The Best, Worst, and Ugliest OSes of the Decade

itwbennett writes "Hundreds of Operating Systems were released during the past decade, finding their way into microdevices, watches, refrigerators, mobile phones, cars, motorcycles, jets, even the International Space Station. Some worked; some even worked well. Others, sadly, didn't. And some were just ahead of their time. Blogger Tom Henderson takes a look back at the best and worst OSes of the decade. Among the worst? Vista, as you'd suspect, along with WinME. But what about GNU Hurd? And some of the best? Solaris/OpenSolaris 10, Mac OS X, and newcomer Google Android."

Comments

BeOS

[JesseL]

I still miss it. So much potential and such high hopes. I suppose I should check out Haiku.

like...WHATever, dood...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista gave the good admins the ability to have a completely safe computer. WinME was the best of the 9x line after you took 30 seconds to put DOS back in. 'Blogger Tom Henderson' is a moron, but indicitive of the slashdot community.

What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA is a waste of time. It's the worse kind of drivel and doesn't have any interesting technical facts or points.

I mean if they had broken OS's down by functionality, design and architecture it might be worth some time but this strikes me as an article anyone with quarter a clue could write in about a half hour - I mean did the author research ANYTHING for this versus pull out general comments that are generally known.

Come on editors you gotta be able to do better than this!

Re:What a total waste of time

[nschubach]

I read it and the comments from the author...

Nah... the CLI scripting makes up for it
The UI is what it is... but the PowerShell scripting components are like bash on steroids. There's nothing in UnixVille like it in terms of integration.
by tomhenderson on 12/22/09 at 12:29 pm

Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash? Unless he's talking about the fact that you can replace Bash if you like and you probably can't replace Powershell... but I doubt he's talking about "integration" in that manner.

Re:What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

integration significantly deeper given the ability to interface, automate and integrate heterogeneous API.

I need a marketing -> English translation for this please.

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

But wouldn't that be more overhead (passing an object) because now the application accepting said list of files has to understand the structure of passed object in order to process it correctly, where in Linux you simply pass text/streams as specified by the accepting application. These applications can be written by anyone with no prior knowledge of the object structure of another application that may be sending it information.

On the contrary, the overhead ought to be smaller with PowerShell; first, cmdlets run in the PS process: once instantiated, passing references around should be enough, and objects don't need to be marshalled and translated as a step of piping from one cmdlet to another. Compared to the Unix model, there is no need to serialize the internal object to stdout, push it to a pipe (maybe requiring OS involvement, buffering, etc.), very little need for custom glue code that modifies the output to make it understandable to the second app, and no need to deserialize the result from stdin into the internal representation of the accepting application. And even if your apps didn't run in the same process, the CLI handles serialization and deserialization for you, so you don't need to write your own custom parser - fun as it may be :)

Your other concern, that the accepting cmdlet must understand the structure of the incoming object is not a problem either: the accepting cmdlet does not usually need to understand all of the structure of the objects received. Often the requirement is simply that the objects in question implement a certain interface. That gives one a lot of flexibility, because you can push very different objects through without having to write glue code, as long as the required interface exists. Note also that in the CLI, some properties or methods are predefined (for example the ToString() method), and that the receiving application can use reflection to investigate the methods and properties exposed by the input objects.

Re:What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

They added this OO stuff because you can't do much on windows with text processing tools (i.e. parse the registry),
while Unix is built around text files. In the end, this OO stuff makes it more complex and less powerfull than the
good old character streams, which work so well exactly because they are damn simple.

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

They added this OO stuff because you can't do much on windows with text processing tools (i.e. parse the registry),

That's just not true; there are plenty of text processing tools in Windows, including ports of all the Unix utilities. If anybody needed it, it's trivial to write some utility that reads the registry and dumps it to stdout for parsing. They added the OO stuff because it's a much more powerful and modern approach.

In the end, this OO stuff makes it more complex and less powerfull than the
good old character streams, which work so well exactly because they are damn simple.

