You do realize that SFU is 10 times worse and Apple's OS is actually a real *NIX under the hood right?
You do realize SFU is a joke and Cygwin is far better right?
You do realize it's very possible to update that open source stuff yourself if you really wanted to, right? Or even easily install current stuff from Fink or Macports with a Linux/BSD-like pkg management system, right?
Let me know when Linux has a GUI remotely on par with OS X for professional apps.
X11 is cool and I love network transparency but X11 and Aqua/Quartz are two very different tools.
Let me know when you can run a modern version of Photoshop and InDesign as well. WINE doesn't count. I don't want Win32 apps anywhere near my machine.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and BSD and use them daily but it's wrong to try to compare Linux and OSX. Very different animals. Linux is NOT the right tool for every job but it's a great tool. I just wish the RMS-humping freetards would get this. Commercial/closed != crap.
ObjC/Cocoa is also an awesome development environment and don't try to bring up GNUstep, it doesn't have most of the modern frameworks present in modern OSX.
Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.
Torn to shreds for what? Not supporting hardware that none of their products have in it anyway?
In fact, MOST operating systems in existence are tied to particular platforms. Been that way since the 80's. People just got used to cheap crappy PC clones and DOS/Windows running on most of them so they assume that every OS is supposed to be this way.
I'm all for building a Hackintosh, I have several times myself, but Apple isn't obligated to help me by supporting hardware they don't even use. Get a grip.
They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...
I'll use a purchased copy of software any damn way I see fit and if they don't like it they can kiss my ass or stop selling retail boxed copies.
Just because I write in my EULA that all end users have to give me 3 blowjobs a year in the back of an Apple-branded sports car doesn't mean it's legally enforceable.
That doesn't mean I expect them to make it easy to install or even support my hardware they don't even use in their own products however.
I will use it any way I want (on a single machine) and I dare them to try to do something about it.
Latest stunt? WTF?! What makes you think Apple owes it to you to support hardware they don't even use in their products?
I could see getting pissy if they stopped supported all but a couple specific Core 2 Duo chips but Atom was never officially supported in the first place.
I like my Macbook and my Hackintosh desktop but I don't think they owe it to me to support my hardware. They don't support it and I don't expect them to help but if they tried to sue me for running OS X on a PC, I'd be angry but this is a silly non-issue.
Chances are that someone trying to do this on a small budget doesn't have sound proof rooms and high-end speakers. Just a thought. They might be doing good to have additional insulation in the rooms, they may not even have that.
I get annoyed with stereo bleed in my house due to this. For the record, just because people are in the tech industry doesn't mean we have nicely built homes. Most don't even own a home. A lot of us are fairly poor and try to do cool things scrounging through others' discarded "crap".
I'm half broke. A few hundred is a couple months of saving for me. FLAC is huge for my portable media player.
Yes, 128kit MP3's encoded by moron teenagers uploaded to Limewire sound like shit. MP3's done by someone with a clue and a good encoder at 320kbit VBR really aren't bad. On a high end system it does sound like "something is missing" but sounds far from awful. I've never had any complaints about it and I'm fairly picky. Older encoders back in the 90's had a tendency to MURDER cymbals and other high frequency noises though. Not so bad these days.
FLAC sounds great but unless you're ripping the CD yourself, not too many people throw around their libraries in FLAC format. And unless you like transcoding all of your music, good luck using FLAC on your iPod.
Now my life can tolerate old Napster-era 128kit MP3's all day long and can't tell the difference from a CD. Must be a woman thing, I can't f**king stand listening to it. I'll listen to old worn cassettes before I do that.
Just because it's a lossy algorithm doesn't mean it sucks when in the right hands.
This in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. Especially since on a 64 bit distro pretty much everything, with very few exceptions is 64 bit.
You're not quite getting it. YOU may not have other arches around but I do. This isn't about 32-bit vs 64-bit. It's about SPARC vs ARM vs Intel vs MIPS, etc. I would love to be able to use the same binaries. This is especially useful when you don't have source and can't recompile.
