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[SageJiraiya]

So yeah,

Let's talk about operating systems for desktops, mobiles, and all in between.

To start the conversation, I present you with this fine sir's incredible achievement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

[Masterpiece]

I think I've posted this video somewhere here before. I thought it was incredible.

[snalin]

I've always been a big windows user (for reasons), but I've lately been realizing that I kinda need to get linux for work. A lot of software is just so easy on linux (apt-get install x and you have x. No files to be downloaded, no PATH variable to be updated, no dependencies to be checked - though a lot of that is because open source devs often just don't care if their stuff works on Windows), and if you're writing software, that is really super convenient.

I know that Windows PowerShell is a thing, has anyone actually used it? It's supposed to be good for scripting and such, but I have never heard of it as an environment you can do all your work in. Anyone?

[celticgeek]

Longtime Linux user here (over 10 years) and I am mostly using Mint right now.

[Masterpiece]

PowerShell is a thing and it works pretty well. Especially if you use them on larger scales. HUGELY efficient.

[mtmerrick]

I've used windows pretty much my entire life. Dabbled in Mac, Linux, Chrome, and iOS. never really took to any of them.

I am also in love with android.

Currently using windows 7 and Jellybean.

[ankhtahr]

Well, with me being the starter of the Linux and open source thread on this forum, my position on this should be pretty obvious. I'm loving almost everything about my Arch Linux. The only downside I see about it is the small software collection, but that's not Arch's/Linux' own fault. Admittedly I'm really tempted to look into BSD for server purposes, but that will need time. For mobile phones my favourite system would probably be webOS, if it wasn't for the small software and hardware collection. Because of that I'm using Android. Still better than iOS or Blackberry, and imho better than Windows Phone, but far from perfect. I think they've done a few bad design choices in their past. I'm really interested in whether the Open webOS project will go anywhere.

[mtmerrick]

That post made me think of this:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/28/phoenix-project-reincarnates-webos-as-nexus-s-app/

[SageJiraiya]

I personally use windows 8. I hate the metro display, but the new task manager and file transfer screens make me nerdgasm. It honestly feels like Microsoft tried too hard to make it look minimalistic, but it suits me.

My family always used windows, and it felt like we went straight from windows xp to 7, with nothing in between. In 2007 I got a (then) brand new Mac mini. Upgraded the sucker up to snow leopard. Honestly it worked well for me. Mac OS X was pretty efficient.

I've screwed around with android, almost exclusively on a nook color. You could get them overclocked to 1300 MHz running honeycomb. So, it was at one point a bit like having a Samsung galaxy with missing buttons and a shittier screen.

I've played with Linux a bit too. I remember using DSL, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, Macbuntu, of course Ubuntu, and enjoyed both KDE and Gnome alike.

I use windows. I like windows. It's efficient to me, and is most productive to me. I'd honestly use Linux if any of my machines had anything more than windows-only hardware.

iOS was an innovator that has since sparked a revolution in mobile OSs, from android, to palmOS, to webOS. The features recent versions hold in high esteem, have been available on systems using android for years.

My stepmother's ex purchased something like 6k apple shares back in 1980-something. They of course skyrocketed in value, and after their divorce they split up the shares evenly.

I think macs are just plain overpriced. They boast features that could be had in windows for a fraction of the cost. But, in a perfect world, I'd want a 12 core Mac pro with Linux mint, Mac OS X, and windows all partitioned evenly on a fancy SSD.

[mtmerrick]

iOS was an innovator

don't ever say this in front of me again.

[SageJiraiya]

B-, bu-, but it w-was! (Don't hurt me).

[Masterpiece]

iOS was good in the sense that they had a unified experience that worked exceptionally well. Matthew is right in saying that none of the technologies used by Apple were novel to begin with, heck, just look at the IBM Simon, that thing had the touchscreen-one button system down ages before the iPhone.

[pwhodges]

Hmm.  Shall I talk about the multi-user real-time OS I wrote in the late 70s?  No - it's long dead, along with the company and its computers.  Shall I talk about the 32-bit OS I was supporting in the 80s?  No - it's long dead, along with the company and its computers.  Shall I talk about OS/2 that I used throughout the 90s?  No - it's... no, wait, actually you can still buy a version of it that's actively maintained!  Shall I talk about early Red Hat Linux, that I got an official support qualification for in the early 00s?  No - everyone knows about that already.  Did I mention Netware 4.11 (another certification, there)?  No? - well there's a reason for that, too.  I've also written several embedded systems with no OS at all (in the early 70s and early 90s, mainly).

Currently everything I run is Windows (XP, 7, 2003, 2008), the servers mostly virtualised on Hyper-V; apart from OpenBSD on the firewall, and a couple of Linux systems that I don't run, but have some maintenance overview of.

Any questions?

[SageJiraiya]

No questions, just awe for your nerd-cred.

I still think iOS was innovative. Maybe not in terms of features, but as Masterpiece mentioned, in terms of unification. IMHO, just like most apple products, iOS used ideas that already existed, culminating, and applying them in ways nobody had managed before. IOS has been so successful for that reason: it culminated decades of innovation in a publicly usable form.

