Battle of the Operating Systems

Battle of the Operating Systems

What are the Operating Systems you are using? Do you like it? Pros and Cons. Feel free to bash other OS if you wish.

I am using Windows 7 but I have a couple of laptops and on one I tried Linux Ubunto and was pleasantly surprised at it's ease and simplicity on installation and use.Especially as the OS is free! Later I disocovered a version of Linux that is exactly like Widnows for those who wnated something familiar to them. Zoran I think it was called although haven't tried that. Linux is remarkable considering the cost of Windows.

I'm one of those "weird-o"s who pines for a Universal Operating System… Indeed, I think we're on the verge of –at least– interoperability; not via a programming language, as I'd hoped, but by hardware that is so cheap that noone can afford to exclude it from their product line…

The Operating System it's Big Brother's soul.
I'm thinking about founding a sect that proposes to exorcise it.

On this computer I have Windows XP and Mageia Linux 1.0, on my laptop I have Windows 7 (64-bit) and Mageia.

Obvious question - would FreeBSD or Solaris fall into the UNIX category (and if so, why doesn't Linux)?

What's the name of that OS at the old movie, Tron? I like it, with those small guys inside fighting for defending and attacking the User.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Obvious question - would FreeBSD or Solaris fall into the UNIX category (and if so, why doesn't Linux)?

There is a historical reason to use name "Unix" for FBSD and Solaris. They both were based on old Unix source code.

There is one more reason to use name "Unix" for Solaris - it conforms to official Unix standards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Unix_Specification

Linux was developed from the scratch and it never tried to conform to official Unix standards. For these reasons Linux is considered to be Unix-like, but not Unix.

Wow, lots of Linux computers!

I tried to tell ya in your windows thread.

currently I run windows 7 and Ubuntu on most the computers I use. But I play around with different distros of Linux whenever new versions come out so that's varied depending on what day it is and how much time I have. Ubuntu is simple and I have my son using it (don't want him stuck in win) so it's a good install any day.

Originally posted by sergey-pypyrev:

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Obvious question - would FreeBSD or Solaris fall into the UNIX category (and if so, why doesn't Linux)?

There is a historical reason to use name "Unix" for FBSD and Solaris. They both were based on old Unix source code.

Nonsense.
BSD started out as a set of patches for AT&T's UNIX OS, which grew way out of proportion and then had the few remaining AT&T bits rewritten for legal reasons ( read: the infamous lawsuit which indirectly prompted a certain finnish student to write his own )
None of the modern BSDs contains AT&T UNIX code.

Originally posted by sergey-pypyrev:

There is one more reason to use name "Unix" for Solaris - it conforms to official Unix standards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Unix_Specification

So does Mac OS X from 10.5 on. It's also a BSD by heritage so the categories are a bit fuzzier than people might think. It's not like BSD and UNIX are mutually exclusive.

Originally posted by sergey-pypyrev:

Linux was developed from the scratch and it never tried to conform to official Unix standards. For these reasons Linux is considered to be Unix-like, but not Unix.

Actually most of the free unix-likes do aim to conform with the various POSIX and UNIX standards and (arguably) it wouldn't be that much work to get them UNIX certified. It just costs money for no apparent gain.

That said, last time I checked 'Apple Mac' was a big pile of quite different hardware, not an operating system

But Apple does not have a collective name for all its OS's like Windows. The current name is Mac OS X but the older ones are just iMac.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

But Apple does not have a collective name for all its OS's like Windows.

Really. Matter of fact they do. Even though it doesn't make much sense to lump them together.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

The current name is Mac OS X but the older ones are just iMac.

Maybe you should go by your username and actually read the relevant wikipedia pages. Both of your statements are completely silly.
Hint: iMac is a line of entry level / all-in-one computers. Not an operating system.

What's the general name of Apple OS? Mac OS? What makes Linux so appealing? It's free?

All results of vote were reset. Now everybody should vote again.

Correct name of Apple OS is Mac OS X. But don't change vote options, otherwise results will be reset again.

wouldn't "custom made" and "other" be the same really?

Originally posted by wikipedian:

What makes Linux so appealing? It's free?

There are paid versions with (more) support. For me, like my phone, it's 3rd party development. I sure reasons vary and that's not the end-all for me but the bigger one...

side note: Google is a thing.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

What's the general name of Apple OS? Mac OS?

Oh for fsck's sake, do I have to spell it out for you?
Try again:

Originally posted by Macallan:

Originally posted by wikipedian:

But Apple does not have a collective name for all its OS's like Windows.