I'll have to disagree; character streams are simple, but this simplicity makes them less powerful, not more. The programmer is forced to do a lot of work the computer ought to handle. As to the complexity, this is due to the data itself: modern applications push around all kinds of data that aren't, by their nature, character strings. The Unix approach requires applications to convert the data to character streams and back (so the programmer needs to design a format complex enough to represent the data items and their relationships as character streams, write serialization code and parsers to convert it back). That's a lot of overhead.

Windows bias

[1000101]

I agree with most of the article, but when people have attitudes such as "It's not easy to nominate them here as their business practices aren't very kind" (Windows Server 2008) I tend to take the article less seriously. The OS either holds up to the criteria of the article or it doesn't. Keep it at that.

GNU Hurd is not an OS

[Timothy Brownawell]

Any more than Linux by itself is. It's half an OS.

Or really, a quarter of an OS because it won't be finished until the Second Coming of RMS to lead the faithful out of a world where all hardware (even your toaster) will only run software approved by the MPAA.

Crap Article

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is shit. First they split Windows down to the Service Pack level, but go on to say "all of OS X and all of Linux" are in the best? Really? OS X 10.0 was a dismal, WinME failure, for one. And then to throw in Android, which is also Linux? WTF? The author clearly just named a handful of OSes he knew of, grabbed a blurb about them from Wikipedia, and is laughing all the way to the bank with the ad impressions from fanboys/haters.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[sopssa]

But I don't really get the Vista bashing in the article. It is a good OS. It had its problems at launch, but those were mostly caused by driver issues. Its also a lot better with security. I would take Vista over XP anytime.

Sure, it put some people off with the new features who weren't used to them (especially those also using unixes), but it was surely way to the correct direction that Windows needed. And now we have Win7, who no one really bitches about and says its polished. They would had if MS would had introduced the new features in it instead of Vista.

Android isn't an OS

[Wee]

Android is just a bunch of Java apps running on Linux. That's an OS?

-B

z/OS forever

[gelfling]

As always z/OS is the ratio sum ultra.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Bagels]

Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.

In related news

[Icegryphon]

FreeBSD was unavailable for comment.
Friend of FreeBSD, Netcraft is reporting that he is dead.
As of yet this rumor is still unconfirmed.
;_;

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[w0mprat]

We were so desperate to beat up on MS after taking so damn long to give us a new OS that when it had problems we blew it out of all proportion, far beyond what empirical facts would support.

I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine. I saw few people with actualy problems and fully consider the Vista bashing phenomona part of the Microsoft hate disease.

I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.

Yes it had problems, but not worse than the XP era. After a few patches these niggles were addresed.

I have to poke fun here: on average, a new Linux distro comes with a multitude of problems preinstalled, mind you they are freatures to a Linux user, not bugs. I'll be honest, I enjoy fixing pre-broken distros and I'm actually throughly bored when I install something like Ubuntu and everything just works. :D

BUT ... all the bad PR has forced MS to make Windows 7 a huge improvement. If there is one genuine gripe, it is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Yet through our bleating has paid off, we've been given a good Windows OS.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[badboy_tw2002]

You're not using DOS. You're using a command prompt. Given that you were a little kid, I'm sure your dad helped you get the autoexec.bat set up just right so it'd load your CD rom driver in and make sure high mem was available. Also, gotta make sure that the sound card starts up on the right IRQ, don't want to screw that one up. Oh, and gotta clear out the TSRs to eek out the just over 3.75 megs that the game needs to even boot. Its nostalgic to think about that stuff, but I'll take a real operating system that can configure its drivers and doesn't think 640K is enough for everyone. Oh, also one that I don't have to roll my own TCP stack.

I'm guessing your just old enough now to what we call "nostalgia", which is great in some ways but can also lead to bad things like bell bottom revivals and trucker hats. Its great to acknowledge the past, but generally the future has more going for it.

And apparently biased...

[CannonballHead]

For example, he recognizes Windows Server 2008 R2 as a great OS, but fails to mention Windows 7; Windows 7 and 2008 R2 are on the same code base.

