Best OS

[Snowy©]

I've got an original box of OS2 Warp somewhere round here

TOS FTW

On chip operating system well blow me down look what technology is comming back to :)

Funny how alot of history repeats itself :) some say that's how Nostradamus made his predictions.

[harrison]

Each OS has it's strong point. For developing I like Gentoo. For work I prefer Windows, I mean, Office XP still owns anything else out there, and yes, it even owns open office because of integration with Sharepoint and other technologies. For databases, Solaris can't be touched. BSD variants are awesome for servers, etc.

For everything else, I prefer OSX

[Snowy©]

Office XP still owns anything else out there

Excel is just damed fine but it could do with better importing from other data sources but in 5 mins you can easily knock up a macro to help with that.

The new office version (currently in beta) is well different to say the least :shock: hopefully in a good way though :) so people can get to see functions that can help them do things faster. I think the dl.tv episode (3 episodes back I think) was demoing it

[VaKo]

Office 2007 looks like the MS Apple team designed the GUI, not the windows team, it rocks!

[TheZ]

I only have used very very few OSes. I use windows XP for gaiming and since most of my favorite games only run on windows. I am gonna start experimenting with gentoo. I have used ubuntu it is a great desktop OS.

I am not gonna vote just yet until i have tried more OSes.

[Sparda]

There is no right answer (although in alot of cases the phrase "Any thing Windows can do Linux can do better" applies), basicly it's a trick question. Each OS is tailored to do some things excelently well while not doing other things so well.

What Windows has going for it:

• Easy to use, any novice can sit at a computer running windows and use it.

Hardware support, virtualy every peice of hardware for the x86 and x86_64 architechture is supported by windows, in some cases third party drivers are needed.

What Linux/BSD has going for it (every thing distro dependant):

• High Security, I would like to see you try to crack a Linux/BSD password hash with rainbow tables.

High Performance, <long descript cut out>

Customisability, you can tailor a Linux/BSD distrabution just to your needs.

Stability, Linux/BSD does not crash without human error or hardware failure.

[VaKo]

One thing I would say about linuxis that you be spending more time configureing it than you would be with Windows XP/Vista or OSX. And there are some tasks that linux is unsuited to due to its lack of mainstream software support.

Now most of the functionality of nearly everything can be added to linux for free, but if you use Applications more than functions of a computer (say gaming, or CAD rather than tools such as SSH or PHP) then Linux isn't always the best choice desktop wise.

For servers, scientific processing, databases, there is no comptition, *nix wins hands down. Personally I like to keep a mix running, for different things.