Really. Matter of fact they do.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

What makes Linux so appealing? It's free?

Although you can't beat the price, hardly.

I'll give you the two reasons that most recently annoyed me in Windows:

1) The compose key
2) Much easier network sharing (at least through NetworkManager)

Note that Android is Linux, but isn't GNU/Linux.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Originally posted by wikipedian:

What's the general name of Apple OS? Mac OS?

Oh for fsck's sake, do I have to spell it out for you?
Try again:

Originally posted by Macallan:

Originally posted by wikipedian:

But Apple does not have a collective name for all its OS's like Windows.

Really. Matter of fact they do.

That's why I change the poll

I am using Windows XP because it is what came on this machine (bought secondhand) and it is what I have installation disks for. Microsoft is crappy and evil. I will use it since it is useful, but I will never, ever pay Microsoft for anything and I discourage anyone else from paying them. Not unless they quit being evil (which I doubt will ever happen).

Oh, and I am sad to say that Apple (which I have used extensively) appears to be no less evil than Microsoft. And, in fact, most software companies are evil in that they screw over their customers by forcing "upgrades" which rather than improving anything, merely make it so that previous versions don't work with the new.

Originally posted by aefields:

Oh, and I am sad to say that Apple (which I have used extensively) appears to be no less evil than Microsoft.

Seriously, does that surprise anyone?

nope. Is there seriously a "battle" going on? (or has someone unnamed just discovered other possibilities?) The difference between most systems amounts to UI and personal preference. Whatever you like/get used to is 'better', for you. Capability wise they all will get the job done, perhaps some excel in areas but not so great to negate another, imo.

Well, Linux = Freedom.

now, it depends on what you want to do, i develop, therefore apple's crapple won't do jack. i remember the Mac Classic II. it was awesome as it had no cords but the standard power cord, you needed no monitor to buy, and the mouse and keyboard were bought together and very cheap. however, its meant for meaningless office work that can't use or employer's didn't want certain network access(at all mind you). The mac is a simple computer, stupid friendly mind you. I however loved the 386. The ability the change the OS on a whim or make the pc conform to how you like it took hours, but it was rewarding. The OS for me is Linux/GNU and Windows. Unix is too network oriented and relies to much on a stable connection all the time. and btw for the record there is one giant of OS family that i believe is still used. Sun Solaris. This is its own platform, and anyone who says its part of unix now is wrong.

Windows on main computer, Haiku on fun system and NetBSD on VirtualBox.

I used Linux for the longest time, nowadays I consider it a lost case. I think GPL'd FOSS developement model has so many drawbacks to offset the somewhat illusionary benefit of freedom that I no longer fancy wasting my time with it. And waste time I did! Let's see: Best Linux 2000, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora Core, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Puppy, DSL, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Chakra and ELKS. Yup, that would be all I've used. Some contribution went into KDE, which is still a piece of shit. Never again contributing anywhere for free. Never again.

None of the Linux systems are ever well designed, they are all just a bunch of hacks thrown together and then it's just the matter of crossing fingers and hoping they work. The entire GNU/Linux scene is like a rainbow-coloured puke: one will surely find a suitable colour for self, but it still doesn't change the fact that it's a horrible mess.


What I think has the best changes on longer run to ever be as relevant as Windows is some of the BSD's or Haiku, namely because they are engineered instead of hacked together from pieces. This provides stable ABI, which in turn makes API possible. Little known fact is that FreeBSD has one ports collection (a software repository). There are no different repositories for each of the FreeBSD versions. Doesn't matter, it is a designed system and it has ABI, thus you can install latest packages from ports tree to years old FreeBSD installation. BSD's also make a clear difference between core system and rest of the packages, whereas in Linux systems it is a mess which knows no such boundaries. That's why using sid just for sake of getting the latest version of Konversation in Debian is a bad idea, despite Konversation being just one innocent (and damn good) IRC client. Linux distros are a bloody joke from user perspective.

Well, the ABI mess in Linux is intentional, to force companies to provide source code instead of binaries only. Seems to backfire more often than not ( just think of the various proprietary 3D graphics drivers and their ridiculous version dependence )
As for me - I'm eating my own dog food of course, my main workhorses are various Suns, Macs, SGIs and an amd64 laptop, all running NetBSD, all running kernel code and in some cases Xorg drivers I wrote or contributed to at some point. If you write drivers it helps to have radically different machines to test things on.
I'm typing this on a Sun Blade 2500 running Firefox on Xorg 1.10.3 on NetBSD 6.99.4.

