Well, here's my little rant on Operating Systems.

This is, of course, entirely my opinion. If you don't agree and get the sudden urge to flame me, go away.

Windows 95/98

The biggest steaming pile of crud i have ever seen. It should not be used by anyone, for ANYTHING. Its the most bug ridden OS i have ever seen, and was obsolete before it went out the door. Fuck, it was obsolete in the conceptional design stage! (Well, we already had Windows NT.) If you've never used anything else, you really have no idea what your missing. This OS is your funeral.

Windows NT (4.0 and 5.0)

Ahhh, now we're talking! If you must use windows, this is the OS i recommend everyone uses. Under NT4, i had uptimes running into the months, and i used the OS heavily each day. Hell, the only real blue screens i ever got were due to buggy third party drivers. NT4SP6 is solid. Its main problems were, that, well, it was old. No DirectX (No, sorry microsoft, but DX3 does NOT cut it!). NT5 fixed all this. It now comes with DX7, has a new GUI (which i guess i like), has better then Win98 power management, and finally some PnP support. Its majorly bloated tho, and i had to go out and buy another 128mb ram just to keep the bitch happy. But its worth it. NT4/5 is the Workstation OS. You can run Office, Photoshop, 3DSMAX, do whatever, and still get a coupla games of Quake in. What more would you ever want? And best of all, that feeling of "riding on the edge" you get with win95/98? You don't have that on NT. You just know it won't crash on you causing you to lose EVERYTHING. NT is the ultimate (windows anyway) Workstation.

NT as a server? Yeah right ....

Windows 2000

Microsoft's worse decision yet. You can't blame the tech guys tho. Microsoft is, after all, a marketing company. By calling Windows NT 5.0 "Windows 2000" you are literally degenerating it to the like of Windows95/98. Windows NT is usually associated as a "good reliable OS". Well, in most cases, anyway. "Windows 9x" is associated as something a dog barfed up. I guess MS's marketing guys will NEVER learn. I bet they thing "Windows 95" is "cool".

BeOS

I must say my time with BeOS was enjoyable, and i look forward to r5. r4.5 had no 3D accelerator support :( and lacked software. But i did manage to spend a few days comfortably in there without booting back into Windows.

BeOS was designed from the ground up to be a powerful Media OS, and i think its achieving its goal. I can't wait to see it scaring the shit off microsoft one day ;)

Linux/FreeBSD/UNIX

I've been using Linux for a long time. A long long long time. Unless your alan cox, or linus himself, forget it. I was using linux before you. :) That said, i still don't know where linux is heading. Suuure. Desktop and Server you say. Whatever.

BSD. I haven't used it that long, but its definitely a powerful server OS. No, i'm not going to advocate it, or explain why its better then Linux. The real world examples speak for themselves. The biggest FTP and Web sites in the world (walnut creek cdrom, yahoo, hotmail) all run on FreeBSD. The technicians working there say they've tried Linux, and it crumbles under the load. I don't believe in words. Or stupid flames. Or pure advocacy. I believe in real world examples. After all, if Linux (or NT for that fact) can't handle running as a server under real world stress, what the fuck is the point ?

So don't anybody dare flame me saying i'm a dumbfuck and Linux is better, cuz its not. Until it can outperform FreeBSD, and handle millions of hits a day, and send out terabytes off one little measley machine every 24 hrs, then its not. period.

Unix as a Workstation? Well, its my honest opinion that this will never succeed. Linux won't make the desktop, nobody will. Unix was designed as a multiuser OS, and a server OS. Not a newbie desktop OS. Unix (which yes, includes Linux and BSD of course) have far to much legacy crap to be run as an efficient desktop. X is bloated, everything going via sockets in the kernel to draw a GUI is bad, and 50 layers of libraries to get to xlib to talk to the X Server is just a joke. This definately does not mean the death of unix. I expect it to be around for a looong time yet, primarily on the server side. I love to have a unix box lying around that i can just telnet in, and do stuff. Whether its check my mail, do some coding, whatever. Its just so much easier then doing it in Windows :) Afterall, when your bored, all u can do is sit and just rightclick around on the windows desktop. Oh what fun. (go on, admit it. I know you've done it before ;). Under unix, at least u can hexedit /dev/wd0s1a and reconstruct some lost inodes ;)

But remember, things change damn fast. My opionon on unix and the desktop may rapidly change. XF4.0 is on the way out, and has huge improvments. (its finally gonna have True Type Fonts? HIP HIP FUCKING HOORAY!!!) KDE 2.0 is on the way, and it looks damn sweeeet!. And then theres KOffice :) Corel may make a decent Linux distribution thats a Windows replacement yet. Who knows. I certainly can't predict the future.

D., 24/02/2000.