Linux as one group? Seriously, what distro you choose can make or break your Linux experience. Especially depending on your hardware.

Android? Isn't that kinda new to be saying it's amazing already?

Mac OS X bias, too:

It just works. Darwin BSD underneath, mostly luxury on top. The upside is beauty, quietness, control, and stress-free existences. The downside is that it isn't a business plan for computer consultants and virus removers. Onerous is the fact that the most recent release of MacOS-- Snow Leopard-- had a sufficiently large number of post release patches to make our PTSD of Microsoft Windows patching come to mind. Apple's QA now faces a bit of what Microsoft does: so many hardware platforms that QA is difficult as Apple releases new hardware platform variants. The OS isn't pricey, and this isn't about hardware captivity, this is about quality and architectural philosophy in an operating system. Yet MacOS is also the underpinning for the cell/mobile OS to beat on the iPhone. Attention to detail pays.

Sure. It "just works" on Apple approved hardware. :) Luxury on top? Hm. Control? I wasn't aware that Mac OS X allowed you to control your system as much as Linux or Windows. I thought it actually was simpler and didn't allow as much control - which is fine, it's a design decision that many people like, I have no problem with it. And what is "architectural philosophy" anyways? I thought Mac OS X was about being a good OS, not an architectural POC...

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[RubberDuckie]

True enough, the Solaris userland is not as robust as Linux out of the box. You can upgrade to a more robust userland through sites like Blastwave, that carry pre-compiled GNU-like programs.

OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux. I have a very old proprietary database that was once running on Solaris 2.6, running on Solaris 10. I didn't have to wedge in some ancient libc to get this to happen, it just worked. So like many things in life, and especially with computers, you trade have trade offs: stability or newer features. One size does not fit all.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nschubach]

Personally, I'm dreading the forced move to Windows 7 when it comes down the pipe. It may be nice for Grandma who wants transparent windows and flashy interface, but the lack of usable file tree structures (no lines anymore, needless wasted space...) really puts a damper on my development tasks (especially when you dig 14 levels into a folder of classes and version trees...) The addition of useless tool bars at the top of the windows that can't be removed also put's a damper on my minimalist self with the removal of the small status bar at the bottom of the windows. I'm not even going to mention how handy the old XP (2000?) classic menu was that allowed me to organize my applications by company, use and then product so I could quickly find what I needed without having to remember it's icon name to search for it. (Yes, there are tools that I might only use once in a blue moon, like packet sniffers, hex editors, etc. that have some ridiculous names.)

But hey... I'm a developer who uses tons of tools all day long. If MS doesn't want me to be productive, I know where I can go. Now, if I can get my company to agree...

Re:Windows Mobile & embedded

[UnknowingFool]

Instead Windows Mobile was essentially a desktop OS shoe horned into a handheld device, for which the UI was ill suited, not taking into account the unique design and usage issue of such a device. This is why OSs such as the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Android had such an impact on destroying the Windows Mobile market.

It's actually worse than that. MS made Window CE/Mobile more like a desktop OS by including concepts and features that don't really belong in a mobile device. To MS everything should be a desktop, even though on a handheld, you have limited screen space, you do not have a full keyboard, or a mouse. There's also a desktop, files, directories, drop-down menus, etc. Very little attention was paid to how someone might use a handheld differently than a computer on a desk. How do you launch an application? Well there's the Start button or you could navigate into directories. Every icon and text is tiny so you can fit it on the "desktop". Want to zoom in on your document? It's in the OS. Somewhere. It's functional but not very user friendly.

As much as people complain about the iPhone, Apple really thought about the UI. Apple treated the iPhone as more of an appliance than a portable desktop. There's no desktop. Every application is a button. There are no files or directories to manipulate. There's no stylus so every icon, button must be large, etc. If something is too small to read, there's a quick way to enlarge it.

Vista vs Win7

[befletch]

I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.