This would also make it easier to have commercial software supported on more than 1 CPU architecture. I get REAL pissed about Intel-only Linux and BSD software. There's no reason for it. And now that ARM may catch some steam in netbooks, this is pretty important to me.
I don't want to hear that "well, just run RMS-approved free software" or the "comershul softwear iz teh evil" crap either.
What are you talking about? In 1997 I had windowmaker running on my NetBSD machine with a gradient theme, marble pixmaps for my dock tiles and things exploded when they were pulled from them the dock.
An old linksys NSLU2 that's been reflashed to run either Debian or OpeNSLUg would probably meet your needs. They are very hackable and can be had for like $20 on ebay easily. It's about the size of a paperback book, has ethernet and a couple USB ports.
I'm still waiting for a fairly realistic WW1 or WW2 combat flight sim for linux. FlightGear is a great sim but I want realistic combat. Shredded superchargers, oil spraying on the windscreen, wings being ripped to pieces and flying off, pilots bleeding out, etc. Basically I want a native IL2 port for Linux.
The Atari 800XL/130XE The Atari ST The Amiga 500 The Commodore 64/128 The Spectrum etc....etc....
I actually kinda miss that sort of compact form factor for computers with everything integrated under the keyboard. It really does make good sense for a machine designed to be unexpandable. If this takes off I'm going to kick myself for not trying to market my similar hack with a mini-ITX board (no LCD however).
If it's cheap enough, I'd buy one. My kids would love it.
Even better, someone just may port the basic GIMP imaging primitives and filters from MMX (x86) to Neon (ARM). Now running image processing on four cores at 2 GHz, each running SIMD instructions, should not feel all that sluggish.
I hadn't thought of that.... that would be pretty f**king awesome I would think. At that point it should annihilate the Atom I would think.
Having one cpu arch everywhere has its advantages. I just don't think kludge on top of kludge piled on x86 should be considered the wave of the future.
ARM is much more elegant. Hell, if they made a beefy 4 or 8-core version of this CPU and an ATX form-factor board for it I'd buy it if it wasn't horribly priced (under $1,200).
The only advantage to x86 IMHO is being able to run inferior operating systems via virtualization to take advantage of the existing app base.
I'd still rather have a high performance ARM and a little x86 coprocessor card or something. The same way I ran PC shit on my Atari ST.
I liked the Alpha as well but I won't beat that dead horse.
Neither is an atom. Especially when paired with 1GB of RAM and the cheapest disk money can buy. Throw in Windows 7 Starter Edition and it'll feel slower than an iPaq.
The new ARM-based netbooks will at least run GIMP in a fairly snappy fashion. I could give a shit less if it'll run Windows. Most of the apps I need are cross platform anyway.
Most people think they need Windows because their cousin's roommates best friend is a "computer guy" and they said noone takes anything but Windows seriously and nothing works on Linux. What people neglect to mention to these people is that there's a big difference between a "computer guy" who's an uncertified bench tech at Best Buy and an "IT Professional".
In fact, I would buy an ARM netbook just because it's optimized to run Linux and a Win7 port would be a buggy joke.
trials of the on-board 23 mm Nudelmann aircraft cannon (other sources say it was a Nudelmann NR-30 30 mm gun) were conducted with positive results at ranges from 500 m to 3000 m
Slugthrowers would probably be for up close and personal use. I imagine it being a cross between sub warfare and jet combat. Once you use up the big munitions and countermeasures at extreme range, it'd end up being a very brutal slaughter up close with most if not all of both crews likely dead or soon to be dead if surprise can't be achieved. Especially with HE cannon rounds. Rocket propelled chaff canisters would make things interesting too.
You'd have guidance, you might even have some limited target tracking. Equipment was very heavy too. There's a lot of weird constraints to consider. A PDP11/03 or 11/23 would have been considered a luxury "small" footprint machine in those days.
Hell I think it would make a cool game. Maybe even a cool movie.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is why the "realistic" space sim zealots will never be happy. If a company ever actually gave them the game they wanted, one that was truly realistic as per our current understanding of physics and such, it'd be way too boring to actually play.
