Operating System Discussion

First of all, Congratulations to Mike and his new wife.

Now, this post is something of a response to Prassel and his posts about not seeing the point of Ubuntu and instead opting for Windows 7.  I finally got the RAM together on my laptop and was able to install Windows 7 this afternoon.  It still is not on my desktop, but I’m too happy with that setup to take the risk.  Plus it’s a now-7-year-old  computer, and I don’t dream that it would run a newer Windows comfortably.

For a bit of context, I have used ubuntu sporadically for the past 2-3 years, and in February when I was stranded in TN with a shitty connection and a corrupted Windows Registry such that I could not start Windows up, I first downloaded Ubuntu 8.5 and built up from there.  I’ve since placed Ubuntu 9 on both my desktop and laptop and have spent at least 20 hours in the environment, and I’ve spent about 8 hours now in Windows 7.

Windows XP: the industry standard.  Get a nice clean, stripped down pirated version and you have the best OS I have ever seen.  Very fast, very intuitive (perhaps biased since I’ve spent so much time there), and – honestly – quite stable.  I have never seen a BSOD, and any difficulties were due to my own fault installing a .exe I found on my computer whose identity I was not sure of (happened once).

Windows 7: much nicer looking.  Wayyy better than the week I spent with an early version of Vista 15 months ago.  That was slow and awful.  Some of the things from that which annoyed me persist: inability to create multiple taskbars, hard to find folder options, hard to get rid of the “are you sure you want to do this?” perpetually appearing prompt.  Nevertheless, it’s much faster and much sexier.  There isn’t a huge interface upgrade in my opinion.  The start menu is still not as good as my “classic” XP version (even on XP I didnt use the new version – nor the control panel’s “simplified” version).  But it looks nicer.  I like the white icons in the bottom right.  I think the network stuff works better even though it seems less transparent (i’d like that “repair connection” button back, but it’s possible windows 7 is smart enough that i really don’t need it… time will tell).  I really liked that when my browser window and instant message window overlapped, i could see my IM window’s title bar blink behind the semi-translucent broswer title bar.  To be fair, vista can do this too.  On the other hand, all the software and drivers I’ve installed have worked beautifully on Windows 7, even though they were designed for XP or, in cases, Vista.  Altogether, I see no reason to switch from a nice hacked version of XP, however, as it is still faster and more… customizeable.

DOS: easily the best OS available today.  Text-based operating systems have never been sexier.  For a good one, see MS-DOS

Ubuntu: version 9.  Haven’t tried out multi-monitor support which was Prassel’s main complaint.  Honestly, today’s Ubuntu is a million times better than that of 1.5 years ago.  It is a bona-fide, legit OS.  You can easily use this thing OOB (out-of-box).  It instantly picks up all the wireless signals in the area.  It comes with firefox, IM clients, and games already installed.  You almost never work in the terminal (which is a lot different from 1.5 years ago).  It figures out NTFS partitions automatically, and the hard drive is entirely available without any programming (which is what i call terminal work, even if you copy/paste it from sites).  If there’s a program you don’t have that you want, just install it optionally and easily.  All that said, I usually just use windows XP because why bother?  I still see Ubuntu as a tool or novelty rather than a native OS.  It will probably never overcome that hurdle for me or the masses (as, say, firefox did over IE), but it’s still worth keeping on my computer and using every couple weeks.

OSX: So here’s my position on Mac’s these days, and probably for about 2-3 years now.  It’s probably a better OS than Windows XP.  My friends that are really into IT and computers that have played with Macs all use them exclusively now.  The guy that introduced me to firefox and digg and ubuntu 6 years ago is now a mac user.  I bet I’d love macs to and switch over if I gave it a try and saw how much better it is.  But I’m not about to spend 3x the amount of money on the same damn computer for one that’s a mac just so i can try out the goddamned OS.  My next purchase is a $250 netbook, not a $1250 macbook.  That said, I’ve heard of making hackintoshes out of netbooks, so maybe i’ll try that.