I've played around with Linux (Ubuntu) on Live Disk and I think it's an ok OS that I might consider if I didn't have Windows. But according to your descriptions, Linux is a bundle of loosely joint programming codes where the user have to tinker all day long to get it right. And it's too Mac like for my tastes. Reminds me of this joke:
If Your Operating System Was An Airline

DOS Airlines
Everybody pushes the aeroplane until it glides, then they all jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then push again, jump on again and so on.


MAC Airlines
All the stewards, stewardesses, captains, baggage handlers and ticket agents look the same, talk the same, and act the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without you having to know, so just shut up.

UNIX / Linux Airlines
Everyone brings one piece of the aeroplane with them when they come to the airport. Then they all go out onto the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of a plane they are building. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name.

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

I've played around with Linux (Ubuntu) on Live Disk and I think it's an ok OS that I might consider if I didn't have Windows. But according to your descriptions, Linux is a bundle of loosely joint programming codes where the user have to tinker all day long to get it right. And it's too Mac like for my tastes. Reminds me of this joke:

I always like the Mac OS X internals. It was very much like other UNIX clones I've used, but done right.

GNU/Linux is okay, the software works well out of the box, and continues to work well as long as you stick to the app or web interfaces that have been provided. As soon as you need to tweak anything, it all falls to bits. Linux does a very poor job of separating the user from the technicalities. I'm very technical, but it still scares the hell out of me.

Originally posted by beiren:

Windows on main computer, Haiku on fun system and NetBSD on VirtualBox.

BeOS could play back DivX movies on my p100 that it couldn't manage in Windows, so that was cool, but besides that I didn't really see anything to win me over as a regular user.

Originally posted by wikipedian:

I've played around with Linux (Ubuntu) on Live Disk and I think it's an ok OS that I might consider if I didn't have Windows. But according to your descriptions, Linux is a bundle of loosely joint programming codes where the user have to tinker all day long to get it right. And it's too Mac like for my tastes. Reminds me of this joke:

Only if you want to. This is 2012, not 2002.

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

GNU/Linux is okay, the software works well out of the box, and continues to work well as long as you stick to the app or web interfaces that have been provided. As soon as you need to tweak anything, it all falls to bits. Linux does a very poor job of separating the user from the technicalities. I'm very technical, but it still scares the hell out of me.

Nonsense. Windows 7 once confused its C and D partitions and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. I could've reinstalled the junk, but instead I switched to Ubuntu exclusively. A while later something similar happened in Ubuntu due some messing about with partitions and file systems — Windows just did it by itself — and from grub I could actually edit my fstab and patch things up sufficiently to boot into my OS again. It sounds scary, but I find it extremely resassuring.

More basically speaking, you only have to know how to use a few commands:
cp (always make a backup before you mess around)
cd (change directory)
cd .. (one up)
nano (best text editor for someone unfamiliar with the likes of vi or emacs)
startx (optional really, but otherwise you'd be like a silly Windows user who needs to reboot all the time instead of simply stopping/starting/restarting)

With those you're pretty much indestructible… unless your Linux kernel has some issue with your hardware and panics.

To get anything remotely similar out of Windows you have to pop in the Windows CD and use this mysterious "recovery console" application.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

and from grub I could actually edit my fstab and patch things up sufficiently to boot into my OS again

Sure, once you already know how to do that. The problem is that there are too many places where you have to resort to that sort of fiddling - not just when things go catastrophically wrong, but also when things just need a little tweaking.

If you drop to the command line and start editing configuration files, things go wrong really quickly and you have to immerse yourself in a lot of scattered and virtually unreadable documentation to get anywhere. And if you make even the slightest change without knowing 100% of the implications, you can screw things up really badly.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's easy, safe or comfortable to bring it about.

I run an Ubuntu Linux tower as a media server at home and love it. But very often I hate it.

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

Sure, once you already know how to do that. The problem is that there are too many places where you have to resort to that sort of fiddling - not just when things go catastrophically wrong, but also when things just need a little tweaking.

But I need to do the same fiddling in Windows. The only difference is that I often can't and also that it messes up all by itself without any input from yours truly.

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

If you drop to the command line and start editing configuration files, things go wrong really quickly and you have to immerse yourself in a lot of scattered and virtually unreadable documentation to get anywhere. And if you make even the slightest change without knowing 100% of the implications, you can screw things up really badly.