BS. There's a reason MS Flight Simulator succeeded though it was rather boring to most people. There's a reason IL-2 Sturmovik is still making money. Realistic sims sell, just to a much smaller niche market. Boring for you and other 12 yr olds? Probably. Most of them can't even get a plane off the ground in IL2.
Exoflight is a sim based on realistic newtonian physics. Kinda fun. No combat. Space Combat by the X-Plane guys is fun too but the "combat" part is lame due to the lame weapons. Both of these are free.
The ultimate space combat sim to me would be a game set in the cold war era in LEO, to and from the moon and maybe mars. Basically Apollo and Gemini capsules with belt fed.50 cals w/ compensating thrusters. Soyuz capsules with 23mm cannon. Cobbled together crappy tin can space stations (also armed).
Shields, laser weapons and particle cannons are what ruin the fun in space games for me. Slugthrowers and missiles with limited propulsion/maneuvering fuel would make it insanely fun, especially if you accurately model venting atmosphere from bullet holes effecting the stability and maneuvering of the craft. This is how spacecraft to spacecraft combat would take place today, just with better targeting systems. A.50 in space would have MUCH greater effective range than a similar weapon in the atmosphere. You just can't afford to send lots of missiles up on each spacecraft.
I think a space combat sim with realistic physics set in 1974 instead of 2269 would be more fun. Hell, there's even an AGC emulator now that could probably be shoehorned in and scripted to make it easier for non-astronauts to use.
They do not actually want what they believe they want.
Who are you to tell me what I want? I want true realism without pipe dream lasers with unlimited ammo, particle cannons or warp drives (time acceleration to make it playable is cool though).
I've played sims with realistic newtonian physics and I deal with them very well. It takes getting used to but is actually more immersive. You want that tired old Wing Commander shit, you go ahead and buy it. It got boring well over a decade ago.
So thanks but no thanks, I'll take highly unrealistic, fun games.
To each his own, but your opinion is not shared with others and it's awful arrogant of you to think you can tell people they don't want something they want.
A highly realistic space game can be a blast if done right. Stuff set in the far future doesn't interest me all that much anyway.
MS did a lot of the development of OS/2 in the early days up until 1.1 and then had a falling out with IBM. Windows was seen by IBM as a cheesy interim solution until OS/2 was perfected. MS and IBM really didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things and MS decided to walk. MS developed NT with their bits of the project and knowledge gained and IBM giggled and continued with OS/2. It's a pity IBM couldn't market it for shit and priced it out of the market for mere mortals to afford for their cheap home machines. It was also ahead of it's time and a resource hog initially.
NT wasn't built to replace OS/2, it was to spite IBM and cut IBM off at the pass and dominate not only home desktops but the business desktops as well. In some ways you could consider NT a fork of OS/2. NT still runs OS/2 1.1 binaries (at least Server 2003 does).
Aside from the software base offered by Windows..... just about any of them had more and better features. Even the open source ones!
Old *nixes that ran on 386's complete with full X desktop environment:
Novell UNIXWare 2 (SVR4) - Motif-based desktop, if I remember right it would run DOS apps, possibly even Win16 apps, dunno about Win32
Slackware Linux had been around since 1993 and offered several choices of X environments, my faves at the time were olvwm with xfm or AfterStep (pre-1.0) w/ xfm. I think my install used kernel 1.2.something. On a relatively zippy 486 in 1995 I was able to run 2 instances of Doom under XFree86 without a hiccup while running a web browser. That was with 16MB of RAM. I switched to a mac running NetBSD a few months later when that box died.
SCO UNIX - never played much with it but I knew people who did.
On the mac side of the fence, A/UX had been around for a long time and offered all the goodies of MacOS with a nice friendly GUI on top of SVR2 (ick!) and supported rootless or full-screen X as well as mac apps.
Good god, I feel old and I haven't even officially hit 30 yet. Makes me wonder why I'm so underemployed....
Define "proper Unix". Unix can be anything from the old PDP-10's OS
Not trying to outnerd you or anything but the PDP10 was a 36-bit monstrosity that typically ran TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX or ITS. EMACS was born on PDP-10's but as far as I know there has not been a PDP-10 port of UNIX. The NetBSD folks were talking about it at one point though.
