Favorite Operating Systems of all time?

[+wongojack]

MS DOS is NOT required for Win 95. It is around for convenience and to access DOS drivers just like OLD CS1 states. This old debate will never die.

 

 

Oh, and speaking of badly implemented hardware and software, we have crappy driver developers to blame for the 4GB memory limitation in 32-bit Windows. The original release of Windows XP supported 36-bit PAE which remapped RAM under PCI I/O space at the top of the 4GB memory space allotted by 32-bit addressing. Microsoft found that a ridiculously large number of error reports sent from crashed Windows XP machines were caused by drivers which were confused by the remapped RAM and would just up-chuck. With one of the subsequent services packs (I believe SP1, but it could have been SP2) Microsoft re-instantiated the 4GB addressing limitation, and thus 32-bit Windows to this day (some server OSes excluded) never report a full 4GB of available RAM as the top of the space is taken by PCI I/O addressing and AGP aperture, as well as shared video RAM in some systems.

 

Yep, Server 2k3 can use the AWE (PAE) mapping and "address" additional memory, but it is still not really the same as 64bit. The 32bit architecture still only allows for a 4gb address space, it just gets worked around with memory maps (that also use memory). This is definitely an area where I spent A LOT of time.

[TheTIGuy]

My computers all have chip-sets that start hissing at more than 2 gigs so...

[mr_me]

MS DOS is NOT required for Win 95. It is around for convenience and to access DOS drivers just like OLD CS1 states. This old debate will never die.

...

Windows 95 is a distinct os from ms-dos but without ms-dos it can't boot. Edited November 29, 2017 by mr_me

[youki]

For me my favorites OS (in term of usage not in term of technical capabilities) are :

 

• MS DOS
• combination TOS / GEM on Atari ST (i really loved that with the Monochrome Screen)
• Windows NT 4 and Windows XP.

 

Special Mention for GEOS on C64 and GEOWORK on PC , i never really used them unfortunately but at their time i was quite impressed by them.

 

OS I really hate are "modern OS" like Windows 10 or Android.

[Flojomojo]

OS I really hate are "modern OS" like Windows 10 or Android.

Why? Too much utility, not enough waiting?

[youki]

Why? Too much utility, not enough waiting?

 

Android is mainly due to its Graphic interfaces , i hate it. If we speak about mobile , i loved the old Black Berry OS , but Android i hate. Second thing i hate about Android is that if you don't have a google account you can almost do nothing as user. Currently on my phone , i have put a old FirefoxOS , it is a little bit better for me (not good, but better) and at least i don't need a Google account!

 

Windows 10... is too much connected, all is slow on it (in comparison what you could do on a same machine with XP, and Graphic interfaces becomes worst and worst...).

 

In matter of windows, Windows XP was really good. Almost perfect for me. you could have the control of all what you want , make it boot extremely fast. (i have one machine (with old celeron 533Mhz with old IDE drive) with XP in one of my arcade cabinet , it boots in 8 to 10 seconds! Also XP is very stable , i have never seen a blue screen on XP or had to be forced to reboot because a application crashed or freezed the OS . On Windows 10 at work , it occurs 3 or 4 times per week without doing some very special.

[+OLD CS1]

Why? Too much utility, not enough waiting?

 

My guess would be too much spying and surreptitious tracking. For a phone I am rather partial to SE's Java Platform. Maybe even Symbian, though it loses a LOT of AT command functionality.

[fujidude]

DOS based windows run on top of the old MS-DOS based OS and the old FAT based disk systems. They include Windows 1 to 3.1 and Windows 95/98/98SE/ME.

 

Windows NT 3.1 introduced the NTFS file system and does not run on top of an MS-DOS based OS. Others include Windows NT 3.5/4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, etc.

 

Edit:

I always disliked the old interface in windows 3.1 and windows nt 3.5. I was happy to see the start menu in windows 95 and then windows nt 4.