Not if you make sure you can restore your configuration files. You're always editing only one or two files and you can easily restore said configuration files. In Windows it's nigh impossible to tinker in such a dedicated manner as you're dealing with the entirety of the registry, which is completely obfuscated to boot. In any case it's a lot less scattered than for Windows. The number of times that Microsoft's own documentation has helped me is countable on one hand, while in Linux I tend to get a usable answer from the Ubuntu, Debian or Arch wikis if the man files don't help me.

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's easy, safe or comfortable to bring it about.

Of course, but in many another OS you (or at least I) can't at all. Besides, now that I finished my configuration once it's incredibly easy to carry over, including to the NetBSD Macallan refers to above.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Only if you want to. This is 2012, not 2002.

It is already 2012! But what the hell in 2012 I should have all those problems with sound?

I have two Linux computers. After spending days to fight with their sound I've configured their sound finally. But on one computer I was forced to use line in jack for microphone. Who knows why it does not work on mic jack. Sound on second computer works even funnier. It works, but... First - microphone starts to work only after few minutes after login. Second - some old programs occasionally stop to play sound. Third - recording program for whatever reason records sound with much noise (though, skype does not have so much noise).

This is drawback of "freedom". Everybody has freedom to develop their own sound subsystem. And users got predictable results: sound in Linux is a hell.

Ironically, it is easier to configure sound in user-unfriendly FBSD than in "user-friendly" Linux simply because FBSD has only one sound subsystem.

Originally posted by sergey-pypyrev:

It is already 2012! But what the hell in 2012 I should have all those problems with sound?

You tell me. It's working fine in XP, but in Windows Vista/7 it's total junk. Linux may have taken a tad more effort to get it working quite the way I want, but in the end it's working better than Windows XP ever did.

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

Originally posted by wikipedian:

I've played around with Linux (Ubuntu) on Live Disk and I think it's an ok OS that I might consider if I didn't have Windows. But according to your descriptions, Linux is a bundle of loosely joint programming codes where the user have to tinker all day long to get it right. And it's too Mac like for my tastes. Reminds me of this joke:

I always like the Mac OS X internals. It was very much like other UNIX clones I've used, but done right.

It's NEXTSTEP with a more Mac-ish GUI

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

GNU/Linux is okay, the software works well out of the box, and continues to work well as long as you stick to the app or web interfaces that have been provided. As soon as you need to tweak anything, it all falls to bits. Linux does a very poor job of separating the user from the technicalities. I'm very technical, but it still scares the hell out of me.

What annoys me about Linux is how they manage to mess up even basic things like booting single user. The BSDs might be too conservative in some ways but whenever I have to fix up some Linux box that got buggered up by ${SOME_UPDATE} I'm happy they are.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by beiren:

Windows on main computer, Haiku on fun system and NetBSD on VirtualBox.

BeOS could play back DivX movies on my p100 that it couldn't manage in Windows, so that was cool, but besides that I didn't really see anything to win me over as a regular user.

What won me over back in the old days were things like filesystem queries, free file attributes ( for example, the mail client would store each message in a file and stick things like sender, subject and so on into attributes so they're visible from the file manager, same for MP3 files where you could do the same with ID3 tags ) etc.
On the other side there was abysmal networking performance of course.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by wikipedian:

I've played around with Linux (Ubuntu) on Live Disk and I think it's an ok OS that I might consider if I didn't have Windows. But according to your descriptions, Linux is a bundle of loosely joint programming codes where the user have to tinker all day long to get it right. And it's too Mac like for my tastes. Reminds me of this joke:

Only if you want to. This is 2012, not 2002.

I wonder which desktop he confused with the operating system. Probably gnome
Funny how those windows drones bitch about imaginary compiling & tinkering on Linux but are happy to spend all day with registry editors, virus scanners and so on

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

GNU/Linux is okay, the software works well out of the box, and continues to work well as long as you stick to the app or web interfaces that have been provided. As soon as you need to tweak anything, it all falls to bits. Linux does a very poor job of separating the user from the technicalities. I'm very technical, but it still scares the hell out of me.

Nonsense. Windows 7 once confused its C and D partitions and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. I could've reinstalled the junk, but instead I switched to Ubuntu exclusively. A while later something similar happened in Ubuntu due some messing about with partitions and file systems — Windows just did it by itself — and from grub I could actually edit my fstab and patch things up sufficiently to boot into my OS again. It sounds scary, but I find it extremely resassuring.