I fully admit to bashing Vista too, and I continue to do so. It was pushed out the door unfinished and with poor driver support (thanks to Microsoft changing video architecture too late in the dev cycle, not due to any 3rd party failings) and while the driver issues have been resolved I still find Vista feels unfinished. But leaving Windows 7 off the good OS list is just wrong. Windows 7 is a well designed and executed OS, and Microsoft deserves credit for it. And I say that as a dyed in the wool UNIX / Mac OS X fan and frequent Microsoft critic. (Did I mention how bad I think Vista is?)

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Sandbags]

I will admit, 7 is much better, and overall supoerior to both XP and Vista, and I have adapted to it quickly and don't plan on going back. That said, 7 is still "unfinished" by a large margin.

1) The control panel experience is entirely inconsistant, with bottons in some cases appearing inside toolbar areas, and the design of each panel looks like a free-for-all design contest with no leadership at all. Some were completely unchanged from XP, others take all new approaches, and I can rarely find a button where one would "expect" it to be based on any logical convention. it flies in the face of ease of use, which was the whole point of redesigning the control panel system to feel more like an app and less like a disparate collection of 50 apps and panels. If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.

2) Backup has become even more of an issue. They took away choices Vista offered, and image backups still suffer the same bug that Vista RC had (if in any way shape or form you, or another backup, touch the directory the image backup is in, it can never be restored) but now it's worse and image backups is done EVERY time, not as a seperate process. This MUST be fixed ASAP!

3) New OS, no new screen savers?

4) New start menu was a good idea, but it's a bit inflexible in usage (needs to be easier to put things in the quick view or favorite apps area), and for christs sake it can't be resized!

5) Taskbar is an improvement, but turning back on quick launch should be easier, and i need to be able to change the spacing between the icons on the taskbar!

6) failed to replace task manager with the much better one that got when they acquired ProcXP from that other small firm I can't recall the name of atm.

7) too many windows either can't be resized, or lost functionality they had in XP and Vista, yet others either retained that or got better instead of regressing. It was not a consistant change at all.

SP1 will hopefully clean some up, but I'm really counting on Win8 being where that magic happens and they start to catch up to OS X. Key features: new FS format, consistant OS feel across apps and functions, OpenCL and OpenGL support, central process thread management. Things like this will really sell the next Microsoft OS.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[caubert]

Oh, I forgot to add. Today my w7 had another BSOD while I was using remote desktop connection to a XP-box at work. Dump shows ntoskrnl. Funny thing was, that the XP-box also crashed. It replied still to ping and as my co-worked stated, mouse and keyboard were still functional; but that was it.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[marciot]

3) New OS, no new screen savers?

Seriously, how about using power management instead? Screen savers were meant to protect CRTs, back in the days before power management existed.

Love the droid

[w0mprat]

Best OS: Android IMHO it is more sophisticated than it's competitors. Before you mod me down iPhone fan bois, Android has brought genuine multitasking to the smartphone platform amongst other things. Oh and the aftermarket firmware and themeing community is thriving. It's not great, but it's the newest thing thats making alot of hackers, tweakers and gadget addicts learn to love again. Hopefully an official Google phone will re-center the AOSP and do more than keep the project alive, but really ramp things up.

Worst OS: Solaris without a doubt. In my own experience it doesn't perform like linux does now, ZFS is cool but just confuses me and the userland is the most horrible thing ever.

Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one. I can make a linux pretty, but I'm talking about defaults. Often with some of the most amateurish desktop backgrounds. People make better art with MS Paint. No really they do. http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/incredible-ms-paint-artwork

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nxtw]

IMHO solaris has a really bad userland..... horrible horrible os for users :P

I would argue it's simply not polluted with nonstandard GNU extensions...

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Josh04]

No, when the limit is reached the programs themselves will be made better. Scraping an extra 10mb on top of your 8gb of RAM won't help you run anything. You're labouring under the delusion that all that tweaking was to get extra performance from your PC, when in fact it was more to do with the terrible DOS base memory model which meant that you needed to fiddle no matter how much memory you had outside the first 640k.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux.

