Worst Operating System Ever
 

Tell me, what is the worst operating system ever?

And what is it that David is doing a critical patch for?

Discuss.

Just think of it as a keyword you can put on your resume to get really high-paying jobs that you don't really want.

Yeah. Especially since HP-UX is dying. 'Cause it SOOKS!

The shame is that the hardware is really nice. Too bad their real engineers don't have some nice software to put on it. :whofarted HP boxen running Linux or Solaris would be about a trillion times nicer. I'm not a huge fan of Solaris either, but it beats the pants off of HP-UX.

But hey, it is something that I can put on my resume. ▒

The OS used with Macrodata minicomputers.

That was seriously worse than HP-UX?

I truly do find that hard to believe. :whofarted :)

Imagine an OS that, when you were disconnected, the next person to log on that modem picked up right where you left off. It did not even log the user off when modem lost connection.

Macrodata was later bought and run by MacDonnel Douglas for reasons I will never understand even after their own employees explained why it was purchased.

Heh. Sounds like it was almost as irritating and poorly designed as HP-UX is. :)

Check your private messages...

I've seen VMS do the same thing. Not that VMS isn't a contender for Worst Operating System Ever anyway.

Just curioius, but what is wrong with HPUX? I have a B-180 here with 11.00 on it, and everything seems fine. I haven't had to rebuild the kernel for anything (that's for the system engineers), but I get into it enough to know I have no problems with it.

The absolute WORST thing about HP-UX is the patches.

Take, for example, the buffer overflow in dtspcd, the CDE Subprocess Control Service. To fix, you must download a patch from HP.

That patch requires four other patches.

Of those four patches, one of them requires more.

Total number of downloaded patches? <b>21</b>. 80-some megs.

That's to fix ONE buffer overflow. Which, by the way, most certainly affects your box (you could get rooted! There's an exploit...).

That's my least favorite thing about HP-UX, by far.

Y'know what, it won't matter in a few years; Linux will take the place of all the proprietary Unixes. It's happened at IBM, it's happening right now at Sun, and HP won't be able to stem the tide.

That's my prediction anyway.

IBM and SUN sell/produce small workstations and small servers with Linux. Neither of them are selling or planning to sell Linux servers that would cut into their big iron business. Linux is nowhere near having any of the features or scalability that Solaris, AIX or any of the other big IBM systems provide. If the last two years of Linux development are any indication, Linux won't have those features within the next few years, either' besides, IBM and Solaris make *ludicrous* amounts of money from selling and supporting their proprietary OS.

Don't get me wrong - Linux has its place, and that place ends with roughly 4 processors and 4 gigs of RAM on a system that doesn't need to have vital hardware swapped out while it's running a several-thousand-gigabyte database accessed by thousands of people every second.

On a personal note, I'm partial to FreeBSD for *FAST*, medium-sized servers, and the obvious OpenBSD choice for small secure systems. Windows2k makes for a nice desktop system as well, although this is more of a 'it's good enough' issue for me.

X.

PS: My choice for worst OS would probably be an unpatched original Windows 95 (guaranteed crash after 45 days due to timer overflow, IIRC?), WindowsME due to general design choices, and WindowsXP due to its 'we control what you do, you are not allowed to do this, mortal fool!' approach.

47.9 days.

Sun makes its money off hardware. They hardly make "ludicrous" amounts of money off supporting their operating system. They make ludicrous amounts of money off of the memory they sell and shit like that.

You're right, though - Linux scales for shit. We're always playing catch-up. It rules. Solaris is only good on multiprocessor boxes though. It sucks ass on anything less.

Is this one of them small IBM linux servers?

Looks like Sun is starting to make its own PCs (with the help of processing Gods AMD). http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/23985.html
The boxes will run linux it says.