 

When I first looked at Linux (can't remember the version), the mouse cursor movement was weird and I couldn't adjust it. It bugged me so much I found it unuseable. It seems normal now in current Linux; does anyone know what I'm talking about? I know there are lots of different variations of Linux but it was probably either Red Hat or Ubuntu.

 

I first started dabbling in Linux in the late '90s. To say it was unpolished, especially in the GUI experience, is being charitable. Now, however, it is really nice. In fact, I like it better than Windows over-all.

[fujidude]

Windows 95 includes MS-DOS v7 and is installed at the same time as Windows. Windows 95 is a 32 bit system but at minimum the 16-bit MS-DOS component serves as a boot loader. The MS-DOS component also provides DOS compatibilty. Windows NT is completely different. [Windows 3.1 is a 16-bit add-on to MS-DOS, Windows NT 3.1 is a 32 bit operating system completely independent of ms-dos with the new ntfs file system]

 

MS-DOS was not a requirement of Windows 95 since it included a version of it. It was still needed to run Windows 95.

 

The dos that came with Windows 95 was ms-dos v7.

[Was there a different version of Windows 95?]

 

As I was reading along I was going to respond, but mr_me stated things perfectly.

[zzip]

Windows 95 and later do not run "on top of" DOS and do not require DOS to be installed. Even 3.1 has a virtualization of 16-bit DOS.

That depends.. The versions of 95 I have are not self-booting, so you needed DOS and a CD-driver to bootstrap it.

[zzip]

If memory serves Win 98 SE was the first version of Windows that did not require DOS.

I think it was the first that was self-booting so you didn't need a prior DOS installation.

 

The first truly DOS-free Windows was Windows NT.

[zzip]

I first started dabbling in Linux in the late '90s. To say it was unpolished, especially in the GUI experience, is being charitable. Now, however, it is really nice. In fact, I like it better than Windows over-all.

Yeah, I've been using it since the 90s as well. It required lots of hand-edits to get things the way you wanted. I thought it would always be just a hobbyist OS. Then suddenly it went mainstream and the experience improved by leaps and bounds.

[tschak909]

It's been a very long process...My first install of Linux happened in Dec '91

When I first bootstrapped Linux, It had to be built on a machine that had a full set of working GNU tools, at that time that basically meant:

 

(a) a Sun of some kind (and doing cross building of early 2.x was nothing short of a living hell, as autoconf wasn't even being used across the gnu toolchain).

(b) an Intel UNIX of some sort, which I didn't have

© MINIX 1.5, which I did have...heavily patched, with all the GNU tools ready to go. This was Linus' original setup as well.

 

You would basically build the kernel, which would then output a kernel, which had a boot sector attached to it, you'd literally raw write that to a floppy.

 

You would then have to build a root filesystem. This was actually kind of messy at first, because not all of the gnu tools had been ported over, most of the time, I would build gnu core utils and bash, and cram that onto a minix fs floppy in the right filesystem pattern, that was the root floppy..

 

So when you'd boot, you'd literally plop in the boot floppy, which would boot the kernel...then the kernel would initialize, and ask you for the root floppy, which you would provide... and in fact, the earliest "distribution" was probably Tom's Root Boot (no, I'm not him.), which had a minimal gnu core utils on it.

 

Hard drive auto booting wouldn't come until lilo appeared sometime in mid 1992.

 

Some would quickly ditch minix fs because it had some silly limitations (small partitions, max 64mb, tiny filenames, etc.), and even what we know today as ext2, was literally the second iteration of that filesystem.

 

I remember the first version of X ported to Linux was X386, by Thom Roell. It eventually forked in two directions, one becoming the first version of XFree86, and the other eventually being AccelleratedX. It supported TWO cards other than generic monochrome VGA and 16 color VGA... The Trident 8900, and the Tseng ET3000/4000 cards. And I remember calculating modelines for my monitor, hand writing them in, and wincing after I typed xinit, hoping to hell that my monitor wouldn't explode. (Because even then, people were posting warnings all over usenet and various bits of documentation saying "DOUBLE CHECK YOUR MODE LINES! OTHERWISE YOUR MONITOR WILL EXPLODE!"

