Operating systems Wars!

[SteelCurtain]

I prefer the Mac's speed and the way that I don't have to roll the dice with upgrades/updates. My windows machine has had 2 catastrophic updates that I've had to roll back because of some fatal flaw since I upgraded to Windows 10.

I have never had an issue like that with OSx. It's not perfect, but it works nearly all of the time.

Also, I need a bash shell readily available.

       Is your systems hardware newer? I've heard a lot older boards and chip sets are not set up to run Windows 10 properly. If you had bought a stock Windows 8 or 8.1 computer, you would been generally fine. If you had a hardware made for Windows seven, and upgraded to ten. A lot of users had issues. I do miss Windows Seven though, she was a great O/S. She has the look and feel of Windows XP in a modern power sense. (I call a lot of software and hardware by a female gender specific, I even call all my Electronics by female names. Sarah, Emily, Jessica, and Sophie. Those are my girls who keep me happy generally.). But, Windows seven is gone sadly.

I built my rig from scratch a little over a year ago. It was purpose built with Windows 10 in mind. The Anniversary upgrade caused a crash right after login which was a known issue with certain chipsets, and another security update murdered explorer.exe, making me have to manually restart it until I rolled it back.

The biggest problem with Windows is that it has to be compatible with a trillion different hardware combinations, and they will inevitably screw shit up. They also just get things so unforgivably wrong, almost by rule. The Metro thing was just the worst. The absolute, unmitigated worst. Go hide in the corner and think about what you did worst. Get naked, walk back to the Red Keep while I throw rotten fruit at you yelling "Shame!" worst. Cortana is fucking worse than useless, you used to need to fuck with the registry to get it to stop using fucking Bing. I haven't used it in years, so who the fuck knows now. You just dread any upgrade or major update, because who knows how many hours of fucking around you'll need to spend to get your system back.

I'll give Apple credit, they do make a nice looking product, but the OS is the major problem with them.

Spoken like a person who hasn't used OS X for any sufficient length of time. The OS is an almost perfect combination of the power of UNIX and a decent GUI.

^^^This. OS X is awesome.

I seriously think the biggest reason Windows is still relevant is PC gaming.

[Sterben]

If I was looking for a server I would use a UNIX based system, "Decent GUI" is the keyword. Plus most everything on the market is coded for windows use. The stuff for Macs are very costly, at the moment I'm posting from a Surface three. If were talking the portable world, Windows has that market cornered with it's Surface line. 64 gigs of native storage along side a 128 gig SD card formatted to to be a hard drive. For less then $500.00 I'm runing with 172 gigs of storage. Which is plenty for a true mobile unit. I am curious on why Apple keeps pushing it's Ipad line, when they should be putting a full Mac O /S on a tablet style system. The world of Mobile O/S's is fine for the general. But, if I want to touch up a image or do some light editing away from my power house laptop. The Surface is the only system powerful enough to be able handle the job outside of a 14" ultra book. I don't count anything that does not have a full HD screen to be a competent enough portable system.

I am curious though, what are your thoughts about 4k slowly becoming the new standard for screen resolutions?

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       Is your systems hardware newer? I've heard a lot older boards and chip sets are not set up to run Windows 10 properly. If you had bought a stock Windows 8 or 8.1 computer, you would been generally fine. If you had a hardware made for Windows seven, and upgraded to ten. A lot of users had issues. I do miss Windows Seven though, she was a great O/S. She has the look and feel of Windows XP in a modern power sense. (I call a lot of software and hardware by a female gender specific, I even call all my Electronics by female names. Sarah, Emily, Jessica, and Sophie. Those are my girls who keep me happy generally.). But, Windows seven is gone sadly.

I built my rig from scratch a little over a year ago. It was purpose built with Windows 10 in mind. The Anniversary upgrade caused a crash right after login which was a known issue with certain chipsets, and another security update murdered explorer.exe, making me have to manually restart it until I rolled it back.

The biggest problem with Windows is that it has to be compatible with a trillion different hardware combinations, and they will inevitably screw shit up. They also just get things so unforgivably wrong, almost by rule. The Metro thing was just the worst. The absolute, unmitigated worst. Go hide in the corner and think about what you did worst. Get naked, walk back to the Red Keep while I throw rotten fruit at you yelling "Shame!" worst. Cortana is fucking worse than useless, you used to need to fuck with the registry to get it to stop using fucking Bing. I haven't used it in years, so who the fuck knows now. You just dread any upgrade or major update, because who knows how many hours of fucking around you'll need to spend to get your system back.