The PDP you are looking for would be the PDP-11 (though V1 existed on a PDP-7). Shortly after the PDP-11 versions it was ported the the VAX which is basically a PDP-11 on steroids.
My experience was that X11 was way too slow by 95-97, Windows did use more memory than Linux + X11, but was much faster. Some people disagree.
That wasn't my experience, back when I was a teenager and just starting out in the tech field professionally (had a kid real young), I was running GNOME 1 and KDE 2 under FreeBSD 2.something on a K5-133 w/ 32-64MB RAM from 96-98 and it was great. I ended up going back to WindowMaker eventually because GNOME was kinda buggy and I just really didn't like KDE2 much. Aside from the longer boot times it was far more stable and felt much more responsive than Win95 or NT3/4 on the same hardware.
Prior to that my primary unix box was a bastardized Mac IIci running NetBSD 1.2 most of the time, it ran A/UX for a little while too.
Or you get a copy of Windows XP "Argh Matey" Edition and a install VirtualBox. Use for certain Windows apps required for class when absolutely necessary and and call it a day. For a more native feel use seamless mode. There's a solution even a college student can afford.
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You do realize that SFU is 10 times worse and Apple's OS is actually a real *NIX under the hood right?
You do realize SFU is a joke and Cygwin is far better right?
You do realize it's very possible to update that open source stuff yourself if you really wanted to, right? Or even easily install current stuff from Fink or Macports with a Linux/BSD-like pkg management system, right?
Let me know when Linux has a GUI remotely on par with OS X for professional apps.
X11 is cool and I love network transparency but X11 and Aqua/Quartz are two very different tools.
Let me know when you can run a modern version of Photoshop and InDesign as well. WINE doesn't count. I don't want Win32 apps anywhere near my machine.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and BSD and use them daily but it's wrong to try to compare Linux and OSX. Very different animals. Linux is NOT the right tool for every job but it's a great tool. I just wish the RMS-humping freetards would get this. Commercial/closed != crap.
ObjC/Cocoa is also an awesome development environment and don't try to bring up GNUstep, it doesn't have most of the modern frameworks present in modern OSX.
Well, I'm pretty sure Bush was warned it was going to happen but didn't think it was a credible enough threat to act on or forgot about it.
He was an idiot, I don't think he was smart enough to construct an elaborate conspiracy.
Letting Pearl Harbor happen I kinda believe was a possible conspiracy to drag us kicking and screaming into WW2 though.
Anyway, isn't this stuff a bit off topic ;)
Microsoft ended up in hot water for tying a !@#$ing BROWSER to their operating system and everyone cheered for their defeat. If Apple's market share wasn't so comparatively small, they'd be torn to shreds by the DOJ over this.
Torn to shreds for what? Not supporting hardware that none of their products have in it anyway?
In fact, MOST operating systems in existence are tied to particular platforms. Been that way since the 80's. People just got used to cheap crappy PC clones and DOS/Windows running on most of them so they assume that every OS is supposed to be this way.
I'm all for building a Hackintosh, I have several times myself, but Apple isn't obligated to help me by supporting hardware they don't even use. Get a grip.
They own the copyright on the OS, so they can tell you how they want you to use it. You can argue about the moral implications of what they do all day long, all it does is keep their name in the news...
I'll use a purchased copy of software any damn way I see fit and if they don't like it they can kiss my ass or stop selling retail boxed copies.
Just because I write in my EULA that all end users have to give me 3 blowjobs a year in the back of an Apple-branded sports car doesn't mean it's legally enforceable.
That doesn't mean I expect them to make it easy to install or even support my hardware they don't even use in their own products however.
I will use it any way I want (on a single machine) and I dare them to try to do something about it.
Latest stunt? WTF?! What makes you think Apple owes it to you to support hardware they don't even use in their products?
I could see getting pissy if they stopped supported all but a couple specific Core 2 Duo chips but Atom was never officially supported in the first place.