 

So yeah, it's...been a very....long road for linux... I used it exclusively from 1993 until roughly about 2011, when I bought a MacBook Pro, because I needed it for a contract... I genuinely tried, but I simply got tired of the lagging treadmill of hardware support. (No, nobody argue with me on this, I've been using Linux a lot longer than just about any of you.. I still use it, just not as my primary OS, anymore).

 

-Thom

[zzip]

It's been a very long process...My first install of Linux happened in Dec '91

When I first bootstrapped Linux, It had to be built on a machine that had a full set of working GNU tools, at that time that basically meant:

 

(a) a Sun of some kind (and doing cross building of early 2.x was nothing short of a living hell, as autoconf wasn't even being used across the gnu toolchain).

(b) an Intel UNIX of some sort, which I didn't have

© MINIX 1.5, which I did have...heavily patched, with all the GNU tools ready to go. This was Linus' original setup as well.

 

You would basically build the kernel, which would then output a kernel, which had a boot sector attached to it, you'd literally raw write that to a floppy.

I started couple years after this and things were a tad better. I used to like to build my own kernels, I wanted it as streamlined as possible. Of course by this point Linux could do it on its own, no cross-compiling required. I also booted it from floppy as well, as I didn't know how to setup LILO yet. Nowadays I don't build kernels anymore. My mind goes numb reading all the configuration options, and I don't know what half are for or if I need them, and the blurb doesn't provide much insight.

 

I remember the first version of X ported to Linux was X386, by Thom Roell. It eventually forked in two directions, one becoming the first version of XFree86, and the other eventually being AccelleratedX. It supported TWO cards other than generic monochrome VGA and 16 color VGA... The Trident 8900, and the Tseng ET3000/4000 cards. And I remember calculating modelines for my monitor, hand writing them in, and wincing after I typed xinit, hoping to hell that my monitor wouldn't explode. (Because even then, people were posting warnings all over usenet and various bits of documentation saying "DOUBLE CHECK YOUR MODE LINES! OTHERWISE YOUR MONITOR WILL EXPLODE!"

I remember those warnings too. Good old CRT multisyncs! By the time I used it, the Xfree86 config file contained a number of sample mode lines and you could just uncomment a sane line that worked with your monitor. There was also a utility (xvidmode?) that helped you fine tune it.

 

Though Linux was still easier than getting MiNTnet working on my ST!

[tschak909]

I started couple years after this and things were a tad better. I used to like to build my own kernels, I wanted it as streamlined as possible. Of course by this point Linux could do it on its own, no cross-compiling required. I also booted it from floppy as well, as I didn't know how to setup LILO yet. Nowadays I don't build kernels anymore. My mind goes numb reading all the configuration options, and I don't know what half are for or if I need them, and the blurb doesn't provide much insight.

 

 

I remember those warnings too. Good old CRT multisyncs! By the time I used it, the Xfree86 config file contained a number of sample mode lines and you could just uncomment a sane line that worked with your monitor. There was also a utility (xvidmode?) that helped you fine tune it.

 

Though Linux was still easier than getting MiNTnet working on my ST!

 

Yup xvidtune appeared by 1993.

 

-Thom

[fujidude]

It's been a very long process...My first install of Linux happened in Dec '91

When I first bootstrapped Linux, It had to be built on a machine that had a full set of working GNU tools, at that time that basically meant:

 

(a) a Sun of some kind (and doing cross building of early 2.x was nothing short of a living hell, as autoconf wasn't even being used across the gnu toolchain).

(b) an Intel UNIX of some sort, which I didn't have

© MINIX 1.5, which I did have...heavily patched, with all the GNU tools ready to go. This was Linus' original setup as well.

 

You would basically build the kernel, which would then output a kernel, which had a boot sector attached to it, you'd literally raw write that to a floppy.

 

You would then have to build a root filesystem. This was actually kind of messy at first, because not all of the gnu tools had been ported over, most of the time, I would build gnu core utils and bash, and cram that onto a minix fs floppy in the right filesystem pattern, that was the root floppy..