Yeah, I had that problem on 2k ages ago - luckily the OS itself doesn't really care about drive letters and the partitioning tool lets you reassign drive letters pretty much any way you want. What did bugger things up for me once was a SCSI controller though - Windows assigned it a device number lower than the onboard IDE channels for some idiotic reason and all of sudden Windows would greet me with a blue screen "Cannot mount root device" or somesuch, and no way to fix it other than to re-install everything. It's not like those parts of the registry are even documented.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

To get anything remotely similar out of Windows you have to pop in the Windows CD and use this mysterious "recovery console" application.

... which lets you do some basic stuff but nothing really useful

Originally posted by Frenzie:

The number of times that Microsoft's own documentation has helped me is countable on one hand, while in Linux I tend to get a usable answer from the Ubuntu, Debian or Arch wikis if the man files don't help me.

Amen to that, and I made a living coding on NT4 and 2k years ago. Using their docs to get anything done involves way too much guesswork. That said, I always found the NT kernel documentation ( well, what little was available ) far more readable and useful than the userland / win32 stuff, or even worse, anything GUI-related.
On any of the free unix-likes you can at least look at the code if all else fails.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by sergey-pypyrev:

It is already 2012! But what the hell in 2012 I should have all those problems with sound?

You tell me. It's working fine in XP, but in Windows Vista/7 it's total junk. Linux may have taken a tad more effort to get it working quite the way I want, but in the end it's working better than Windows XP ever did.

At least common audio hardware got more Mac-like ( I'm talking about the Power Mac hardware here, none of this is user visible in any way ) lately - common DMA engine and codec interface with different codecs hooked up to it - and docs for many codecs are easily available.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Yeah, I had that problem on 2k ages ago - luckily the OS itself doesn't really care about drive letters and the partitioning tool lets you reassign drive letters pretty much any way you want. What did bugger things up for me once was a SCSI controller though - Windows assigned it a device number lower than the onboard IDE channels for some idiotic reason and all of sudden Windows would greet me with a blue screen "Cannot mount root device" or somesuch, and no way to fix it other than to re-install everything. It's not like those parts of the registry are even documented.

I did actually manage to switch the drive letters back fairly easily, but Windows had confused itself irreparably through some kind of attempted auto-repair where it had figured out that some files could be found on the D which was actually C. After switching the letters back, it complained about not finding files on D and locked up in a BSOD even sooner. But I repeat, I hadn't done anything, although I suppose it's possible that Windows snuck in some update.

Originally posted by Macallan:

I wonder which desktop he confused with the operating system. Probably gnome Funny how those windows drones bitch about imaginary compiling & tinkering on Linux but are happy to spend all day with registry editors, virus scanners and so on

I had to do some tinkering to set everything on my Debian Squeeze up to my liking, but it was very much set it and forget it. Other than pulling in LibreOffice from squeeze-backports I don't know if I've even done any "tinkering" at all since last summer. (I'm not counting compiling some stuff, installing some other things, and writing some shell scripts as tinkering because it fundamentally left the rest of my system alone.) On Windows I think that's significantly less the case, although it also depends a bit on what you mean by tinkering. I had a stable XP install on which everything was going great, but there was simply less I could automate through shellscripts. The only way I could go about something like this on Windows would be through some third-party app, even though the official nVidia binary blob is probably better on Windows.

Originally posted by Macallan:

... which lets you do some basic stuff but nothing really useful

Honestly I'm not even sure what use the recovery console is. I've long since come to the conclusion that any random Linux LiveCD will offer me a significantly better chance of solving the problem, especially if it comes with GParted.

Originally posted by Macallan:

At least common audio hardware got more Mac-like ( I'm talking about the Power Mac hardware here, none of this is user visible in any way ) lately - common DMA engine and codec interface with different codecs hooked up to it - and docs for many codecs are easily available.

I'll take your word for it.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by Macallan:

Yeah, I had that problem on 2k ages ago - luckily the OS itself doesn't really care about drive letters and the partitioning tool lets you reassign drive letters pretty much any way you want. What did bugger things up for me once was a SCSI controller though - Windows assigned it a device number lower than the onboard IDE channels for some idiotic reason and all of sudden Windows would greet me with a blue screen "Cannot mount root device" or somesuch, and no way to fix it other than to re-install everything. It's not like those parts of the registry are even documented.

I did actually manage to switch the drive letters back fairly easily, but Windows had confused itself irreparably through some kind of attempted auto-repair where it had figured out that some files could be found on the D which was actually C. After switching the letters back, it complained about not finding files on D and locked up in a BSOD even sooner. But I repeat, I hadn't done anything, although I suppose it's possible that Windows snuck in some update.

