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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."
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!
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.
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.