 

So when you'd boot, you'd literally plop in the boot floppy, which would boot the kernel...then the kernel would initialize, and ask you for the root floppy, which you would provide... and in fact, the earliest "distribution" was probably Tom's Root Boot (no, I'm not him.), which had a minimal gnu core utils on it.

 

Hard drive auto booting wouldn't come until lilo appeared sometime in mid 1992.

 

Some would quickly ditch minix fs because it had some silly limitations (small partitions, max 64mb, tiny filenames, etc.), and even what we know today as ext2, was literally the second iteration of that filesystem.

 

I remember the first version of X ported to Linux was X386, by Thom Roell. It eventually forked in two directions, one becoming the first version of XFree86, and the other eventually being AccelleratedX. It supported TWO cards other than generic monochrome VGA and 16 color VGA... The Trident 8900, and the Tseng ET3000/4000 cards. And I remember calculating modelines for my monitor, hand writing them in, and wincing after I typed xinit, hoping to hell that my monitor wouldn't explode. (Because even then, people were posting warnings all over usenet and various bits of documentation saying "DOUBLE CHECK YOUR MODE LINES! OTHERWISE YOUR MONITOR WILL EXPLODE!"

 

So yeah, it's...been a very....long road for linux... I used it exclusively from 1993 until roughly about 2011, when I bought a MacBook Pro, because I needed it for a contract... I genuinely tried, but I simply got tired of the lagging treadmill of hardware support. (No, nobody argue with me on this, I've been using Linux a lot longer than just about any of you.. I still use it, just not as my primary OS, anymore).

 

-Thom

 

All of that tedious work to run an immature OS lacking in features and then using it elusively starting in '93: I officially recognize you as geek of the hardcore order! I had just become aware of Linux in 1993 and didn't try it myself until 1995 or so. And I was never willing to jump through that many hoops when I already had a working OS from MS that (mostly) worked well enough. I respect your doggedness and accomplishment in that regard.

 

Sorry about your request not to argue about the hardware support but:

I've found hardware support to be very good. I'll admit it's not as bleeding edge as Windows though. Hardware makers make drivers for Windows available when the hardware is released, so it's hard to beat that (though not always for earlier Windows which may still be in significant use). Also, in Windows world, some hardware makers seem to like to go out of their way not keep drivers up to date with new OS releases. I suppose that way if someone upgrades their OS they have to re-buy another flatbed scanner or whatever. Yeah, that would be me. However, modern Linux hardware support is still what I consider to be very good. But Macintosh... your argument is a bit skewed there. Apple controls the core and a fair amount of the periphery hardware you will be using with their OS. Hardware choices in Macintosh land are small compared to the gazillions of options in general PC territory. So yeah, when the OS and PC come bundled together, the hardware had better be well supported! So while you can say Linux has lagging HW support, you could also say that Macintosh has "lacking" hardware support. I'll agree though that when you buy a Mac, you know everything in it will work well with the OS.

[tschak909]

I was implying that the limited and tightly integrated scope of Macintosh hardware support is the reason that the out of box experience is well received.. However, as time went on, I found myself getting into situations where I needed LOTS of computing power in a portable package, which isn't something Apple wants to provide. So I've had to move into the elusive territory of mobile workstations (currently occupied by such beasts as the Dell Precision 7710, which I have, and the Lenovo Thinkpad P70/71 series.) these machines provided the computing power I needed (quad core xeon's running from 2-4GHz), and the ability to use ECC RAM (both are very important when you're running huge stacks of virtual machines to simulate data center deployments!) , these machines, while somewhat certified by Linux, do not have optimized drivers to fully utilize the hardware (Intel/NVIDIA Optimus hybrid GPU usage is very problematic, and the performance of the system with ONE 4K display was unacceptable, compared to the THREE 4K displays I run nominally on this unit.), and I was finding myself needing to use lots more software in the Windows domain, that didn't run well enough under Linux hosted VMs, so I had to switch to Windows 10.

