New Poll - Choose your favorite OS

[fafalone]

Originally posted by the GardenGnome

I understand about the games I have a Windoze box myself just for that. But have you considered WINE(windoze emulator for linux) And the part about being a programmer. With Linux you need know what your doing with windoze you can be an absolute idiot. Windoze has so many bugs too. Internet Explorer has a bug that can repartition a hardrive. It seems rather ludacris arguing about why Linux is better than windoze.The answer is obvious.(Linux you FOOL)

 

 

Wine is pitiful. It can't run the best games or high-end apps.

[the GardenGnome]

Originally posted by fafalone

 

 

Wine is pitiful. It can't run the best games or high-end apps.

 

Wine is crap, so far I've managed to get notepad working on linux. (YEAH!) If you really want the games and the stability get a dual boot. But if there were companies producing games for linux there will be no use for windoze!

Epic Games made Unreal Tournament 2003 for linux.

[fafalone]

What's the point of stability if you can't run anything?

 

 

I recently ran my Windows XP box over a week without a crash.

[Sayonara]

You can pretty much run anything you like on Linux as long as you know what you're doing and aren't a dribbling retard.

 

Being able to spell words longer than "notepad" properly helps.

 

Having said that I much prefer Windows. If I want to use Maya, I want to use it NOW. Not after a few days of twiddling with configs and looking up how-to articles.

[the GardenGnome]

Originally posted by fafalone

What's the point of stability if you can't run anything?

 

 

I recently ran my Windows XP box over a week without a crash.

 

I don't what you do on your computer but I don't enjoy playing a game and after awhile my computer crashed.

[fafalone]

My computer never crashes when I'm playing games.

 

Last time it crashed alot was when I had a corrupt memory module... linux wouldn't have handled it any better.

[the GardenGnome]

Originally posted by fafalone

My computer never crashes when I'm playing games.

 

Last time it crashed alot was when I had a corrupt memory module... linux wouldn't have handled it any better.

 

Do what you like.

 

http://www.annoyances.org

http://www.msboycott.com

[apollo2011]

I have Windows XP machine now and before it had a Windows 95 machine. Windows Has become more stable betwwen these two os's. You might have programs crash every hour but I rarely have to reboot my entire machine and hardly ever loose mass amounts of data at once. This in turn saves me time.

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

[dethfire]

I recently ran my Windows XP box over a week without a crash.

 

Some unix boxes I know have run for years without a crash or reboot.

[fafalone]

Once a week is hardly an inconvenience.

[the GardenGnome]

Originally posted by jvanhalderen

What about LINDOWS?

 

Lindows is Linux with a price. They give it a nice GUI window manager. But deep down it's Linux.

[phubuh]

What high-end applications are your referring to, fafalone?

 

Here are some reasons why I use and voted for Linux:

• It's free.
  
• Basically every application for it is equally free.
  
• It has an empirical record of being more secure, a saner security model, and a community and philosophy more encouraging to quick fixes (and fixes at all).
  
• If there's a feature I'd like in an application, I can (and often do) add it myself.
  
• It has a decent cross-protocol IM application (gaim).
  
• It has lots more and better development tools.
  
• I dig bash.
  
• The package systems of the distributions I use (Gentoo and Debian) are just amazing. Windows applications are always compiled for generic x86 processors, whereas Gentoo's package system compiles everything automatically with a bunch of optimization settings which make the binaries processor-specific in trade for speed. In Debian, I can open aptitude and update applications with the press of a button and install new ones equally easily.
  
• The font rendering in GTK 2 is just amazing.
  
• GTK2 and the UNIX API is much cleaner and generally better than the horrible Win32 API, which makes programming more fun.
  
• Irssi is sex.
  
• Mplayer is even sexier.
  
• GNOME dockapps are really convenient.
  
• Mutt is the best e-mail client I've ever used.
  
• I love the freedom of choice. I'm currently a fan of GNOME2, but I used to love pwm. My requirements change, and with Linux, my applications follow accordingly.
  
• I can run it without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse.
  
• Its video interface, V4L, doesn't such quite as much as DirectShow (specifically, it has mmap capabilities); ever wonder why Dscaler has to run in ring-0, and why your video card has to be specifically supported by it? It's because DS is unusable.
  
• WINE runs Half-Life more efficiently than Windows.
  

There's a lot more, including like 50,000 small subtle differences that together make me like Linux more, but I'm too lazy to type them all out.

[Dave]

I don't think there is a "best" OS. Different OS's are good at different tasks. I currently have three machines here. My main computer is an iMac (one of the old ones) and it's great. It does everything I want it to do (so don't say "omg imacs suck cos they can't play games - that's what I have my PS2 for), and I have that triple booted with Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Gentoo PPC.

 

I also have a dual-booted windows 98/Gentoo x86 machine running in my hallway that acts as my server. This machine is just brilliant because I can run all my server applications there without the risk of the box crashing unexpectedly. I wouldn't entrust Windows with anything to be honest, and I can't stand the damn thing. The experience I had of installing Windows 98 on a blank harddisk with the CD (which wasn't even bootable) was enough to put me off it for life. My other machine is quite an old Mac Performa, which basically sits around and my dad does his invoices on it from time to time.

 

Feel free to disagree, but I don't really care

[JaKiri]

Originally posted by dave

(so don't say "omg imacs suck cos they can't play games - that's what I have my PS2 for)

 

Ok, I'll say 'omg imacs suck' because they are slower, less stable and more expensive than your average PC.

