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.

Re:BeOS

[asherlev]

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

Checking out Haiku is going to be like resurrecting your dead mother. Her soul is gone and she'll just try to eat your brains.

Re:BeOS

[AndrewNeo]

Or you'll get your arm and leg torn off, and your brother will have to live in a suit of armor.

Re:BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least she's not gonna eat my eyes, that's just unreasonable.

Re:BeOS

[imakemusic]

I'm still missing it.
Such high hopes and potential.
Should check out haiku.

ftfy

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

[nxtw]

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.

PowerShell operates using objects, so you can take the output from a command and then filter or sort based on columns of the output. The same filtering or sorting commands could be used for listing files, processes, or any other objects. Unix scripting operates using text streams being piped between processes and has a heavy emphasis on external processes (for example, as in the external [ or test program).

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash?

The references to the CLI should give you an indication. The integration is between components running under PowerShell. PowerShell cmdlets use object pipelines to communicate: they send whole objects to each other, and can all access well known and defined properties of those objects. I haven't seen this kind of integration under Unix, where the standard model is to pipe character streams. This requires serialization, weird and often painful custom parsing with liberal use of text processing tools like awk, sed and so on. See here for more details.

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

[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.

So you don't have to waste your time

[bonch]

A tiny, three-page article, with each page only having three to four paragraphs, and the list has exactly what you'd expect it to have. You really don't have to RTFA this time.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[Dunx]

And the writing is redundant, terrible and repetitive:

"lack and dearth of appropriate hardware drivers"

Lack _and_ dearth? That's pretty bad. Just put the thesaurus down and step away from the keyboard.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[yurtinus]

WinME was the best of the 9x line

hee hee

hehehahahahaha

hoo hooo

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

/wipes tear

Thanks, I needed some cheer this morning!

Again?

[Last_Available_Usern]

What is this, the third post today alone that primarily slams Microsoft? I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.

Re:Again?

[frank_adrian314159]

I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.

Well, the Gates Foundation (which derived most of its money from the Microsoft activities of its founder Bill Gates) is funding anti-AIDS efforts in Africa, which might lead to a higher population, and that might place more pressure on native coffee habitat! Close enough for Slashdot... So do I win the "six degrees" prize for bashing Microsoft today?

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.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[VGPowerlord]

Yes, the complete OS is GNU GNU/Hurd.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[iCharles]

I thought OS/2 was half an OS?

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.

uh, what?

[amicusNYCL]

GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman

Why did the author feel the need to run his text through a Chinese translator then back to English?

Re:uh, what?

[AndyGJ]

The original sentence was probably something like "I like a bagel with my coffee."

I think his hovercraft may be full of eels actually.

Re:uh, what?

[PCM2]

Your post made me go back and read the article. And it's true -- this is one of the worst-written articles I have ever seen. Every paragraph is a mish-mosh of subject/verb confusion, mixed metaphors, redundant wording, run-ons, and just about every other mistake you could make. You cherry-picked the best example of the lot, but among other howlers we have:

• 1. The world was looking for the joiner of Novell's time-honored and rock-solid NetWare network operating system to be joined fully to Linux.
  1. Technically, it arrived late in the 1990's, but its inclusion here is to remember the pain of the name.
  1. The love/hate relationship becomes anchored with deep emotions about the merits/detractions of the devices they use-- through the lenses of operating systems.
  1. Even a leopard can change its spots, sometimes as scar tissue.
  1. A natively 'jailbroken' open phone will test carrier promises to just deliver wireless pipe.

Taken as a whole, TFA becomes a kind of demented poetry. Kudos to whatever maniac got it published.

Android isn't an OS

[Wee]

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

-B

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Nerdfest]

That's why you rarely hear anyone say "This is the year of the Solaris desktop".

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Dunx]

More RAM, yes, but also direct access to hardware resources, and predictable response times (a lot of the same reasons that made DOS a reasonable basis for embedded PC systems).

OTOH, DOS barely counted as an operating system.