 

As a side effect, I am able to run Linux very well in VMs, as well as having a Mac OS X guest that while not accelerated, does allow me to actually do software development in Xcode for iOS and MacOS app wanting clients, as needed.

 

What beast of a machine is this I am referring to? It's a:

 

Dell Precision 7710 Mobile Workstation

Intel Xeon E3-1505 4 cores 3GHz nominal peak, with near 4GHz possible with microcode tweaks.

64GB ECC RAM

4K IPS display

Intel P530 GPU and NVIDIA Quadro 5000M GPU with 8GB of DDR5 RAM

dual Samsung SM951 NVME SSDs (512GB running RAID-0)

one Samsung 850 PRO in the sata cradle (bringing total space to 1.5TB)

Fingerprint scanner and multi-format card reader for security

multiple USB 3.0 ports

USB-C for Thunderbolt 3 usage, attached to a Dell TB16 dock, providing my two displays, 6 additional USB 3.0 ports, and a USB-C (3.1 and TB3 and DP) port for monitor 0, and a DP port for monitor 1.

Two LG 27UD88 monitors, one in portrait, one (primary) in landscape

WASD keyboard (with custom font done in Harry Fat, to be very Atari-like, Atari fuji symbols replace windows symbols on keys)

3D Connexion cad-mouse

Shuttle Pro 2 controller for video work in LightWorks (I frequently have to make videos for clients often as demo or documentation)

 

-Thom

[zzip]

All of that tedious work to run an immature OS lacking in features and then using it elusively starting in '93: I officially recognize you as geek of the hardcore order! I had just become aware of Linux in 1993 and didn't try it myself until 1995 or so. And I was never willing to jump through that many hoops when I already had a working OS from MS that (mostly) worked well enough. I respect your doggedness and accomplishment in that regard.

 

Sorry about your request not to argue about the hardware support but:

I've found hardware support to be very good. I'll admit it's not as bleeding edge as Windows though. Hardware makers make drivers for Windows available when the hardware is released, so it's hard to beat that (though not always for earlier Windows which may still be in significant use). Also, in Windows world, some hardware makers seem to like to go out of their way not keep drivers up to date with new OS releases. I suppose that way if someone upgrades their OS they have to re-buy another flatbed scanner or whatever. Yeah, that would be me. However, modern Linux hardware support is still what I consider to be very good. But Macintosh... your argument is a bit skewed there. Apple controls the core and a fair amount of the periphery hardware you will be using with their OS. Hardware choices in Macintosh land are small compared to the gazillions of options in general PC territory. So yeah, when the OS and PC come bundled together, the hardware had better be well supported! So while you can say Linux has lagging HW support, you could also say that Macintosh has "lacking" hardware support. I'll agree though that when you buy a Mac, you know everything in it will work well with the OS.

I've long bought hardware with an eye to what Linux supports to avoid hardware compatibility issues.

 

It is still somewhat of an issue, but it has improved greatly for a few reasons:

 

1) Less diversity of hardware than before (in PC world anyway) for instance, there used to be many graphics card manufactures, now there are essentially two.

2) More standardization of devices. Your printer probably speaks a well-known page description language.

3) Hardware makers now contribute to kernel and/or release proprietary drivers

 

On the plus side, when Linux supports a piece of hardware, it usually works out of the box. I've had things "just work" on Linux and struggle to get the driver installed properly under Windows

[Flojomojo]

I was implying that the limited and tightly integrated scope of Macintosh hardware support is the reason that the out of box experience is well received.. However, as time went on, I found myself getting into situations where I needed LOTS of computing power in a portable package, which isn't something Apple wants to provide. So I've had to move into the elusive territory of mobile workstations (currently occupied by such beasts as the Dell Precision 7710, which I have, and the Lenovo Thinkpad P70/71 series.) these machines provided the computing power I needed (quad core xeon's running from 2-4GHz), and the ability to use ECC RAM (both are very important when you're running huge stacks of virtual machines to simulate data center deployments!) , these machines, while somewhat certified by Linux, do not have optimized drivers to fully utilize the hardware (Intel/NVIDIA Optimus hybrid GPU usage is very problematic, and the performance of the system with ONE 4K display was unacceptable, compared to the THREE 4K displays I run nominally on this unit.), and I was finding myself needing to use lots more software in the Windows domain, that didn't run well enough under Linux hosted VMs, so I had to switch to Windows 10.

