| Author |
Message |
    
Doon
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - 06:37 pm: | 
|
I run and Play with a variety of OS. Mainly cause I am a comptuer geek.. The ones I used the most though are FreeBSD and MacOS X.
My main work computer is a 17" Powerbook G4, Runing OS X 10.4. OSX is a nice Operating system, then again I am a bit biased as it does have the Userland from FreeBSD. I can install X11 from the install cd, I can open up 5 Shells and be happy that I have bash and vi (which we all know is superior to emacs -- j/k I actually use both..) Will the avg user that has a mac ever use 1/8 of the Unixy goodness that lurks beneath its candy coated aqua shell, probably not. But for what I do day to day it makes me more productive than a windows pc would. Also regardless of OS, I am lover of well engineered things (the engineer in me I guess) and Apple makes some pretty nice kit. There are just so many things you can do with your avg Mac before you even boot up. Totally screw up your disk or blow up the OS, then boot into Firewire target mode via Open Firmware, and your computer just shows up a firewire disk so you can fix whatever your did.
I am a big fan of using the correct tool for the job, so if you are happy and productive running Windows on your computer than by all means run Windows. I've been using *nix (Linux, (Free|Open|net)BSD, Solaris, Irix, AIX) since '93 and am the most comfortable in it. It is the right tool for the jobs that I need to use computers for.(
For my computers at the office we generrally run FreeBSD, and a variety of FOSS stuff. OUt of the 40 or so servers that form the core of my Datacenter I do have 2 Windows boxes. They run M$ Sql Server. Most people find this odd being that my coworker and I are FreeBSD fans. The reason being was, when we built the first version of our Apps, i needed certain features from a DB, and none of the OS versions provided them (postgres was close, and is now probably viable) and Oracle was to much $$$$. So as I said the right tool for the job.
Ok enough spewing from me. It is rainy and gross outside here so back to coding... (which is my favorite hobby outside of riding, and the main reason I run the OS's that I do, nice development tools) |
Jlnance
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - 08:14 pm: |
|
If you run one of the linux systems, can you still run all your Windows apps? If not, why bother?
Hmmm. This is a division by zero question. Since I don't own any windows apps, I'm going to say "yes, I can all my windows apps."  |
Glitch
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - 09:35 pm: |
|
It's like this (for me), M$ is the bane of my existence.
I crave something different in every sense.
I like not the M$ license agreement you have to agree to.
You have to agree to let M$ into your computer when they choose, among other nasty things.
Besides the way it is today, it's the machine that holds the license any more.
No longer can you blow up a machine, take your disk, and load windoze on another machine.
Linux also allows us geeks to do way more than windoze will allow (on purpose).
For business you have to run windoze to remain compatible with everyone else in the big business world...generaly speaking.
I have a windoze box, Photoshop, gaming, and for some troubleshooting (remember it's the bane of my existence).
Linux = flexible
Windoze = business
OSX is tied to hardware.
I enjoy open architecture |
Glitch
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - 09:36 pm: |
|
I have Suse, and it's great.
I'll give Gentoo a try. |
Alchemy
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 06:59 am: |
|
I haven't run a MSFT product at home for over a decade. Ran OS/2 for about 8 years. Great stuff. No virus', stable, great internet support and still available as ECS.
About 1999 I started playing with BeOS and fell in love. Knocked my socks off. Native multiprocessor support for up to 8 processors out of the box. Very cool stuff and easy to install and FUN to use with a great user experience and a dedicated community. Been running it in one form or another since then. It has branched into a commercial product called ZETA and is also being developed as an open source product called HAIKU. HAIKU is a fresh rewrite from the ground up of BeOS such that it will be binary compatible with BeOS applications.
See these links for some status on the HAIKU project progress.
http://www.iscomputeron.com/
http://www.haiku-os.org/learn.php
http://www.beosnews.com/
ZETA is now being developed by a German games company ( http://www.zeta-os.com/cms/news.php ) so it could get very interesting from a games standpoint but this is very recent. ZETA V 1.21 is now at the point of taking pre-orders. I have not ordered but probably will shortly.