Spoken like a person who hasn't used OS X for any sufficient length of time. The OS is an almost perfect combination of the power of UNIX and a decent GUI.

^^^This. OS X is awesome.

I seriously think the biggest reason Windows is still relevant is PC gaming.

       Windows users, get ready to gang up on the mac users! J/k, Mac does have it's place, of course as in the sprirt of the old joke . "You can't game on a Mac, you have no mod support." "How are you Gentlemen, all your base are belong to us."

[SteelCurtain]

I don't really care too much about 4k. It would have to come with a major overhaul in mobile data rates for streaming, I guess.

[Alex K]

       Do you run Linux on a VM, or are you dual booting?

Dual booting. I do all the "extreme computing" (such as simulations which take 2 weeks on end to run, or extensive work with Mathematica ™) under Linux. I always buy the machine with Windows pre-installed and then let the Linux installer make a new partition. Works like a charm every time.

[Tiberius]

If I was looking for a server I would use a UNIX based system, "Decent GUI" is the keyword.

I voted "Linux" in the poll too because I use it for all my servers. However I've yet to find a stable GUI environment for Linux that comes close to what OS X provides, hence it's my OS of choice for desktop / laptop.

Plus most everything on the market is coded for windows use. The stuff for Macs are very costly

Not even remotely true. Maybe at one time this was accurate, but a few things happened since then:

1) iPhone boomed in the mobile device market, and developers can more easily develop iOS apps using a Mac. More iPhones = More iOS App Devs = More Mac users = More apps for Mac.

2) The AppStore was ported across to OS X, which allowed developers to access a completely new market which they couldn't before.

You can't game on a Mac, you have no mod support."

I have Steam.

[Alex K]

Also, for some reason, out of the box, my ultrabook has twice the battery life under Mint than it does under Windows.
Also, how have you windows users survived with one desktop for so long? I probably change desktops every 5 seconds while working.

[pocaracas]

Windows for leisure...
Linux for work.

OSx?... Only had to use it once and for about 5 minutes... I felt completely out of my element.

My laptop has Windows pre-installed, so I kept it. It's working fine. Firefox runs fine, except for crappy excessive use of JavaScript on some pages (looking at you Facebook and photobucket). Video reencoding goes through handbrake just fine and all my audio editing needs are met by audacity.
Winamp kicks the llama's ass.
Putty (because openSSH doesn't work in win 10) for my connectivity needs.
And then there's games.
Oh, and stupid bosses and their top bosses are creating documents in word or excel for us to read and, sometimes, edit and send back... Can't escape the M$.

Linux at work. I was using a fedora with cinnamon for GUI. Works well enough. Can't complain of it being slow on the i3 I was provided with. I had to dual boot on that machine though... For some strange reason the processor's virtualization features were disabled in the bios, and it didn't have the option to enable them. So no virtual machine for me.
But...when most of my work consists of VNCing or SSHing to another machine and working there, OS responsiveness isn't very noticeable.
(Don't forget, when VNC is in full screen and you hit ctrl+ alt+L to lock the screen, you're locking the remote machine... Your own remains unlocked -.-)

[Jackalope]

Putty (because openSSH doesn't work in win 10) for my connectivity needs.

Try MobaXterm. The free version is pretty limited in the number of profiles it will save but if you're willing to use a Unix-like shell, it has an internal terminal session which blows away Putty.

I use it at work to access dozens of systems via ssh, stop/scp, tunneling, xterm, etc etc etc.

[I_am_not_mafia]

       Do you run Linux on a VM, or are you dual booting?

Dual booting. I do all the "extreme computing" (such as simulations which take 2 weeks on end to run, or extensive work with Mathematica ™) under Linux. I always buy the machine with Windows pre-installed and then let the Linux installer make a new partition. Works like a charm every time.

Same here. Even my laptop has dual boot and that requires me to go off to make some tea for it to boot up the few times I use Windows on it. But there will be some things that are just designed to run on Windows so why not give it the reaL thing?

My friend recently got a laptop with Windows 10. She's been off-line for about a year now after a troll campaign against her. She got reinfected from an old file on her USB stick I think. Window 10 is the worst operating system for her considering how interconnected it is and tries to do everything for you without you knowing about it. Even the bug where wi-fi kept switching itself back on every minute freaked her out. So I am going to wipe it off and give her Linux instead. She needs the peace of mind. I need to make a back up of it though first.

[Alex K]

I forgot to say, I don't have a stationary machine, I use my thinkpad (i7, 500GB SSD) exclusively for everything.