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.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ivucica]

The one who thought packing CDE into Solaris for a few years is a good idea should be hanged. I still sometimes have nightmares about it.

OS Kernel

[Midnight Thunder]

An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[ivucica]

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.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

I do use Dosbox to run the Old Monkey Island games and The Dig and Full Throttle, as well as the original Duke Nukem and Lemmings.

It does fine, for a spell, but what I was getting at is that alot of games today will specify in the Miniumum requirements: 2 Gigs of Ram for XP, 3 Gigs for Vista, because Vista eats up about of Gig of Ram. If I could free up even a portion of that, todays games would run better and smoother.

Andriod?

[roe-roe]

I think Android has a lot of great possibilities, but putting it on the list of best OSes of the decade is similar to giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve being on the list, I just think it is a bit premature.

Is Solaris actually good?

[selven]

Honest question. Solaris seems similar but different enough from the Linux I'm used to to be interesting. What are its features that Linux lacks/doesn't implement as well? I'm not a file system geek, so what's so good about ZFS that I'm going to notice? Is it much slower than mainstream desktop Linux, or is it doing fine?

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[JerkBoB]

ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.

Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.

Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH. ;P

To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:

root@host:~# zfs list tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K /tank

What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:

root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www

I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:

root@host:~# zfs create -s -V16G -o shareiscsi=on tank/vol/build_centos5.4-x86_64

Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot ...
drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/ ...my homedir contents from 11:00...

There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.

That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and ... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.

Nonsense Article

[Tomsk70]

"Hmmm, what can we type to make it appeal to the fanboys?".

That's nearly two minutes of my life I won't get back.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ByOhTek]

Vista was tolerable with SP1, albeit way to slow (I'm talking on a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB memory).

XP, on the same machine, not surprisingly, was a *LOT* faster

7, on that machine, is between the two, but close enough to XP that I don't mind using it.

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.

Solaris? Give me a break.

[Skuld-Chan]

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.

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:And apparently biased...

[abigor]

Mac OS X bias, too:

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...

You are basically a non-technical person, correct? Your post would indicate it. It's also clear you know nothing about OS X or Darwin and have never used it.

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:I will stand by this forever

[Orange Crush]

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.

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

[Antique Geekmeister]

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.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[caubert]

I run w7 RTM build and BSOD is happening. I've read M-audio firewire audio interface drivers make this happen, but I'm not sure. Been XP-user for 9000 years now and BSOD is kind of frustrating to experience nowadays.

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

[Penguinisto]

If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.

Err, as someone who has to schlep around in MMC v3 all day long, please let me take this opportunity to say the following:

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!... oh HELL NO!

In all the years of working with Microsoft products since Windows NT 3.5, I have never, ever seen an instance of MMC puking all over itself, limping along and unresponsive like a kicked dog, and/or taking a geologic era just to open and close... until friggin' MMC 3 came out.

Server 2k8, even the R2 version, is no better. MMC in its current incarnation was, in my humble opinion, expressly designed and engineered to piss off the sysadmin. There's honestly no other explanation for it. It's like the MMC codemonkey's wife found out that her husband was screwing around on her, so she snuck into his laptop, then cut+pasted some pirated Symantec A/V code into the build just out of spite. Okay, maybe too harsh... but I can say with confidence that I know now how Microsoft intends to force Windows server admins into using PowerShell in spite of PS' unpopularity: Make MMC such a crap experience, that you actually look forward to PS and its overly-long syntax-from-hell.

Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.

Okay, okay... on a serious note? There's still a lot of problems in MMC that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and it has a lot of things that seriously need fixing. In some ways they have (Win 7's isn't as painful as Server 2k8's), but at least from the server view, oh hell no...

Re:Vista vs Win7

[PopeRatzo]

Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.

Please don't tell us how you're able to make that comparison with such confidence.