I like my Macbook and my Hackintosh desktop but I don't think they owe it to me to support my hardware. They don't support it and I don't expect them to help but if they tried to sue me for running OS X on a PC, I'd be angry but this is a silly non-issue.
Wow, you're sick. How could you tell if it was the movie or your neighbors shooting at you?
Chances are that someone trying to do this on a small budget doesn't have sound proof rooms and high-end speakers. Just a thought. They might be doing good to have additional insulation in the rooms, they may not even have that.
I get annoyed with stereo bleed in my house due to this. For the record, just because people are in the tech industry doesn't mean we have nicely built homes. Most don't even own a home. A lot of us are fairly poor and try to do cool things scrounging through others' discarded "crap".
I'm half broke. A few hundred is a couple months of saving for me. FLAC is huge for my portable media player.
Yes, 128kit MP3's encoded by moron teenagers uploaded to Limewire sound like shit. MP3's done by someone with a clue and a good encoder at 320kbit VBR really aren't bad. On a high end system it does sound like "something is missing" but sounds far from awful. I've never had any complaints about it and I'm fairly picky. Older encoders back in the 90's had a tendency to MURDER cymbals and other high frequency noises though. Not so bad these days.
FLAC sounds great but unless you're ripping the CD yourself, not too many people throw around their libraries in FLAC format. And unless you like transcoding all of your music, good luck using FLAC on your iPod.
Now my life can tolerate old Napster-era 128kit MP3's all day long and can't tell the difference from a CD. Must be a woman thing, I can't f**king stand listening to it. I'll listen to old worn cassettes before I do that.
Just because it's a lossy algorithm doesn't mean it sucks when in the right hands.
This in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. Especially since on a 64 bit distro pretty much everything, with very few exceptions is 64 bit.
You're not quite getting it. YOU may not have other arches around but I do. This isn't about 32-bit vs 64-bit. It's about SPARC vs ARM vs Intel vs MIPS, etc. I would love to be able to use the same binaries. This is especially useful when you don't have source and can't recompile.
This would also make it easier to have commercial software supported on more than 1 CPU architecture. I get REAL pissed about Intel-only Linux and BSD software. There's no reason for it. And now that ARM may catch some steam in netbooks, this is pretty important to me.
I don't want to hear that "well, just run RMS-approved free software" or the "comershul softwear iz teh evil" crap either.
What are you talking about? In 1997 I had windowmaker running on my NetBSD machine with a gradient theme, marble pixmaps for my dock tiles and things exploded when they were pulled from them the dock.
Before that I used AfterStep 1.0.
Your thinking of '88 not '98.
An old linksys NSLU2 that's been reflashed to run either Debian or OpeNSLUg would probably meet your needs. They are very hackable and can be had for like $20 on ebay easily. It's about the size of a paperback book, has ethernet and a couple USB ports.
Urban Terror is a lot of fun. www.urbanterror.net
I'm still waiting for a fairly realistic WW1 or WW2 combat flight sim for linux. FlightGear is a great sim but I want realistic combat. Shredded superchargers, oil spraying on the windscreen, wings being ripped to pieces and flying off, pilots bleeding out, etc. Basically I want a native IL2 port for Linux.
The Atari 800XL/130XE
The Atari ST
The Amiga 500
The Commodore 64/128
The Spectrum
etc....etc....
I actually kinda miss that sort of compact form factor for computers with everything integrated under the keyboard. It really does make good sense for a machine designed to be unexpandable. If this takes off I'm going to kick myself for not trying to market my similar hack with a mini-ITX board (no LCD however).
If it's cheap enough, I'd buy one. My kids would love it.
Even better, someone just may port the basic GIMP imaging primitives and filters from MMX (x86) to Neon (ARM). Now running image processing on four cores at 2 GHz, each running SIMD instructions, should not feel all that sluggish.
I hadn't thought of that.... that would be pretty f**king awesome I would think. At that point it should annihilate the Atom I would think.
Having one cpu arch everywhere has its advantages. I just don't think kludge on top of kludge piled on x86 should be considered the wave of the future.