I have no qualms about paying for a product from a reputable company that is responsive to it's customers. I happily pay for ZETA and happily support HAIKU. I hope some folks make lots of money making great products. Similar to how I feel about Buell in that I happily pay for products from companies that have their head screwed on right.
I am hopeful about Apple. They seem to be making some right moves. There may be a Mac in my future if they keep it up. |
Glitch
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 08:31 am: |
|
I'm downloading Gentoo now.
Should be done in a couple of minutes, being plugged into the backbone sure makes things fast! We have a fiber optic network that links to GA Tech. Sweet!
I'm interested in FreeBSD, I'll pick it up also.
The wonderful thing about what I do, and where I do it, I have lots and lots of resources at my disposal. So experimenting on several machines isn't a problem.
Thanks to all that chimed in, you gave me a lot of ideas, and things to think about.
Blake, Win2K is probably my favorite flavor, but one must move on, at M$'s pace (or at least we do here), for an eye opener, read the EULA for WinXP, or any M$ product. Did you read the EULA for Win2K's service pack 3? |
Doon
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 09:00 am: |
|
alchemy: Beos was awesome (it doesn't get along with my hardware in my new machine -- at least the last time I looked at it ). But it too blew me away.
Glitch: I used to run Gentoo on my main workstation (I too must have ADD since I change OS's all the time) It is a very nice Linux distro, assumes that you know a bit about what you want (and have some time to let it build). But you can bootstrap yourself a totally tweaked OS compiled exactly how you like it. Portage is kinda like the ports system in the BSDs (IIRC it was based on it).
On M$ I hate Win2k and WinXP the least. The only reason I still have XP on a computer is for the video games. But if that company can get them to run on the mac like they say they can. that partition will be short lived. |
Ikeman
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 09:44 am: |
|
If it wasn't for my kids being gamers and the fact that nobody produces a tax package for Linux (i.e. Tax Cut, TurboTax), I wouldn't have a Windows machine in my house.
I tried it for about a year using nothing but Mepis (which is my favorite distribution for noobs - replaced Knoppix as my "handout" distro). Went pretty well other than the games and tax software. Considering the rest of my family pretty much web surfs, writes some papers, uses IM and listens to music a distro like Mepis is great. I don't have to worry about all the virus protection BS, I can really control what each of them is allowed to do/access on the machine. I probably rebooted twice in a year and that was because of power outages.
If you haven't checked out Mepis, try it. It was designed as a desktop distro (Debian based) and does it very well. I was hardcore Red Hat going back pre-5.0 up until the Fedora change over. I basically got tired of having to install all of the multimedia stuff that Red Hat never included.
I can't really remember all of the distros I've tried over the years but Red Hat, SUSE and Mepis have spent the most time on my boxes. |
Glitch
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 05:52 pm: |
|
Got Mepis, it's okay.
Tried out FreeBSD today at work, the jury is still out, so far I'm not impressed.
Gentoo is now on one of the laptops, it's okay as well.
I'll probably stick with that.
Whine is working wonderfully on Gentoo.
Windows games on Wine, so far so good.
Photoshop has gone the way of windoze, as you can't take it off one machine to another without jumping through hoops, so I'm reluctant to even try right now, so windoze still has a home on the desktop here at the "GlitchCo Office of the Less Than Modivated"
also at my downtown office, but it's an M$ office anyhow. |
M1combat
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 06:31 pm: |
|
How well does Gimp work? I've used it for simple stuff but I'd like to hear an opinion from a graphics guy (or at least someone who knows their way around Photo shop). |
Glitch
| | Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 - 08:42 pm: |
|
Gimp is top quality. Lots of tools. The learning curve is just as steep as Photoshop. I've seen some pretty good stuff done with gimp.
It's a real good Draw program as well. |
Jlnance
| | Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 - 08:11 am: |
|
the fact that nobody produces a tax package for Linux
I used Turbotax on the web last year. If you don't mind them having your financial info, its great. |
Ikeman
| | Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 - 08:42 am: |
|
I used Turbotax on the web last year. If you don't mind them having your financial info, its great.
I use Tax Cut myself. I don't like the web based option. I'll have to dig out the article on why I won't use TurboTax. |
|
