Favorite OS?

Well, since I have seen this posted in a topic yet, I thought I start it off. Hopefully, I'll get alot of responses.

Tell me what your favorite Operating System is and "Why." It can be any windows, Linux, Macintosh or any other that is out there on the market.

I'll start. From what I've experienced I like XP Professional. I like the new cool features on it and it's easy use and understand.

I've used every OS out there since the old DOS days. And of all of them Windows XP Pro is the best I've used so far.

Slackware...its so stable and easy to set up.

Well its Windows all the way for me you should see my boot screen selection:

Microsoft Windows 98
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows 2003
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows Longhorn
Linux Suse
Linux Red Hat

Now I have used a lot Linux is secure its the best for secruity and servers thats it for personal use it is not very good its not even ready for the average home user. Could you really see the average user compiling his own package and installing it. Linux is a real mess when you look at it from an overview all you can really do is surf the net and use it for servers it has a lot of un finished code from what I have seen and a lot of programs require finishing especially on Red Hat. Now a lot of people say it is really secure but no one knows for sure the only reason companies use it is because it is free. Linux could have thousands of secruity problems but no one or even a few people try to hack it thats why most people try to attack Windows because of Microsoft's dominance if you have thousands of people trying to hack into Windows' users computers 24 hours a day 7 days a week its pretty obvious you will find security flaws within it. The other problem I find with Linux is games I like to play a lot but a lot of them are hard to run. Also open source with the free software I don't like that at all I'm a programmer (still learning) and when I leave uni and try and get a programming job I would prefer if I could be paid for it and earn living but I can't do that if companies give away their software for free. I say give it a a few years once Linux has matured and more user friendly then it will give Windows a good run for its money.

Right Windows is perfect for the home user XP has made extreme advancements from 98 it crashes a whole lot less I have never experienced a crash of the OS (I have had program crashes but thats the program crashing not the OS) it looks great you can install programs with a click of the button and run 99% modern games and programs. I see Windows in the next few years concentrating on security with Linux concentrating on its useability so in a way Windows has what Linux wants and Linux has what Windows wants. Remember thats my personal opinion.

I am not the average casual user... So Linux is great for me.

I still administor PCs and servers running MS Windows (NT/2000/XP), but I find them so annoying. From a development point of view, it sometimes seems impossible on MS Windows.

I have one web server running MS Windows (I know it's a bad choice, but it's not a production server), and I like to compile and build my own web server software - Apache. It can be quite a task under Windows using Visual C++, as there are so many tools and libraries that Windows just doesn't have - so you have to go and download them.

Of course, Linux has everything you could possibly need for this. And if not, is easy to find.

But I would still say MS Windows has the edge on "User Friendly Home Use"
Mikomi said a really good quote... Windows has things Linux wants, and vice versa - this is very true.

For a really stable and secure OS though, and especially for servers of any kind, I would say either Linux Slackware, or FreeBSD. Maybe even a SunOS system.

As opposed to MacOS... I think it is really good... I think it has better support for development than Windows, especially the new MacOS Jaguar, which is *based* on Unix! (Like Linux, FreeBSD, etc) while still being very user friendly for the home user.

So... In colnclusion, here is my oppinion of suitable OSs for certain taks:

Servers - Any Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS, etc.
Home Use - MS Windows XP, MacOS - Any version. Linux Mandrake 9.* and Linux Suse 8.*
Software Development* - Any Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS, etc.

* Of course if you were making Win32/64 software, you would need to use MS Windows, same goes for MacOS. But development is done more on Unix still. Oh speaking about Windows development... What do people prefer... .NET or the Java Platform? I prefer the Java Platform, as it's portable.

I think the Win NT line (like NT 3.51, 4.0, win2k and now especially XP) have been decent desktop OS's, security notwithstanding. I have also supported NT servers at my day job and they continue to improve. The Win 95/98/ME line shouldn't have even been produced.

Though I haven't done much with MAC's lately, I used to support a large Mac user base, but there was hardly anything for me to do. With the OS now using BSD for it's core, my next peice of machinery will probably be a MAC.

Linux is probably my fav. OS. So many nice distributions to choose from! I've always been a redhat fan but I think they are quickly become the Windows of the Linux world.

FreeBSD is wonderful, great for the desktop also! And of course probably one of the better server OS's around, untill you get into Sun, HPUX, and AIX. I haven't touched netbsd of openbsd yet.

Right now, Gentoo is my OS. It just *works*, it's not bloated like some other distros, and the 'portage' system blows away RPM's.

Has anyone tried Menuet OS? It's the only OS out there that fits on a floppy!!!

www.techtv.com...

Originally posted by Saucerat
Has anyone tried Menuet OS? It's the only OS out there that fits on a floppy!!!

www.techtv.com...

Oh not the Dork Tipper again.....

[Edited on 28-2-2004 by dreamlandmafia]

haven't heard of Menuet, but I love wacky OS's.

what other non-traditional OS's have you guys used? BeOS, Amiga??


[Edited on 28-2-2004 by Bob88]

Originally posted by Saucerat
Has anyone tried Menuet OS? It's the only OS out there that fits on a floppy!!!

www.techtv.com...

Trinux fits on a floppy disk and they have managed to get Windows 3.1 on a floppy disk

my favorite windows OS for workstations is XP and 2003 for servers, and my favorite linux distro is Slackware.

I've come to hate all of the other MS products, especially 2000 server lately. What a bitch.

I run Windows 2000 on all of mine, I love it's stability, security, and most importantly the ease of use. In my opinion, Windows 2000 is the easiest Operating System to use on a network...I like that fact that it automatically recognizes your NIC, and connects you to your network.

I'm a middle-of-the-road type of person when it comes to OSes. Right now I'm typing this up using XP Pro, have a ssh connection open to my RH9 server, and have been working on setting up a Windows 2003 server w/ exchange for a college class. I definately agree about using *nix for servers, they are extremely stable (as long as you dont muck it all up, which can and does happen) as for security its my oppinion that out of the box both are insecure. A fresh install of XP will have a boat load of bugs, the worst imho being the RPC holes. Same tends to go for Linux, because out of the box the SSH daemon will be out of date, and vulnerable to a few nasty attacks, as will Apache, PHP, and a host of others.

On the desktop front I do admit that Windows is the current king, but I have heard many good things about the latest offer from SuSE Linux (being 9.0) and that they are quickly catching up on RedHat on the way to meeting MS at the top of the OS dogpile.

Milton > I agree completely on windows 2000, I've used it alot, and its just a kickass OS, especially when you get into the server versions with dfs and the like.

Mikomi > the various Linux distros arent limited just to simple severs, they are great for setting up development systems with low cost, and use CVS to allow testers to get nightly builds to poke around with. Also ILM uses linux clusters to render most of their animation now, because they have a lower TCO versus windows and the ability to cluster them. As for companies only using linux because its free, its often not in corporate environements. the RH Enterprise line is not free, it actually runs over 1000$ for the AS version. I just checked all the entries for the Vendor name 'Linux' on the SecFocus vulnerability database, and they have at 90 just in that category, not to mention the host of others throughout specific distributions.