No kidding. I kept several old applications that was built on pre-Solaris machines (SunOS 4.1.4) running for many years on newer Sun OS' all the way through to Solaris 10. There were occasional blips in there that were less sucessful (Solaris 7 was a pain) but Sun takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[mr_lizard13]

This is why:

Confusion over what hardware characteristics would be needed to run Vista

This is true.

lack and dearth of appropriate hardware drivers

This is true.

OEM confusion

This is also true.

Given Microsoft turned up the hype machine to 11, these problems became all the more a bitter pill.
It was only a good OS if you had the hardware to run it. Many did not, although were told that they did. Underpowered boxes were branded with a 'Vista Capable' sticker; the performance blowed. OEMs were suckered into that one. Those same OEMs began offering XP downgrades. Perhaps not as many as perceived actually ordered the downgrade option, but enough customers did for it to notice.

That said, Vista 'had' to happen in order to progress to 7, which is a far more polished effort, and ought to be in the Best list.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[NotBornYesterday]

I suppose that depends on what the user wants to do, doesn't it? Solaris rocks for its stability, power, security, ZFS, and containers, among other things, which makes sense considering it is generally used (and intended) as a server OS rather than desktop. But that's not to say it's not a good user desktop for web & office (OpenOffice), and other end user apps that are available for it, which is all many people need.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[digitalhermit]

This is revisionist history.

Vista was bad at release. It got a lot better by the time Windows 7 became available for sale, but Vista was not a product that a multi-billion dollar corporation should have released in such a state. For the cost of Vista, and the billions that Microsoft and the PC industry stood to make on the product, it shouldn't have had all the flaws. And there were many..

Before it was even released there were problems. Missed schedules, removed features, arguments with OEMs because of resource requirements such as the Vista Basic fiascos (some were Intel's fault, many were Microsoft's).

Even with all the delays, it was still released with little polish. The security sub-system was brain dead to the point that Apple could mock the dialogs that popped up every moment. There's a video on YouTube showing five dlalogs that popped up when a user wanted to delete a file. Networking would fail (google Vista wireless disconnects for thousands of hits). The apologists who claim that the driver errors were the fault of third-party vendors don't say how Microsoft changed and changed things as they neared deadline.

No, Vista certainly wasn't as bad as ME, but that's no excuse to release such a flawed product. When you are a billion dollar company and your software costs $200 a seat, we expect a certain level of quality that we don't from a free download. The fact that the free download works just as well would piss me off to no end if I'd spent $200 on Vista.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Anonymous Coward]

You upgraded a system with an 8-inch floppy to include a Sound Blaster? 8-inch floppies were a 70's thing and Sound Blasters were a very late 80's thing at the earliest.

Perhaps you had a 5 1/4" drive?

Hurd is "..of the decade"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurd can't be best/worst of the decade, because this isn't 1999. Hurd is dead.

Not all Vista bashing is ignorant...

[the_archer666]

But I don't really get the Vista bashing in the article. It is a good OS. It had its problems at launch, but those were mostly caused by driver issues. Its also a lot better with security. I would take Vista over XP anytime.

I bashed, bash and will bash Vista for one thing which Microsoft ignored deliberately:

"If it ain't broken, don't fix it!".

Prefetch - adds no performance to my daily usage pattern
Multmedia Priority Rescheduling - I never had trouble playing MP3s or movies
Constand HD activity - makes me wonder "what the hell" is optimized when & why
and so on and so on.

Plus it takes double the time to wake up from hibernate then to boot (oh well, 4 (3.5) GiBs of RAM to be loaded)

Roland

[sxltrex]

And somewhere Roland Piquepaille is smiling.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[ckaminski]

We did upgrade it. It's called Linux.

Now get off my lawn.

</sarcasm>

Seriously. Let. DOS. Die.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Anonymous Coward]

e had only one BSOD in Vista 64 home and it was due to a poorly written FOSS app.

A good OS should isolate misbehaving apps, not crap on itself.