[phubuh]

Originally posted by MrL_JaKiri

Ok, I'll say 'omg imacs suck' because they are slower, less stable and more expensive than your average PC.

On the other hand, they run a better operating system.

[JaKiri]

Originally posted by phubuh

On the other hand, they run a better operating system.

 

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[phubuh]

Originally posted by MrL_JaKiri

content cut because of intelligence overload

Oh.

[ThEmAdHaTtEr]

I voted xp cuz its DAMN STABLE! I wanna say 98 too tho cuz it was amazing for its time. But now Xp is out it blows everything else outta the water. .NET is gunna be awesome too. Lol and I completely agree with MrL_JaKiri. IMACs = power sucking pieces-o-shite. I gotta say, that one bendy monitor thing they have out is awesome looking and fun as hell to play with. But whoever buys it needs to be pinched by a gigantic lobster wearing a green mohawk wig.

[JaKiri]

Originally posted by phubuh

Oh.

 

I thought my post summed up nicely my response to the suggestion that MacOS IX or X are anywhere near as good to Windows XP Professional.

 

Having used all three, I have concluded that XP Professional is the second most stable Operating System I have ever used (Behind RISC OS (specifically version 3.11) on the Acorn A4000 - an OS that only crashed once, and that was when I allocated all the RAM to be used as a virtual hard drive and then ran Dune 2 [sEE KIDS! IT'S NOT IMPOSSIBLE TO CRASH AN ACORN!]). On the other hand, I found MacOS IX and X to be incomplete and about as stable as a fish riding a unicycle (what OS comes without a disk defragmenter, for god's sake? Especially one with an HDD as small as in the iMac; if hard drive space is at a premium it's a vital app, surely?).

 

Why support an OS with less compatability and less stability?

 

What else do you want in an OS?

[Radical Edward]

I use windows XP Pro because

 

a) I don't do anything clever with my PC, and see no need to run something like UNIX

b) It runs games

c) it is free and comes with a free copy of microsoft office.

[Polverone]

There's Pro/Engineer, Maya, Softimage XSI, Houdini, Photorealistic Renderman, Mental Ray, and Amazon Paint in the modeling/graphics/rendering department, IBM DB/2 and Oracle in databases, AMBER, Gaussian, and dozens of others in computational chemistry, Mathematica, Maple, and Matlab in mathematics... The only areas I'd say where linux lacks high-end apps are video and sound editing. But maybe I'm forgetting some categories.

 

It does lack many popular applications, of course. The one that bugs me most is Photoshop, because the Gimp just isn't as UI consistent/fast and I can't afford Amazon Paint.

 

I find day to day use of Linux to be very nice. Installing new software/hardware can be a real PITA, depending on the exact circumstances.

 

OS X is nice but runs on somewhat overpriced hardware.

 

Windows 2000 is pretty nice and runs on inexpensive hardware.

 

XP is Windows 2000 as imagined by Big Brother and color-schemed by Big Brother's 4 year old sister.

 

Linux can be a pain to configure but is very nice to use day to day... and it's free (not that most people I know pay for commercial software anyway).

 

So linux is my fave but I'd recommend a new iMac with OS X or a midrange PC with Win 2K almost anyone apart from those who'd like to learn a new environment for its own sake.

[JaKiri]

Originally posted by Polverone

XP is Windows 2000 as imagined by Big Brother and color-schemed by Big Brother's 4 year old sister.

 

Not really.

 

And his sister sure likes grey! (if my desktop is something to go by)

[Polverone]

This is an honest question, not a troll or an invitation to flame: what's so great about XP?

 

XP's appearance may be customizable; I've only used it at school, where almost everything is locked down so I can't tweak anything. But the default that I see on my roommate's computer and in the labs at school is a bright mix of primary colors that would be at home in a daycare center or a backyard swimming pool.

 

Appearance aside, what advantages does it hold over Win 2K? Win 2K's as stable as any version of Windows I've ever used; I've crashed it only 2 or 3 times in the last 18 months. That seems to be about the same crash rate as my roommate's experienced under XP.

 

I understand there's some sort of system versioning/recovery built in to XP, but when my roommate tried to use it to recover from some bad drivers it didn't help her.

 

XP's Windows Product Activation is a real deterrent for me. I don't think Microsoft is going to use this feature for Eeevill, but it's still annoying if you frequently swap hardware in your machine.

 

So that's why I'm not impressed by XP; what sort of benefits have I missed?

[JaKiri]

Originally posted by Polverone

XP's Windows Product Activation is a real deterrent for me.

 

Use ProCorporate. It's not in there.

 

XP is designed for the kind of things I do, whilst 2k is the NT upgrade and designed (obviously) for larger (office) networks.

[Guest SyntaXVB5]

I believe it depends on the personal preference of the user. Most business-related people use Windows 2000 for some reason. Programmers tend to use a unix or linux based solution. Windows XP Professional is probably the only Microsoft OS that I like and wont post repulsive comments about, it's based on the kernel of Windows 2000 (or so I'm told) and has the capabilities of removing the ugly babyface GUI that it comes with. Linux is also another operating system that I like, but the only reason why I dont switch is because theres always atleast one or two installation problems, and the person who runs GNU looks like a homeless man.