how DIFFERENT it was from everything i have ever used. and most major programs dont support linux, so you miss out on the big good ones :( which is a shame, because linux in general has a lot going for it, and if they had 3rd party support and enough drive behind it to push it, then i could see it becoming something other than an oddity no doubt :)

anyways what do you guys use? like? etc....

[Giaguara]

os x. just most me. i like most feature of it, and i'm trying to hack it to have some more things that finder and other apps don't have. i was afraid before i wouldnt find any progrmams.. hah. yes, good support, if you need to ask something about an application, in most cases you get an answer and fast.

the others...

redhat. i use it on an old peecee. i tried mandrake but it was too ugly so it stayed 15 minutes. kde. i like multiple desktops and that i can change the behaviours and i get most apps free.

win. i dont use it anymore. the last i used was ME . i had frankly enoguh of windows - 10 yrs of my life with it. i couldnt use 98 as pcmcia crashed all the time, and ME didnt run BeOs. windows... worms, viruses, formatting, formatting, formatting. no thanx. xp does not for me so i stay in os x / unix now.

i want multiple desktops and transparency, trying to figure how to build the transparency (iin os x and) kde 3.1 ...

[RacerX]

I think most people know I love Rhapsody. I used NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP for years, but I always went back to my Mac because I loved how things were set up there. Rhapsody was, for me, the best of both worlds. I really was to sure what to expect from Apple before I saw it up in action. I had always like NS/OS, but found A/UX to be somewhat disappointing at time. Rhapsody was a pleasant surprise.

Even though Apple didn't put much time into it after they started the Mac OS X project, the public releases were quite an improvement. With each release Rhapsody got better. Rhapsody 5.3 (Mac OS X Server 1.0) had almost all of the features that I had heard that Apple was going to have in the never released client version (Rhapsody 5.2). THe next few releases, Rhapsody 5.4 and 5.5 (Mac OS X Server 1.0.1 and 1.0.2) were mainly enhancements to the core. Rhapsody 5.6 (Mac OS X Server 1.2) is still my favorite though. It felt complete and supported more apps (and games) than any version that I had used before it. And with Mac OS 8.6 used in Blue Box on that release, there was very little on the classic Mac side that I had to do without.

If we assume that Rhapsody is Mac OS X without Aqua (it isn't because Rhapsody had the use of the seasoned display engine from Adobe while Mac OS X has to use a display engine that Apple developed recently), then yes I can see where things are much faster in the older system. Of course at the price Adobe wanted for Display Postscript (Mac OS X would have been over $200 a copy), I am willing to live with Quartz's growing pains. Plus 10.2 was fast enough to displace Rhapsody 5.6 on my PowerBook G3, so I would say things are getting better.

Non-Apple/NeXT operating systems:

A day doesn't go by that I don't spend a few hours on my SGI. Considering that I have both a VCR and DVD player connected to it for playing movies on screen while I work doesn't hurt. The IRIX operating system is quite remarkable. I currently use IRIX 6.2 on my Indy. Both the operating system and the processor are 64-bit on that system, but the system I had before it, an IRIS Indigo (which I still have), had both a 32-bit operating system and processor. The amazing thing about this is that both systems seem a like in the feel and all my 32-bit apps seem to run just fine on my 64-bit system. I hope Apple is able to make the move to 64-bit as easy as SGI did.

For the most part, I don't think I treat my SGIs any differently than I do my Macs. More than 95% of the time I can use the GUI to do any system stuff. I do video capture on it and it saves the movies as quicktime. I have Xinet's K-AShare on it so all my Macs see it as if it was just another Mac on the network. And like my Rhapsody systems I can't remember the last time (or if ever) I had a crash.

I have Solaris (and Sun hardware), I have Windows, I have a lot of operating systems, but the ones I feel most productive in are Rhapsody, Mac OS X, Mac OS, and IRIX. The only reason I ever even pull any of the others out of storage is to keep up on using them. I don't support Windows any more in my consulting so I don't feel the need have any of the Microsoft stuff installed any where anymore. I have a spare SGI and Sun for practicing installations and set ups every few months. Otherwise, I'm happy with my current toys (though I want an SGI O2 for x-mas ).

[fryke]

It seems that all the operating systems I _really_ like vanish before (consumer) release. I loved what Copland promised to be (before we learned what a mess its development really was). I loved the preliminary interface guidelines for Rhapsody Unified (which was scrapped when Mac OS X got the focus, although you could argue that Mac OS X _is_ Rhapsody Unified, but the preliminary interface guidelines had been transformed quite much).

So what can I say? I love Mac OS X. It has its flaws in the interface, too, but it's still the best I can get nowadays. And with the theme called 'Rhapsodized' I get some solidness back on top of that translucent beast. (kidding, I like Aqua, it just doesn't seem professional enough to me...)

http://mac.fryke.com/media/rhap3.png

[kendall]

Yeah, I remember when I first saw a picture of OS X with the gum-drop window buttons. I thought Macs have just went from a user friendly computer to an idiot man child computers. Green for go etc.

You get used to the changes though. I just use the graphite theme.

I thought MS had flipped its lid when I saw XP and Luna. Ugliest thing I had ever seen but once you use it for a while, its not so bad.

[ApeintheShell]

I like to go back to Mac OS 7.5 on my Power Mac 6100. It was the only macintosh where high speed graphics in games were no big deal.
well...besides earlier versions.
A plain interface worked for me because i wasn't as specific as i am now.
But it was prone to crash once every day.
not like i was doing productive work at 12"L"
When i bought this iMac in 1999 it came with Mac OS 8.6
It made Mac OS 7.5 a bleak outlook and was alot quicker. I can't say a disliked 8.6 because i didn't add that many items to it to cause problems.
When Mac OS 9 arrived it all went wrong.
When i had seen previews of Mac OS X in those catalogs apple sends out to universities i knew i had to have it. I wasn't sure what any of the features meant at the time but i was excited when it came out. I guess it is the only operating system that has made me feel good about owning a computer besides 7.5,8.6
I hope to actually use Linux someday but i am not a programmer of any sort. I try the CLI in Mac OS X and end up in the GUI. go figure.
naturally i dislike all flavor of Windows.
it sucks to use it when you got a mac at home.
*shrug* i dunno