Great, Win2k was the last Windows I used voluntarily and it didn't have any such crap. The only things that would refer to drive letters were applications installed later on - if you didn't install anything while the drive letters were buggered up nothing else happened. But yeah, I've seen that happening without provocation as well.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

The only way I could go about something like this on Windows would be through some third-party app, even though the official nVidia binary blob is probably better on Windows.

Heh, I'd probably look at the Xserver's source code, it's not like I didn't hack that before. That said, from what little experience I have with nvidia's drivers, the Windows blob has to be an order of magnitude better than that horrible mess of kernel modules, GL libraries and whatnot that all need to be exactly the same version or things will go boom in various, creative ways.
That said, most operating systems I've seen so far need some sort of tinkering at some point if you actually try to use them for anything - MacOS ( whichever variant) is no exception, neither is any of the BSDs or commercial UNIXes.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by Macallan:

... which lets you do some basic stuff but nothing really useful

Honestly I'm not even sure what use the recovery console is.

You can poke around in filesystems and copy stuff around, remove files and so on. You can disable services or drivers. You can run chkdsk or whatever they call it these days. So, 'nothing really useful' was a bit of hyperbole, obviously, but in order to use it you better know exactly what you're doing, and at that point it's no different from a (rather limited) single user shell on something UNIX-ish.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

I've long since come to the conclusion that any random Linux LiveCD will offer me a significantly better chance of solving the problem, especially if it comes with GParted.

Yeah, I don't think you can mess with partitions on the recovery console ( I'm fairly sure you can reassign drive letters but memory is fuzzy )

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by Macallan:

At least common audio hardware got more Mac-like ( I'm talking about the Power Mac hardware here, none of this is user visible in any way ) lately - common DMA engine and codec interface with different codecs hooked up to it - and docs for many codecs are easily available.

I'll take your word for it.

I know the Mac hardware - it uses one of the onboard DMA pipes and some way to talk to a codec, which is either some I2S thing you talk to through an i2c bus ( on newer uninorth machines and G5s, they all have several i2c controllers built into the host bridge ) or the same DMA machinery and a couple registers to talk to the codec directly ( all the awacs variants, used in all earlier PCI macs and some not so recent uninorth ones ). The actual audio capabilities depend entirely on the codec and can be anything from simple 16bit stereo 48kHz all the way up to the G5's 96kHz 24Bit surround plus digital in-and outputs. What Intel calls HD Audio looks remarkably similar.

Originally posted by Macallan:

That said, most operating systems I've seen so far need some sort of tinkering at some point if you actually try to use them for anything - MacOS ( whichever variant) is no exception, neither is any of the BSDs or commercial UNIXes.

Although I dislike certain aspects of Grub2, its equivalent in Windows 7 is significantly harder to use. Windows XP and 2000 were a lot like Grub1, where you could easily mess up the boot.ini or the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Grub2 and Windows 7 take a safer approach in that you tell them certain things (like default boot partition, number of seconds to wait before doing so, etc.) through a configuration file and the rest you then have to generate and write to the MBR rather than running the risk that you can't boot. Anyway, Grub2 is quite intuitive and besides some peculiar inconsistencies very easy to use. Not as easy as Grub1, but I guess there's something to be said for safety. Anyway, I don't recall the equivalent Windows 7 commands atm, but suffice it to say they (and the documentation on the Microsoft site) were a lot more dark and magical to me just to change the default timeout from 30 to 3 seconds. Surely I can't be alone in thinking that all the damn boot optimizations in Ubuntu and Windows 7 to boot in 30 seconds or so don't mean much if you're going to build in a 30 second timeout at the same time. The point being, I suppose, that I want to tinker to customize things to my liking regardless of the OS, and in Windows I've been consistently exerting more effort to do so.

Especially now that I've been using Linux almost exclusively for a little over a year I've got a lot of plain-text configuration files that I could just copy over to any new install to get a system working pretty much the way I like it with barely any effort at all. Try that with the Windows registry. I do admit that all of the hidden directories in your home dir can be a bit of a mess though.

Originally posted by Macallan:

You can poke around in filesystems and copy stuff around, remove files and so on. You can disable services or drivers. You can run chkdsk or whatever they call it these days. So, 'nothing really useful' was a bit of hyperbole, obviously, but in order to use it you better know exactly what you're doing, and at that point it's no different from a (rather limited) single user shell on something UNIX-ish.