 

As a side effect, I am able to run Linux very well in VMs, as well as having a Mac OS X guest that while not accelerated, does allow me to actually do software development in Xcode for iOS and MacOS app wanting clients, as needed.

 

What beast of a machine is this I am referring to? It's a:

 

Dell Precision 7710 Mobile Workstation

Intel Xeon E3-1505 4 cores 3GHz nominal peak, with near 4GHz possible with microcode tweaks.

64GB ECC RAM

4K IPS display

Intel P530 GPU and NVIDIA Quadro 5000M GPU with 8GB of DDR5 RAM

dual Samsung SM951 NVME SSDs (512GB running RAID-0)

one Samsung 850 PRO in the sata cradle (bringing total space to 1.5TB)

Fingerprint scanner and multi-format card reader for security

multiple USB 3.0 ports

USB-C for Thunderbolt 3 usage, attached to a Dell TB16 dock, providing my two displays, 6 additional USB 3.0 ports, and a USB-C (3.1 and TB3 and DP) port for monitor 0, and a DP port for monitor 1.

Two LG 27UD88 monitors, one in portrait, one (primary) in landscape

WASD keyboard (with custom font done in Harry Fat, to be very Atari-like, Atari fuji symbols replace windows symbols on keys)

3D Connexion cad-mouse

Shuttle Pro 2 controller for video work in LightWorks (I frequently have to make videos for clients often as demo or documentation)

 

-Thom

I look forward to returning to this thread in 2030, when your "beast" of a system is a very modest spec, Linux is the only OS that matters, and I'm close to retirement.

[tschak909]

This is what I wanted to avoid arguing, but somehow, everybody seems to know more than I do on this subject.

 

Trust me, I know the state of hardware on linux, as I've written hardware kernel drivers for Linux; have contributed to numerous projects over a long arc of time.

 

Given my situation, and the fact that the state of driver maturity for my hardware was considerably better on Windows, than it was on Linux, I opted for the Windows build.

 

I have been a long time contributor to the free software movement, more than two decades, almost three now. I have watched how things have panned out, and in some respects, yes, I have given up. Too many battles fought, reaching deep into the internal politics of many projects, it takes everything out of a man. I need stuff that works, and works well, and can't be arguing and begging for data sheets to different GPU chips.

 

You are right that things have standardized, this brings me back to the point that while the hardware works, it sometimes doesn't work as well as it does under other operating systems, I mean, even compare the board support packages for a bare linux versus an Android build from the same manufacturer, it's night and day!

 

It's come a very long way, but after more than two decades of observation, I am inclined to say that it will be forever playing catch-up to systems with far more seats and thus have more engineering capacity thrown at them.

 

I am tired of arguing these facts with people who think I've never heard their earth shattering viewpoints.

 

-Thom

[tschak909]

And I didn't EVEN go into the MESS that is the entirety of X11, a steaming pile of shit that should have been set on fire 20 years ago.

 

Having support for devices isn't the same thing as supporting those devices with sufficient performance, and Linux has some really nasty problems that need to be surmounted there, unfortunately so much political infighting and battling out of replacement stacks has set this whole venture back at least another decade. The UNIX world has been really bad with this:

 

* System V vs BSD

* X11 vs NeWS vs NeXT

* PHIGS vs OpenGL

* OPEN LOOK vs Motif

* AIGLX vs GLX vs EGL etc

* Wayland vs Mir

* Unity vs GNOME3 vs MATE vs Cinnamon

* GTK vs Qt

 

Choice is good. Effective democratization of these choices relies on coming to consensus and rallying behind these choices. The UNIX community has been terrible at this, with each side preferring to stay in their corners and not standardize. This is the reason that programs in X can't even fucking copy and paste between them effectively (I have deep insight into this, as I was one of the many voting on what to put into ICCCM),

 

It's not that I get mad that I am not hearing any new ideas, it's that I am hearing exactly the same ideas told back to me by people who didn't go through all this mess, and they don't even bother with trying to dig back through history, learn the good and bad ideas, and remix them.... It makes me unbelievably frustrated.