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:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

Well I was told it was DOS, it didn't have anything else. Maybe it was just Command Prompt, but there wasn't an inch of windows on it. My dad didn't help at all, I ended up teaching him about it, by the time I was 5 or 6. I knew how to navigate file structures better than he did. It didn't have a CD Rom. It didn't have 3 and a Half inch Floppy. It used an 8 Inch Floppy. I remember we eventually upgraded to a Soundblaster so that we could even -get- sound. (Where yes, -I- was the one who memorized the IRQs)

It is nostalgic to play these old games once again, Even just to tinker with command prompt once again to get things to work just right. But I obviously wasn't old enough to understand the full inner workings. I don't understand why it should be limitted to 640k anymore, why we can't hack together an upgrade for it, and have it run the way it used to.

I just see alot of innovative thinking that happened in the past that seems to have been discarded. Like you said, clearing out TSR's to get more Memory, boot Disks for games, a bunch of other tricks to get the most resources possible to launch an application. All this has been discarded for our ability to brute force with newer and better hardware. What happens when Moore's law reaches it's limit, will these talents be rediscovered?

Re:Why do games need 2 GB of RAM?

[vlm]

But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?

90+% of PCs are never upgraded. "needs 2 gigs of ram" is marketing speak, for "most computers sold with 2 gigs of ram will probably have a fancy enough graphic card to have acceptable performance".

The other interpretation is any game will run faster if its cached into ram instead of reading off the DVD... Reduces stuttering and pauses.

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:Slashdoted already?

[lowen]

This is about OSes.

Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.

This is incorrect. Windows/386, even though it started up under MS-DOS, once the 386 VMM was running was a full-bore OS. The VMM intercepted calls to DOS, and could easily remap to 32-bit routines implemented in VxD's. It's easy enough to test yourself, just write a TSR that hooks the INT21H DOS vector, and count calls to it before and after executing win.com.

This is all exposed completely in the (long out of print) book 'Unauthorized Windows 95' by Andrew Schulman (IDG Books). The difference with Windows 95? A revamped UI, and an automatic call to win.com. In essense, DOS was the Windows/386 VMM's glorified bootloader. It's as if you went from a world where you booted to the GRUB prompt and had to manually type in the commands to load Linux to the days of grub.conf and autoloading Linux.

Windows 95, 98, and Me were all built on the Windows/386 VMM 'OS' core that used VxD's and trampolinish hackery (thunking) to get the job done. Windows NT was built on a new kernel that exposed the same API's but didn't trampoline itself into control.

Windows 9x and Me 'safe mode' is DOS with the Win32 UI, though.....

Surprised that OS/2 wasn't on the list

[marquis111]

Stable? Yes
Ugly? Yes
Last release? 2001.
Still widely used in the 2000's? Definitely, though declining precipitously.
Good or bad, it should have been on the list.

Re:Surprised that OS/2 wasn't on the list

[smchris]

But as which? I think that's the problem -- finding its category.

It was really nice and not so ugly for the time -- especially with Object Desktop. Like a pimped out Cadillac when linux was a jeep and Windows was a Pinto. Since Warp came out nearly a year before Windows 95, it could be argued that it was the coolest desktop around for at least that year. And the graphical way each app could be tuned to run at maximum performance _individually_ was very nice.

But it was a bitch to install as a home one-off. Closer to a 1995 linux than Windows. Nonetheless, it was my home desktop for several years, including my first year with DSL. Still have a non-networked boot on qemu to play Galactic Civilizations the way it was originally conceived.

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

[buchner.johannes]

It seems everyone forgot the DRM and 'Trusted Computing' (aka distrust the user) introduced in Vista, one of the major criticisms (not look & feel).
You may recall this analysis: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html, (Schneier wrote something here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows_1.html)

Not sure how 7 is now, but its not like the bashing against DRM/Trusted Computing/TCPA was not without reason, and might have worked. Also, since that time, complaining made music download websites turn their back to DRM.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[confused one]

WinME was horrible. HUGE memory leaks. Unstable. It was a kludge on Win98SE to fill in for the (late) WinXP desktop.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[SharpFang]

Look, we could argue that Postal was the best of Uwe Boll's movies. It tells just as much about its quality.

Re:Server 2008?