ARM is much more elegant. Hell, if they made a beefy 4 or 8-core version of this CPU and an ATX form-factor board for it I'd buy it if it wasn't horribly priced (under $1,200).
The only advantage to x86 IMHO is being able to run inferior operating systems via virtualization to take advantage of the existing app base.
I'd still rather have a high performance ARM and a little x86 coprocessor card or something. The same way I ran PC shit on my Atari ST.
I liked the Alpha as well but I won't beat that dead horse.
Neither is an atom. Especially when paired with 1GB of RAM and the cheapest disk money can buy. Throw in Windows 7 Starter Edition and it'll feel slower than an iPaq.
The new ARM-based netbooks will at least run GIMP in a fairly snappy fashion. I could give a shit less if it'll run Windows. Most of the apps I need are cross platform anyway.
Most people think they need Windows because their cousin's roommates best friend is a "computer guy" and they said noone takes anything but Windows seriously and nothing works on Linux. What people neglect to mention to these people is that there's a big difference between a "computer guy" who's an uncertified bench tech at Best Buy and an "IT Professional".
In fact, I would buy an ARM netbook just because it's optimized to run Linux and a Win7 port would be a buggy joke.
I imagine working in government IT doesn't feel all that much different. You just get to go outside more.
Actually, it'd probably look more like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3
"Self-defense" gun
trials of the on-board 23 mm Nudelmann aircraft cannon (other sources say it was a Nudelmann NR-30 30 mm gun) were conducted with positive results at ranges from 500 m to 3000 m
Slugthrowers would probably be for up close and personal use. I imagine it being a cross between sub warfare and jet combat. Once you use up the big munitions and countermeasures at extreme range, it'd end up being a very brutal slaughter up close with most if not all of both crews likely dead or soon to be dead if surprise can't be achieved. Especially with HE cannon rounds. Rocket propelled chaff canisters would make things interesting too.
You'd have guidance, you might even have some limited target tracking. Equipment was very heavy too. There's a lot of weird constraints to consider. A PDP11/03 or 11/23 would have been considered a luxury "small" footprint machine in those days.
Hell I think it would make a cool game. Maybe even a cool movie.
This is why the "realistic" space sim zealots will never be happy. If a company ever actually gave them the game they wanted, one that was truly realistic as per our current understanding of physics and such, it'd be way too boring to actually play.
BS. There's a reason MS Flight Simulator succeeded though it was rather boring to most people. There's a reason IL-2 Sturmovik is still making money. Realistic sims sell, just to a much smaller niche market. Boring for you and other 12 yr olds? Probably. Most of them can't even get a plane off the ground in IL2.
http://www.fasterlight.com/exoflight/
Exoflight is a sim based on realistic newtonian physics. Kinda fun. No combat. Space Combat by the X-Plane guys is fun too but the "combat" part is lame due to the lame weapons. Both of these are free.
The ultimate space combat sim to me would be a game set in the cold war era in LEO, to and from the moon and maybe mars. Basically Apollo and Gemini capsules with belt fed .50 cals w/ compensating thrusters. Soyuz capsules with 23mm cannon. Cobbled together crappy tin can space stations (also armed).
Shields, laser weapons and particle cannons are what ruin the fun in space games for me. Slugthrowers and missiles with limited propulsion/maneuvering fuel would make it insanely fun, especially if you accurately model venting atmosphere from bullet holes effecting the stability and maneuvering of the craft. This is how spacecraft to spacecraft combat would take place today, just with better targeting systems. A .50 in space would have MUCH greater effective range than a similar weapon in the atmosphere. You just can't afford to send lots of missiles up on each spacecraft.
I think a space combat sim with realistic physics set in 1974 instead of 2269 would be more fun. Hell, there's even an AGC emulator now that could probably be shoehorned in and scripted to make it easier for non-astronauts to use.
They do not actually want what they believe they want.
Who are you to tell me what I want? I want true realism without pipe dream lasers with unlimited ammo, particle cannons or warp drives (time acceleration to make it playable is cool though).