 

There, this is why I didn't want an argument.

[Flojomojo]

/mic drop

[+x=usr(1536)]

And I didn't EVEN go into the MESS that is the entirety of X11, a steaming pile of shit that should have been set on fire 20 years ago.

Hearing someone else say this makes me very, very happy.

 

Many of the concepts that X11 presents are fine, but the implementation blows meaty chunks. It blew meaty chunks 20 years ago, and it blows them now. It blows them with great force and gusto, leaving interesting splatter patterns where they land.

 

I first used Linux somewhere around the 1993 timeframe, but didn't dedicate a machine to it until about 1995. That was a Yggdrasil box; moved on to Slackware from there. Kept with that distro for years before finally admitting that I needed modern package management, and, after various flirtations with RedHat, CentOS, SuSE, and others, settled on Debian. Turned out to be a useful choice because, once the Raspberry Pi came along, that was its default platform.

 

That said, the first *nix that I used was NeXTStep, which for some reason led to a liking of Solaris and FreeBSD. Both have had places in both datacentres I've worked in or built as well as at home. And I wish I'd never let my NeXT boxes go.

 

These days, it's OS X on the Desktop, and Linux or Windows on the backend depending on what I'm looking to accomplish.

 

But for all-time favorite... Hands-down it's BeOS. It can still do things that, 16 years after its demise, other OSes can't, or at least still don't do as well as it did. It had so much potential; it's a shame about what happened to that company.

[TheTIGuy]

 

For a phone I am rather partial to SE's Java Platform.

You mean Sun *Cough* err... Oracle's Java SE Platform, right?

[zzip]

Hearing someone else say this makes me very, very happy.

 

Many of the concepts that X11 presents are fine, but the implementation blows meaty chunks. It blew meaty chunks 20 years ago, and it blows them now. It blows them with great force and gusto, leaving interesting splatter patterns where they land.

 

I first used Linux somewhere around the 1993 timeframe, but didn't dedicate a machine to it until about 1995. That was a Yggdrasil box; moved on to Slackware from there. Kept with that distro for years before finally admitting that I needed modern package management, and, after various flirtations with RedHat, CentOS, SuSE, and others, settled on Debian. Turned out to be a useful choice because, once the Raspberry Pi came along, that was its default platform.

 

That said, the first *nix that I used was NeXTStep, which for some reason led to a liking of Solaris and FreeBSD. Both have had places in both datacentres I've worked in or built as well as at home. And I wish I'd never let my NeXT boxes go.

 

These days, it's OS X on the Desktop, and Linux or Windows on the backend depending on what I'm looking to accomplish.

 

But for all-time favorite... Hands-down it's BeOS. It can still do things that, 16 years after its demise, other OSes can't, or at least still don't do as well as it did. It had so much potential; it's a shame about what happened to that company.

X's ability to display application windows running on other systems was a killer feature back in the 90s. This was an era before remote desktops were really a thing yet.

 

These days its a feature that I rarely ever need anymore, because most remote apps can run headless. So I won't be that sad to see X get replaced with Wayland or whatever.

 

X's philosophy of delegating UI and Window Management to other apps makes it both flexible and led to the mish-mosh mess of GUI apps that couldn't talk to each other very well.

 

It was annoying that when the KDE team set out to fix this and provide a unified set of apps that work together, the GNOME project sprung up in reponse, over a licensing issue that was ultimately fixed. So now we have a choice of sets of unified apps

 

Such is the nature of an open, democratic system, I guess. It will have factions, competing efforts