[confused one]

It is Vista. It's built from the same source tree. The Aero user interface is a bolt-on feature that you can turn off if you don't like it. Server 2003 was built from the same source tree as Windows XP (or at least started there before branching). Server 2008 R2 is built from the same source tree as Windows 7 (which begs the question, why aren't they changing the version name). That's just how it is.

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[DragonWriter]

I had tested both systems as candidates to install on friends who demanded Windows, and Windows Me was better

I hate to break it to you, but those things you can install Windows on are called "computers", not "friends".

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[necrogram]

I'm right there with you. I bashed Vista pre-sp1, but there was some griup policy issues. Once you understand why ms did some of the things they did, they got a lot right. It a really easy OS to manage. My favorites feature is the hardware-agnostic wim image and off line driver injection. It adds up to let you have a single master image that doesn't care about the target system. New model of opti from dell, no problem.

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:Monkeedude1212 said minimum

[radish]

You can try, I don't know of many games which will refuse to run if you're below min specs, but I guess the devs are saying they won't support it if you have problems. It's a CYA move.

Another thing worth considering is swap - a console game has MUCH more control over memory management (and knows exactly what else is running on the box) - very much unlike a game running on Windows. Given that people typically will have an AV, maybe a browser and even things like iTunes running at the same time as the game, you need to give yourself some wiggle room so you're not grinding the pagefile. Users won't care that they're being stupid trying to run too much on a crappy PC - they'll just point to the min specs and complain.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[John Betonschaar]

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

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Utoxin]

... Um. Wow. Just wow.

See, I worked as a microsoft support tech for a while shortly after the release of Windows ME. A dark period in my career, I'll admit. But aside from a few nice troubleshooting tools (msconfig FTMFW), ME sucked beyond belief.

Troubleshooting Step 1: Reboot. If that solved the problem, we told the customer it was fixed, and to call back if it happened again. Really.

And at least once a day, I would determine that a machine was beyond recovery, and we would FFR it. (Fdisk, Format, Reinstall). And my experiences were pretty standard, from what I heard around me on the support floor. People who had transferred to the ME support team from 9X complained about how buggy and poorly designed ME was.

*shudders* So... no. ME was not the best of the 9x line. Arguably, 98SE was the best, although some people preferred 95.

Also, the article completely messes up the history of 2000 / 9X / ME. 2000 was /NOT/ the hybrid of 9X and NT. 2000 was the end of the NT line, and a damn fine OS. I ran it for many years, until my last CD bit the dust, and I grudgingly updated to XP.

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:Windows Mobile & embedded

[dunkelfalke]

I actually like it that way. Don't need a dumbed down UI when my PDA behaves the same as my desktop computer. I can even attach a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to it.

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:I will stand by this forever

[acheron12]

For Monkey Island and other supported games you should definitely try the Scumm Virtual Machine.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[shirotakaaki]

The beauty is Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 without that nasty Vista name attached. So if you already had Vista you had to pay a second time for 7. **KA-CHING

QNX man - best there ever was

[terjeber]

EOM

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[amRadioHed]

[citation needed]

Here you go.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[drsmithy]

I have read Guttman's analysis, I even was able to get and read the slides, and it wasn't.

Yes, it was, as evidenced by a) all of it done without ever even having used Vista, b) significant parts of it being flat-out wrong, and c) none of the sky-is-falling predictions ever eventuating.

DRM support in Vista (and Windows 7) is irrelevant if you don't have DRM-encumbered media, and nothing but helpful if you do.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[lanc]

You, Sir, are a troll.

instead of looking for tools you are used of on other platforms (top, killall), pls rtfm, and look for the functionalities delivered with the OS (prstat, pkill). Nonstandards switches? Which standard are you talking about?
Instead of using old USIIIi boxes, have at last a look at the Sparc64 (Mx000 series) and the CMT processor based servers (T5xx0 Series).

and so on.

The rest is just useless rant. Go check your facts, or at least read wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC64_VII , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_Enterprise and sunsolve.