OS's

[jaguar]

Just out of curiousity, what OS's do you people run? What do you know of? How many computer do you have?
For the record i Dual-Boot Mandrake 8 (linux) and Windows 98 (i need my games) and will use Windows XP over my dead body..Over the last 6 months i'vemade a concerted effort to make Linux my desktop OS to remove my dependance on Windows.

[tw]

Originally posted by jaguar
Just out of curiousity, what OS's do you people run?

Why would you spend all that money on hardware, then run an OS that removes 20% of the comptuers speed and abilities. IOW why would anyone run Windows 95 or 98 - except to beat themselves up?

[jaguar]

Mostly for software that runs on it: ie, everything sadly. I run it for Photoshop, Halflife (game), Visual BAsic (we have to do it at school, ick) and mapping tools for Quake3.

[Undertoad]

Seven computers, three with WinME and four with Red Hat Linux. Why no Win2000 instead of WinME? Price, I'm poor. The 20% loss is not so much an issue in the days of commodity hardware as you point out in another thread. Why not move to Linux? Apps, plus I don't feel Linux is superior on the desktop. It runs poorly as a desktop on the one box I use with Gnome. I think X is a hog.

I am patiently awaiting the day when we have Mozilla-operating applications platforms (just like we were promised in 1996 with Java, only for real this time). I feel that reports of the death of the network computer are premature.

[jet_silver]

At home I have OpenBSD as my server / gateway. One each os/2 and WinNT machines.

Tony, have you experimented with wmaker? Gnome and KDE are both fat and getting worse. My OpenBSD machine is a Netpliance I-Opener, 32M RAM and Winchip 180MHz, and wmaker works just fine on that. I use X to get four consoles in the space of one <g>.

At work we use NT for desktops and 2K for servers. We need to move -lots- of data by SMB, so NT isn't workable as a server.

[elSicomoro]

The one thing I loved about my university--two big Mac labs. It took me forever to learn windows.

Eventually, I taught myself...I only have Win95 with a 200 P1. I don't even have word or excel. :-b I feel like I have a dinosaur here...although at least it's not a Packard Bell.

[Undertoad]

No, I'll admit, I haven't done much experimenting with Linxu GUIs. I'm a Unix guy from way back, so I can get a ton done just using the character interface.

And as far as a 20% loss in productivity, if you only use the character interface the increase is much larger than that. Figure that the system that runs the Cellar is a P3-500 - that it also runs about 10 other web sites - and that its CPU usage is damn near zero. Here's a box so slow that you couldn't buy it today - systems twice as fast can be had for under $1000.

And this is with web sites running an interpreted language (PHP) to access a relational database (MySQL)! Yet even if there were a hundred times the current number of users, this system would just take it and take it; we'd run out of bandwidth LONG before the OS crapped out.

But you're right jet, I ought to look into what can be done with the Linux GUIs. (Or, does anyone know about Philly area Linux user groups?)

[Sperlock]

Dual boot with Windows 98 one one drive, Debian 2.2r3 on the other. Two computers - one desktop, one laptop. I definitely don't want to go to Windows XP; eventually I will probably go fully Linux.

[jaguar]

Intering this is that the X sourse is much smaller than mozilla (which i use under both win and lin)
Windowmaker is damn good, much faster than either Gnome or KDE, but i prefer KDE, call me old fassioned =)

One of the things i'd LOVE to see it OSX ported fully to intel hardware (dream on i know)

[kezdeth]

I run Potato, and have likely settled on that for this box. I have plans to build a second machine to be a multimedia box at some time in the future, which will be dual boot Win98 SE and most likely Free BSD just to get into that as well.<p>In the past, I've run DrDOS with 4DOS as the shell, Win98, and several different flavors of Linux. Where Linux is concerned, I've pretty much settled on Debian but have used Slack, Red Hat, and SuSE as well.

[Undertoad]

I run Mozilla under Win and Lin too. I love it, despite the fact that I need to switch to IE for about 1% of sites.

I started running it about a year ago. At that point it would still have minor rendering issues, couldn't do SSL, would randomly crash during bookmark updates, etc.

They got it really stable until about two months ago, when a bunch of new feature introductions blew it up again. But right now I'm running a build from two weeks ago, and it's damn close to perfect at this point, and damn fast as well.

I use it because the way they handle the personal toolbar is better for me than how IE handles it. I have folders of bookmarks on the personal toolbar - one for "daily", one "weekly" etc. IE allows this, but treats the folders as normal OS folders of shortcuts, which means that if you select one, it will choose a random IE window to handle that shortcut. Or open a new window. I haven't figured out what logic it uses to decide when to do what.

[russotto]

OS X on the PowerMac, Windoze 98 on the laptop.

[tw]

I certainly do hope the new BSOD based Mac OS is an improvement. Those iMacs with OS8, etc - do Mac users love crashes? Do they love a system that periodically ignores mouse clicks - another serious distraction? I could never understand why Mac users put up with an OS that had Win 9x reliablity. Only used those Macs if I had to. Netscape 4.7x would take out iMacs frequently - too many crashes to be considered an acceptable OS.

[Dagnabit]

That's BSD not BSOD dude. Two very different things...

BSD: Open-source Unix from U. of California Berkeley, kernel of which is in OS X

BSOD: Blue Screen Of Death made famous by Mickeysoft

[jaguar]

I always found the Mac OS far superior to windows, in both relaibility and beauty. Basing it on BSD add a few badly needed features, like protected memory.

Mozilla 9.1 is a BIG improvement over 9.0, though i still find many bugs it beats IE hands down. I tend to use Knoquer alot under Linux though.