I've played sims with realistic newtonian physics and I deal with them very well. It takes getting used to but is actually more immersive. You want that tired old Wing Commander shit, you go ahead and buy it. It got boring well over a decade ago.
So thanks but no thanks, I'll take highly unrealistic, fun games.
To each his own, but your opinion is not shared with others and it's awful arrogant of you to think you can tell people they don't want something they want.
A highly realistic space game can be a blast if done right. Stuff set in the far future doesn't interest me all that much anyway.
What the hell is wrong with that state?
What do you expect from a bunch of massholes?
It directly mentions the constitution so we might even get the lingering Ron Paul supporter! I've missed those guys.
Hey! Ron Paul is awesome! He might be batshit crazy in some ways but I would have voted for him long before Obama or McPalin.
Happy?
Um..... NT was born from OS/2 and Dave Cutler.
MS did a lot of the development of OS/2 in the early days up until 1.1 and then had a falling out with IBM. Windows was seen by IBM as a cheesy interim solution until OS/2 was perfected. MS and IBM really didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things and MS decided to walk. MS developed NT with their bits of the project and knowledge gained and IBM giggled and continued with OS/2. It's a pity IBM couldn't market it for shit and priced it out of the market for mere mortals to afford for their cheap home machines. It was also ahead of it's time and a resource hog initially.
NT wasn't built to replace OS/2, it was to spite IBM and cut IBM off at the pass and dominate not only home desktops but the business desktops as well. In some ways you could consider NT a fork of OS/2. NT still runs OS/2 1.1 binaries (at least Server 2003 does).
Aside from the software base offered by Windows..... just about any of them had more and better features. Even the open source ones!
Old *nixes that ran on 386's complete with full X desktop environment:
Novell UNIXWare 2 (SVR4) - Motif-based desktop, if I remember right it would run DOS apps, possibly even Win16 apps, dunno about Win32
Slackware Linux had been around since 1993 and offered several choices of X environments, my faves at the time were olvwm with xfm or AfterStep (pre-1.0) w/ xfm. I think my install used kernel 1.2.something. On a relatively zippy 486 in 1995 I was able to run 2 instances of Doom under XFree86 without a hiccup while running a web browser. That was with 16MB of RAM. I switched to a mac running NetBSD a few months later when that box died.
SCO UNIX - never played much with it but I knew people who did.
On the mac side of the fence, A/UX had been around for a long time and offered all the goodies of MacOS with a nice friendly GUI on top of SVR2 (ick!) and supported rootless or full-screen X as well as mac apps.
Good god, I feel old and I haven't even officially hit 30 yet. Makes me wonder why I'm so underemployed....
Define "proper Unix". Unix can be anything from the old PDP-10's OS
Not trying to outnerd you or anything but the PDP10 was a 36-bit monstrosity that typically ran TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX or ITS. EMACS was born on PDP-10's but as far as I know there has not been a PDP-10 port of UNIX. The NetBSD folks were talking about it at one point though.
The PDP you are looking for would be the PDP-11 (though V1 existed on a PDP-7). Shortly after the PDP-11 versions it was ported the the VAX which is basically a PDP-11 on steroids.
My experience was that X11 was way too slow by 95-97, Windows did use more memory than Linux + X11, but was much faster. Some people disagree.
That wasn't my experience, back when I was a teenager and just starting out in the tech field professionally (had a kid real young), I was running GNOME 1 and KDE 2 under FreeBSD 2.something on a K5-133 w/ 32-64MB RAM from 96-98 and it was great. I ended up going back to WindowMaker eventually because GNOME was kinda buggy and I just really didn't like KDE2 much. Aside from the longer boot times it was far more stable and felt much more responsive than Win95 or NT3/4 on the same hardware.
Prior to that my primary unix box was a bastardized Mac IIci running NetBSD 1.2 most of the time, it ran A/UX for a little while too.
Or you get a copy of Windows XP "Argh Matey" Edition and a install VirtualBox. Use for certain Windows apps required for class when absolutely necessary and and call it a day. For a more native feel use seamless mode. There's a solution even a college student can afford.