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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."
Best OS of 9x line was Windows 95 OSR2. 98 sucked horseballs with its instability, only second to ME's. I praised the Lord for Windows 2000 - the nicest and most professional-looking-and-feeling OS of the NT line.
Oh please. I'm kinda glad I lost my job supporting Solaris apps. Our apps were relatively easy to get working, but the Solaris machines management dropped off at my desk (last one was a Blade 1500) were just stupid and showed a blantant lack of quality assurance, and nothing ever worked out of the box. You'd think by now you could buy a desktop machine from them and expect the backspace key to actually work as just one example - or to be able to log into the desktop without facing a dozen cryptic errors. No - expect to spend days or years applying patches, tweaking config files - and even then nothing will ever work as seemless as Windows or Mac (or even Linux these days). Oh sure on paper Solaris might be superior to anything out there, but as anyone who has worked in software knows - its the little problems that make a failed product.
Most every patch I got from Sun as well - never worked on the first go. I honestly think its a conspiracy - only system vendor I can think of btw that charges you for a) access to their KB and b) access to hotfixes - not even Microsoft is that evil. It wasn't uncommon for hotfixes/patches to break all kinds of crap too. I once wrote up a list of weird things I never was able to fix on the Sun boxes I and others had on their desks and it was easily pages long. Mind you - these were ALL minor issues, but annoying enough to make it unpleasant. At the job I have now - all the Solaris machines (servers mostly) have the same track record...
In terms of user friendlyness, ease of use, support - I'd take Vista any day of the week.
DirectX was Microsoft's solution to the "exit to DOS to run a game" workaround. It also targetted the "You must have one of these sound cards, one of these graphics cards, etc." that hampered DOS games because the OS wasn't doing any hardware abstraction--they had to roll their own drivers for every game engine/runtime. DirectX *was* the runtime that enabled direct hardware access and hardware abstraction so the game designers could focus on making games, rather than which sound card a user had.
It wasn't a perfect solutions--still isn't--but DirectX did kill DOS as a gaming platform.
Who can tell? None of my core CAD applications run properly on Windows 7 yet, and my userbase has mired itself in XP to the point where I have to bribe them with new hardware to get them to let me back up their systems: they've become frightened that any backed-up machine will be replaced with Vista.
And it's exactly this thinking that makes Solaris userland so freaking horrible. Every time I log into a Solaris machine it's a nice binary-hunt for common tools I have no problem finding on BSD, OS X or Linux, and when I finally find them (in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/ccs/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/openwin/bin, /opt/SUNWPro/bin, /usr/ucb/bin) it turns out they support none of the options or switched normal people (as opposed to unix masochists) find useful. Why is sun tar so anal? Why doesn't cp -r copy symlinks? Why is there no sensible top, or killall? What's up with the completely nonstandard switches to ps? Why isn't vim included by default and why is Sun vi even more terrible than normal vi, which is already bad enough. It drives me crazy, every time I sit down to do something on a Sun machine I get really, really aggrevated, and I've been using and developing for the damn things (amongst many other *nix OS-es) for 5 years now. I'd much rather 'pollute my userland with GNU extensions' than be stuck in the 80's and guessing what is where and what support what every time I need to use a Solaris machine.
What's even worse than the Solaris userland? Developing for Solaris. The Sun CC suite is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever encounterd. It sometimes does the job if you don't push it too far with templates and stuff, but most of the time it simply doesn't work on 100% valid C++ code that has no issues whatsoever on any other platform. Or it works on Sun Studio X, but it fails in Y, to work again in version Z. Compiling even such simple parts of Boost as the shared_ptr headers is still not possible because the compiler is so brain-dead. If you want to build shared libraries on Sun you need to pass 10 different arcane options if your build is reasonably complex, because the sun linker will gladly fsck up where all your symbols end up which breaks a perfectly fine piece of software as soon as it is linked in with another binary that happens to define the same symbol. And the Sun Cstd library is full of those, symbols with ridiculously common symbol names that are just waiting to clash the moment you deploy your software from the testbench to the production environment. So just use gcc you might suggest? In theory that's a good idea if it weren't for the fact that if you need to link 1 (one) binary-only module (e.g. supplied by a third party) that was linked against the Sun libCstd, you're screwed, since you cannot combine that binary with the stlpor4t C++ standard libraries that actually _do_ work in all other cases. All this is not because of a bad sysadmin because it was the same thing all over again at 3 different jobs.
Also, Sun hardware is slow as a turd for what you pay for it, up to the point it's almost a joke, for some tasks. Sure they might have great threading performance but don't dare to try running FPU intensive code on it or stress the VM, my $400 C2D Dell laptop I develop on is literally 10 times faster than the $20,000 Sun Netra 240 the code is deployed to. It's all fine and dandy that Sun hardware scales to a zillion CPU's nicely, and that an UltraSparc is much more power-efficent than a Xeon, Opteron or Power6, but it's not really an advantage anymore if you need 10 of them to get decent performance out of it.
Summarizing: I absolutely HATE solaris from the bottom of my heart, I know I used to hate the 1995 HP/UX I used to deploy on, but after a few years of Solaris experience I'd switch to that without hesitation. I don't care about the fancy tech they put in like ZFS and dtrace, it's all too bad they fucked up they're development environment and userland up to the point that work that uses to be fun becomes one big nightmare, and you can't really count on anything anymore when you log into a Solaris box. Maybe OpenSolaris is better, but that'd only be because it has a GNU userland by default (or at l