What is the Operating System you loved to use the most?

I liked 98SE for all the customization you could do through the registry. It took me a while to achieve but I finally got a crash free system for a while. XP was good to me as well just didn't have as many tweaks available that I was familiar with.
 
heatlesssun said:
Windows 8.1. Probably not on anyone else's list but it can run on such a wide range of devices, at least for me personally. I've had a Dell Venue 8 Pro for three weeks, incredible machine.
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On the right machines - yes. Tablet, hybrids? Yes. Amazing, fast OS. Desktop or laptop without touch? Not the best. There are some great things with it, but the UI keeps it from being the best. The syncing of settings and such are great. So, I can work on the desktop and go to the tablet and things are there (Skydrive as well as other things).

How do you like that Dell Venue 8? Do you have the active stylus? Saw your post on The Verge, but didn't see a new follow up on whether he reviewed it again. The price is right, the device looks great.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Vista. Fantastic OS, it really didn't deserve the negative response it got.
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Pre-SP1 was trash. SP1 fixed a lot of stuff such as the file copying mess that was super slow, and SP2 fixed even more.

I actually started using Vista about the time SP1 came out. It was horrid before that.

As for my favorite OS... probably Win7. Before that it was XP, but XP was always kind of sketchy since it was so easy to screw something up and have to wipe and reinstall just because of something simple like a failed driver install.

XP has major issues with the file indexing getting screwed up and making your computer become super slow. SP3 also killed performance quite a bit on older machines. The defrag on XP is total crap. To get a pretty badly fragged drive back to about where it should be, it can take 6-7 runs. And even then, it is not defragged really well when compared to something like you get when you run My Defrag.

As for 7, the indexing is still a joke. I have started disabling it on every machine I use and/or manage since it runs better without it and I don't have to worry about it corrupting itself. Defrag for 7 is better than XP, but I still miss the pre-XP defragger with the nice GUI.

Windows 8/8.1 is still growing on me. I don't like the dumbed down things such as the lame error messages and the tile interface is horrid. But is is pretty nice if you boot to desktop mode and use a start menu replacement.

Those of you saying you liked OS/2 Warp.... that was a steaming pile. I actually tried it out for a while back in the day, and it not only was a pain to get stuff running on it, but it also had super horrible driver support.
 
I really enjoyed Windows 2000. It was like XP but without any BS.

I have fond memories of dual-booting Windows2000/98se and trying as hard as I could to get as many games as possible working on 2000 so I didn't have to boot into 98se very often.
 
XP was great for me. I only had to reinstall it one time over the lifespan of the OS...and this is coming from someone who reinstalled 95/98/Me dozens of times. My troubles were minimal, too.
 
For me it was Windows 9x (95-98SE).

It was such a new and exciting time for computing back then. The Internet, the venerable Celeron 300A, finally affordable RAM, Network gaming (QUAKE!!!) with friends in the garage, Voodoo2 SLI, case modding, huge computer shows at the local convention center. Computing was just plain fun back then. And the OS that drove it all was Windows 9x.

Yes, 2000 and XP were technically superior, but for me they came at a time when computing was starting to move away from being a near exclusive hobby for us gear heads to become everyday appliances for the masses.
 
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MrCrispy said:
I will back you up on that, even though I've been a vocal dissenter on many of the choices made. It's still a very nice OS and you can see what they were aiming for, but could've done a much better job of execution, which really is typical of MS.
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Ur_Mom said:
On the right machines - yes. Tablet, hybrids? Yes. Amazing, fast OS. Desktop or laptop without touch? Not the best. There are some great things with it, but the UI keeps it from being the best. The syncing of settings and such are great. So, I can work on the desktop and go to the tablet and things are there (Skydrive as well as other things).

How do you like that Dell Venue 8? Do you have the active stylus? Saw your post on The Verge, but didn't see a new follow up on whether he reviewed it again. The price is right, the device looks great.
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Of course 8 could have and needed to do a better job of integrating the new UI and the new UI will probably always be at least somewhat controversial unless there is away to completely disable it. But Windows is moving to new form factors and input methods in earnest this time and more and more people will adapt to the new UI over time.

After two years full time with 8.x now using 7 on my work machine gets weird as I'm always missing the task baron all of my monitors. Most of this debate has been about what we're used to more than some scientific correctness over what is an optimal and efficient UI. If it had been about the latter I don't the controversy would be as poignant.
 