Well, sure. But none of that has ever helped me. For example, I had a Siemens WLAN dongle that somehow became defective and periodically froze my Windows XP. The Windows logs were extremely helpful (not) and made it seem like it was all Windows' fault. It took the Linux kernel log for me to figure out that it wasn't Windows or its interaction with the driver, but the hardware itself that must have gone kablooie. Did I mention that it didn't freeze the entire Linux system? Of course you probably can't blame Microsoft for that exactly, but they still approved the Siemens driver which made the system freeze on error. Admittedly none of that was really about the recovery console, but I guess viewing the logs from within the recovery console often wouldn't be much help either.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Yeah, I don't think you can mess with partitions on the recovery console ( I'm fairly sure you can reassign drive letters but memory is fuzzy )

I don't know about Windows 2000, but in Windows XP and up there's actually a diskpart command that isn't half bad if my memory doesn't betray me. The biggest problem is really that the minimal console I can get into from Grub actually lets me do things on the computer right there and then, while for Windows I have to go find the disk — assuming I even have a working disk drive on the computer in question.

Originally posted by Macallan:

I know the Mac hardware - it uses one of the onboard DMA pipes and some way to talk to a codec, which is either some I2S thing you talk to through an i2c bus ( on newer uninorth machines and G5s, they all have several i2c controllers built into the host bridge ) or the same DMA machinery and a couple registers to talk to the codec directly ( all the awacs variants, used in all earlier PCI macs and some not so recent uninorth ones ). The actual audio capabilities depend entirely on the codec and can be anything from simple 16bit stereo 48kHz all the way up to the G5's 96kHz 24Bit surround plus digital in-and outputs. What Intel calls HD Audio looks remarkably similar.

Sounds good.

Still proudly using...

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Surely I can't be alone in thinking that all the damn boot optimizations in Ubuntu and Windows 7 to boot in 30 seconds or so don't mean much if you're going to build in a 30 second timeout at the same time.

You know what's funny - my old 500MHz PowerBook G3 boots NetBSD, including X, in about 30 seconds without any magic - no 'fast' but retarded init hackery, no pre-linked, pre-loaded anything. Ok, that's from a CompactFlash card so there's no seek time penalty for accessing lots of small or fragmented files but that's about it. For comparison, a Gdium, booting the Mandriva-derived abomination it shipped with from flash memory using one of these retarded 'fast' inits, is one hell of a lot slower even though it skips most of the normal init crap and has a faster CPU.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

The point being, I suppose, that I want to tinker to customize things to my liking regardless of the OS, and in Windows I've been consistently exerting more effort to do so.

Same here.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Especially now that I've been using Linux almost exclusively for a little over a year I've got a lot of plain-text configuration files that I could just copy over to any new install to get a system working pretty much the way I like it with barely any effort at all. Try that with the Windows registry. I do admit that all of the hidden directories in your home dir can be a bit of a mess though.

Many of those are temporary cache crap, sockets and so on, that can be safely deleted anyway.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by Macallan:

You can poke around in filesystems and copy stuff around, remove files and so on. You can disable services or drivers. You can run chkdsk or whatever they call it these days. So, 'nothing really useful' was a bit of hyperbole, obviously, but in order to use it you better know exactly what you're doing, and at that point it's no different from a (rather limited) single user shell on something UNIX-ish.

Well, sure. But none of that has ever helped me. For example, I had a Siemens WLAN dongle that somehow became defective and periodically froze my Windows XP. The Windows logs were extremely helpful (not) and made it seem like it was all Windows' fault. It took the Linux kernel log for me to figure out that it wasn't Windows or its interaction with the driver, but the hardware itself that must have gone kablooie. Did I mention that it didn't freeze the entire Linux system? Of course you probably can't blame Microsoft for that exactly, but they still approved the Siemens driver which made the system freeze on error. Admittedly none of that was really about the recovery console, but I guess viewing the logs from within the recovery console often wouldn't be much help either.

Well, you could disable the driver from the recovery console
If you could figure out which 'service' it is ( and if you're especially unlucky it might be more than one )...

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Originally posted by Macallan:

Yeah, I don't think you can mess with partitions on the recovery console ( I'm fairly sure you can reassign drive letters but memory is fuzzy )

I don't know about Windows 2000, but in Windows XP and up there's actually a diskpart command that isn't half bad if my memory doesn't betray me. The biggest problem is really that the minimal console I can get into from Grub actually lets me do things on the computer right there and then, while for Windows I have to go find the disk — assuming I even have a working disk drive on the computer in question.

