Wanted: Your Thoughts on Operating Systems

Hi,

I run a dual boot windows / Linux for various applications. Some software I use for design will only run on windows, for the rest theres Linux. Pro's and con's on both sides. Still have fond memories of BASIC from my teenage days.

For what it's worth, I read a week or so ago that IBM's latest entry in the "biggest, fastest, most superest supercomputer evah!" ranks runs on Red Hat Linux.

FYI, M$ has killed off VB!

The company i work at works with VB 6, it still works evendo M$ doesn't support it anymore.

Best ever operating system- Palm OS. Why? It is invisible. At power on, Applications are immediately ready for use. No system maintenance required. I spend most of my time actually doing work, not fussing with equipment issues. Easy to program for special applications (i.e., a quick aplet to read a DMM and capture data).

Second on list- HPUX, from back in the '80's. Again. Instant on (almost), fast. Easy to interface to measurement equipment. Programming in c.

Linux shows promise, but the developers are more interested in eye candy than functionality. As noted in a post above, not very good support for design functions (CAD, SPICE). Standard spreadsheets can not hold a candle to Excel.

I haven't tried OSx yet, because I can not justify the price premium, especially since the design applications (CAD, SPICE) don't seem to be available for this system yet. Show me the apps, first...Then maybe I would pay a premium. (Apple's spread sheet also can not hold a candle to Excel).

Let's see, have I failed to mention any operating systems?

latest linux versions are very windowslike in handling, a great improvement.

I always looked at the sidelines interested in Linux, the thing i like most about it is not a resource gobbler like windows. it needs some studying at first but hell with every new windows version you need to re-learn stuff.

Mac is also interesting but the small market share makes software more expensive.

Until any of those systems get the ease and popularity of Windows, I will continue to be a fan of Windows. I'm just too lazy to figure something out past a double-click. A good example of this would be when I took Fortran in school and the computer lab used Linux based machines. It was so difficult to use the computer in the lab (printing, saving, email, internet, etc.) that I went out and bought the Windows Fortran program and programmed at home, double-clicking my brains out.

A company wants an operating system that the most computer-challenged individual can use with relative ease, not necessarily the most powerful operating system. Just my two cents...

I like CP/M, MVS/JES3, OS/MFT with RASP. Better is Plan9 and best is IBMs VM ... they call it something else now, but it is still there. IBMs VM was virtual machines on big iron before VMWare was a thought in a PCers eye or Linus started on Linux. We ran about 2000 concurrrently logged in users on some nice systems. Once it got that big, we needed more processors due to some software architectural limits. Oh yea, we were running 4 or 6 real processors on each machine. ... Pretty cool.

I even saw VM running on the 'CE Console', where the 'bios' equivalent for the mainframes run. They were running a separate VM system just to monitor the 'users computer'. Pretty neat. Today I don't know what they run on the 'big hardware' internally.

Current favorite is Linux in the Ubuntu flavor. Winders is OK, but I have this thing against BGates since he did his 'Open Letter to Computer Hobbiests' back in the late 1970's.

... Thanks for bringing back some memories.