You youngsters and your GUI's. :rolleyes:

I learned more about computers back in the DOS days which continues to be my backbone in computer management. Just today I had to restore a corrupt registry due to bad sectors on a hard disk from a boot disk and command prompt on an XP machine.

Back in those days I struggled to get games to run. Learning to manage conventional, expanded and extended memory. Autoexec.bat and config.sys. I loved it so much I went to tech school to learn more and changed careers from construction to I.T.

Best thing I ever did for myself.

And to think that was a challenge. All you old timers may remember getting all that AND the network drivers loaded into the first 640k of memory.

And I walked 5 miles to school barefoot uphill in the snow. :p
 
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Well, I loved 98se with Plug n Play and a refined certified drivers program. Big upgrade over anything before it as far as ease of use goes.
I was in the Beta test for XP and I HATED IT. XP wasn't a good OS until SP1. But, SP1 made XP a GREAT OS.
Vista was terrible at launch. By the time it became usable 7 was out and 7 kicked ass.
7 was the reason I finally let go of XP. Loved it, probably my favorite OS.
Ubuntu with Unity is pretty nice, the more I use it the more I like it. Its not my favorite OS, 7 is, but it has to be my favorite alternative OS since AMD finally released some decent drivers for it.
 
Zepher said:
You want to buy my Amiga 3000T? It is very rare and has a 68040 processor in it.

AmigaOS was my favorite, with Windows 7 being my non-Amiga favorite.
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Amiga 1200 Tower even rarer with a 68060 in it :p
I also have an ide 4 disc cd changer in it and an ide zip drive. Complete with a pcmcia network card and Miami TCP/IP for internet access.

And I have an Amiga 1200.

I also have 2 C= 1942 monitors, I also have a scan doubler to use a regular monitor.
I also have an Epson parallel port scanner with a home made cable to use it on the Amiga.

I used to have a CD32 with the FMV module and a SX-1 addon which basically made it in to a 1200 in terms of functionality. The SX-1 was specially and MUI would every 3rd reboot do the THX sound on startup that was only supposed to happen once a blue moon. Me and my friend called it the SUX-1. My friend in college wrote a review of the SX-1 of off mine that I bought. Eventually I bought the 1200 and then also the 1200 Tower.

The case for the 1200 Tower was a piece of work. Freaken plastic that when I got it was smashed to bits. That was when Gateway owned Amiga so I put it in a Gateway tower.

I also used to have an Amiga 2000 and a 500. The 2000 I think I had a 030 in it and a toggle switch to disable the add-on processor. The 500 we did several solder mods to for the fat agnus.
 
Well I also had a NeXT borg cube. My friend had a NeXT pizza box.

I also had 2 DEC running VAX/VMS. My old boss from the university gave them to me when the University retired them as I was one of two that actually liked VAX/VMS.

But I will go with AmigaOS for my favorite.
 
What I miss is the sense of fun and personality old OS's used to have. 'Guru meditation error' and 'there is no spoon' is so much more fun than 'software failure' and 'program not responding'. Everyone is too PC these days.
 
Mister Natural said:
You youngsters and your GUI's. :rolleyes:

I learned more about computers back in the DOS days which continues to be my backbone in computer management. Just today I had to restore a corrupt registry due to bad sectors on a hard disk from a boot disk and command prompt on an XP machine.

Back in those days I struggled to get games to run. Learning to manage conventional, expanded and extended memory. Autoexec.bat and config.sys. I loved it so much I went to tech school to learn more and changed careers from construction to I.T.

Best thing I ever did for myself.

And to think that was a challenge. All you old timers may remember getting all that AND the network drivers loaded into the first 640k of memory.

And I walked 5 miles to school barefoot uphill in the snow. :p
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Haha. I used to load TSRs into the unused high memory area between 640k and 1MB. The "fun" part was that no two machines were the same. And if you changed a single add-in card, you would most likely run into issues with your configuration.

Using utilities to see the free memory blocks to see what order to load stuff in in order to max out the free memory below 1MB was great.

My first "overclock" was on a 486-25Mhz machine. I noticed that there was a jumper to change the bus speed from 25Mhz to 33Mhz and decided to try switching it to see what happened. Boy was that a speed boost. I have been overclocking PCs ever since.