One thing I like about UNIXy hardware ( which includes most PCI Power Macs - the first few generations even had rudimentary firmware support for booting AIX ) is that you can almost always boot them over the network, so if you bugger up your boot environment there's always something to fall back to, still without CDs.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Yeah, I don't think you can mess with partitions on the recovery console ( I'm fairly sure you can reassign drive letters but memory is fuzzy )

the recovery console allows use of fdisk.exe. however repartioning is disabled till what ever is broken, is fixed.

Originally posted by Macallan:

Many of those are temporary cache crap, sockets and so on, that can be safely deleted anyway.

I know, but they're too mixed up to know without further investigation. Some, like Pidgin, have really uninformative settings directory names. I forget, but it's .purple or maybe .libpurple instead of .pidgin. I know that's the name of the underlying library, but it's a Windows-like level of helpful. I think it would be better if they were all in just a few subdirectories of my home dir; e.g., ~/.config, ~/.cache, and ~/.something-else-im-probably-overlooking. Such is in fact the case for a fair number of applications, which ironically isn't making life easier because it's not guaranteed to be in there. That is indeed the problem with a lack of standardization in Linux, but I repeat, I still think the present imperfect situation works out tons better for me than the Windows registry ever did. For similar reasons I'm not too fond of GConf, but that nevertheless consists of XML files that can be dropped into a new installation to instantly obtain the results you like, giving it only the disadvantage of not being as convenient to edit as your average plain-text configuration file, without all of the disadvantages of Windows.

I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Microsoft has a similar thing going on, somewhat harder to find in C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\ (previously c:\documents & settings), but thanks to drive letters as opposed to mount points that's a lot less likely to be transferable.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Microsoft has a similar thing going on, somewhat harder to find in C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\ (previously c:\documents & settings), but thanks to drive letters as opposed to mount points that's a lot less likely to be transferable.

what data are you pointing for? the doc folder is still in C:\.

the appdata is program cache data and other data dealing with programs that are small(usually under 120 MB)

I use Ubuntu, and Windows just for games. I don't have any problem with drivers on Ubuntu, I just installed and started using it; in W7 sometimes I get blue screens and problems booting with bad drivers. Ubuntu is safe, fast and customizable, everything I need works and some games too.
But the problem in Linux and Unix are the Hardware developers, mainly graphic cards as Nvidia, without open-source drivers have really crappy performance on Linux!

The problem with Linux are that not many companies make drivers for Linux.

Originally posted by Virusboy:

what data are you pointing for? the doc folder is still in C:\.

It needn't be on C, but that's alright thanks to %appdata% (or some such). Since Windows 2000 you've got junction points and since Windows Vista actual symbolic links to work around that limitation, but it all comes back to what I said above about Windows requiring more effort on my part. Instead of simply saying "the partition with the unique identifier asdwerwd324 shall be mounted as /home" I would have to make a symbolic link to a certain drive letter which Windows may merrily reassign. I think files and settings should be on a different partition than the OS files, even if it's on the same HDD. It's a good idea in any OS really, but I've had to reinstall Windows many times for some reason, sometimes my fault, often not. Regardless, being able to simply wipe the slate clean without losing anything important is a great asset.* My present configuration with four HDDs is a bit easier in that I simply have an entire HDD dedicated to the OS with another HDD dedicated to my files.

* Of course there's the matter of backups, but those are for emergencies. You could call me strange for always being prepared to wipe my OS and start fresh, but it's Windows' fault really. And Windows made my life harder by not being Linux, although I'll admit to not really understanding /etc/fstab 10 years ago.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

... and since Windows Vista actual symbolic links...

Actually NTFS had symbolic links from the beginning ( read: Windows NT 3.5 or so ) and IIRC they were actually usable from the POSIX subsystem - only win32 and friends couldn't handle them. Same with ACEs that deny privileges - supposedly new with Win2k but the only new thing was support for it on the desktop, kernel and filesystem supported them at least in NT4 ( and early NT4 explorer.exe would crash if it found ACEs like that, newer ones ( since SP5 I think ) would just complain about a filesystem supposedly created by a newer version of Windows, in my case a blatant lie - I ran into that while playing with the ACL API at work on NT4 )
NT was originally supposed to have UNIX compatibility, so they made sure the filesystem supports UNIX semantics when asked to. Unfortunately the people who wrote the kernel and filesystem never talked to the people who wrote the GUI.

Okay, since Windows Vista I as a regular user can actually use something that's been present for over a decade.