Jobs didn't invent the computer mouse at all, but he managed to make it popular and standard. Ever since iOS' introduction, all other mobile operating systems have had to compete. That's also made it successful. It set a public demand for certain features that for a while, only apple products could supply.

[Kwaping]

Pwhodges definitely beats me on nerd cred, but I do work for a very large Internet company on the Unix Systems Infrastructure team. I'm an old-school Apple user, though. OSX is my wet-dream OS - friendly gui with a unix terminal back-end and lots of third-party software support.

With that said, I'm an Android user and absolutely hate iOS. I respect it, but using it after using Android is literally torture for me.

[mtmerrick]

Nothing apple has ever done has been innovative. Ever.

they are thieves, criminals, and marketing gods.

I am not judging the QUALITY of apple products here. It's some pretty decent stuff, hardware and software. But you're deluding yourself if you think they "innovated" anything.

[Masterpiece]

You seriously need to tone this down, Matthew, because it only makes you sound like a petty flaming fanboy.

For all its worth, Apple has introduced a sense of quality in the consumer that forced all the other brands to either keep up or roll over and die. That is a pretty huge achievement, especially if you consider how many people tried to emulate their design.

[ankhtahr]

I'm not a apple fan, but you have to credit them for some of their innovations. The Apple II e.g.

[jwhouk]

I have, currently, only three Apple products in my possession: an older iPod Nano; an iPod Touch; and an Apple iBook G3 running X.5 Leopard.

I miss my old Mac SE/30.

[SageJiraiya]

I would want an iBook solely for the purpose of nostalgia. I remember the rich kids in my neighborhood went to some fancy private school, where they got to use those.

[cesium133]

I am not judging the QUALITY of apple products here. It's some pretty decent stuff, hardware and software. But you're deluding yourself if you think they "innovated" anything.

As the owner of a first-generation Intel Macbook, I'm going to have to disagree on the quality of Apple hardware...

[FuryoftheStars]

I really like Windows 7.  I disliked Vista and am absolutely hating 8 so far.

I've never been a fan of Apple.  Right now, I have an iPhone 5 (work issued) and am really wanting my BlackBerry back (I'd much prefer Android, but my work will not issue those... and work requires that my contact number be one they control).  There have been several things that I have tried to do with this iPhone so far that the BlackBerry (and my previous dead Droid) could support natively, that I've discovered you either need to download an App for (sometimes multiple) or simply cannot be done.  Has really turned me off to Apple so hard these past few months....

Someone did once demonstrate Linux for me, but it really does nothing for me.  Nothing against it or bad to say about it.  It just doesn't interest me enough to switch over.  Course, that was what?  12? 13 years ago?  Who knows... considering the direction MS has been going lately, and if they keep it up, I just might give it another look.  I'm an avid gamer in which most of my games don't support Linux, but I'm sure I could find an emulator of some sort.

[snalin]

Wine is the emulator you're looking for in that case (Wine Is Not an Emulator), but programs has a tendency to run slower there than on native windows. There's huge communities built around making windows-only games work on Linux.

[ankhtahr]

Not necessarily. There are some programs which run faster on Wine. But there are some which run much slower as well. The reason for that is that Wine is really what the name is trying to tell you, Wine is not an Emulator, Wine is a piece of software which offers dll implementations and system calls to software and directs them to the appropriate Linux system call/library. And all these implementations of the Windows API are reverse engineered black box implementations (they ran the routines with various input values, looked at the output values and tried to find out what exactly it does and then replicated it).

Problems usually occur with DirectX programs. All the DirectX calls need to be rewritten to OpenGL calls, and that doesn't work too well. AFAIK the support for DirectX 9 is quite well nowadays, but DirectX 10 or 11 are big trouble.

[Masterpiece]

I've been using a Win8 tablet for over three weeks now and I keep being reminded that I really enjoy the decisions that Microsoft made concerning mobile operating systems (or let's say Windows . I still like it with keyboard+mouse, but with touch it's just so enjoyable to use.

Having said that, I'm getting frustrated with Microsoft. Feels like when you use their products it's always a matter of "just wait a little while longer". I'm still waiting on the notification center they promised sometime before WP8. Speaking of WP8, they took way too long with their update cycle, and I distinctly remember Microsoft saying that they would try to iterate with quicker updates with WP8 (and updates for WP7 have been more frequent than for WP8).

It's just hella frustrating, because what's there is so promising of things that might come later.

[FuryoftheStars]

Wine is the emulator you're looking for in that case (Wine Is Not an Emulator), but programs has a tendency to run slower there than on native windows. There's huge communities built around making windows-only games work on Linux.

Problems usually occur with DirectX programs. All the DirectX calls need to be rewritten to OpenGL calls, and that doesn't work too well. AFAIK the support for DirectX 9 is quite well nowadays, but DirectX 10 or 11 are big trouble.

Figures... especially seems 90% of the games I really enjoy use DirectX....  Thanks for the info, though.

Win8 tablet

This, IMHO, is where Win8 seems best suited.  I understand their not wanting to create multiple variants of the OS (although I believe they still did come out with 3 versions of it), but really, with Laptops/Desktops they should've stuck with the original model concept instead of the App/Start screen.  And the mouse movements to simulate touchscreen on the non-touch screen models?  I want to curse every time I have to deal with it.