Fun times back then.
 
ZX Spectrum BIOS :D
No kidding, I had great fun poking around in it.

My all time favourite is Windows 7.
Amiga OS (and multi tasking in hardware) was great for its day, as was Win95, 98/SE, XP.
Missed Vista due to lack of hardware support/drivers for my kit.
 
cyclone3d said:
My first "overclock" was on a 486-25Mhz machine. I noticed that there was a jumper to change the bus speed from 25Mhz to 33Mhz and decided to try switching it to see what happened. Boy was that a speed boost. I have been overclocking PCs ever since.
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Same here. 25 to 33. It changed the bus speed. So, when I was able to get a new CPU (486/50), I ran it at 66Mhz. Those were the days when 8 Mhz made a huge difference. :D
 
Ur_Mom said:
Same here. 25 to 33. It changed the bus speed. So, when I was able to get a new CPU (486/50), I ran it at 66Mhz. Those were the days when 8 Mhz made a huge difference. :D
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Thanks (maybe thanks is the wrong word) to the 'von Neumann bottleneck', bus overclocks used to yield fairly significant performance gains.
 
I get used to every new Windows OS, so they all blur together as what I "like" for the time being. Current fave being 8.1.

Linux side... Xfce w/ any major distro is good. On the CLI side, I'd have to say that Ubuntu is great for ease of use but Arch Linux has some power to it.
 
well for me it would have to be OS/2 and DOS. Both absolutely rock solid and always worked.
 
What OS I'm using at any given moment doesn't particularly matter to me: an OS is really just a means to an end. I don't have any 'favorite'.
 
FreeBSD makes so many things be so much slicker and straightforward than Linux.

Is there anything else in the race? :D
 
I think my fave was win 98SE. It had it's quirks and was never very secure but it also rarely got in the way.
 
MrCrispy said:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/

Good read on Ars as usual.
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Thanks for posting that, it was great reading.

I couldn't help but notice so many correlations between the mistakes IBM made back then and ones MS is making today.

IBM failed to pay attention to the new technologies, comfortable in their current near monopoly; then was too slow and cumbersome to innovate fast enough when they did realize the threat; then still adamantly grasping tightly to their old familiar cash cow, even as it was obviously becoming more and more irrelevant; failed to properly identify what their customer needs were, which then lead to a miserable marketing failure of their new product; and finally, always finding themselves one step behind what everyone else was doing.
 
Until last week I was on Vista since 2008. It was a bit excessive on thrashing disks, and it had some eccentricities that were fixable but it was a good OS that rarely caused me a headache. XP was ok but it was a mess security wise. Going on the web without a firewall was dicey (I used Zone Alarm for like 4 years).
 
ubuntu 13.10. dos 6.22. windows xp.
the one I most like is windows 7.
 
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Windows 2000, I can still dual-boot it on my 990FX machine, with quad CPU support, USB3, AHCI, etc. Linux Mint 13 is my current favorite.
 
I honestly don't get "loving" an OS. The OS I find most useful and appreciate working in is RHEL/Centos. I can't imagine running a file server in anything else. But that's for pure practical reasons.
 
Up until this week it was Windows 2000. Now its Linux, specifically Android, Debian, and Slackware

just excellent operating systems with a common base
 
Windows XP, especially after upgrading directly from the crash-fest nightmare that was Windows ME.

Same with downgrading to XP after using Vista (at least pre service packs)
 
BeOS, it has so many features ahead of its time. And it could play a quicktime file, winamp and software quake (faster than some hardware versions on windows) all at the same time and still be responsive to commands. Windows and OSX are still catching up in many ways.



AmigaOS 4.0 pure eyecandy done right.



For everyday practical use, windows 7, because other choices don't support the applications I use.
 
I actually liked MS-DOS. I remember, as a little kid, going through and experimenting with every executable and command that I could find and trying various flags/switches to learn how to use the functions better. I felt like a ninja being able to make our PC bend to my will when most people didn't really understand DOS, outside of the basics (navigating and such)

The proliferation of the GUI sort of took some of that mystique away, since everything seemed a lot more accessible than it used to be with a text front end.
 
OS/2 Warp 4, BeOS, Arch (In that order). Mavericks is Ok, but kinda laggy on my old ass MBP.
 
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