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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."
I still miss it. So much potential and such high hopes. I suppose I should check out Haiku.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
--- Bwah?
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.
:D
... 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.
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.
BUT
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
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.
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...
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.
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?)
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
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
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
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.
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.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
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.