Do you use any other Operating System(s)?

[Francois-Denis Gonthier]

On August 7, 2007 03:46:07 pm Scott (angrykeyboarder) wrote:
> I've only become one recently. I enjoy it and I figure the more I learn
> the better off I'll be (if I ever get into an IT job that is...).
> And since I finally gave the Virtual Machine thing a try (starting about
> 4 months ago) it's pretty easy.  I find booting more than 2 Operating
> Systems is a pain, especially considering how infrequently most of them
> are used.

My next computer is a VMWare-capable server.  I might become an OS junkie 
again, but I'll try not to.  I have known some people that came up with a new 
operating system setup everytime I spoke to them.  They have hardly ever 
brought anything productive to discussions on IRC.

> Everywhere I've ever worked was strictly Windows (in various flavors).
> I keep wondering what business out there (non IT-elated) are using Linux.

We deploy products on Debian GNU/Linux.  All internal servers are running 
Linux, on extremely cheap machines.

> Just on a simple home user level, I've really found Windows to be fairly
> stable since Windows 2000. Anything before that was a different story. I
> ran 2k for several years, then XP for a few (new computer) and now Vista
> (starting with betas about a year ago and then with retail in February).

Well, all Microsoft products are more or less thightly closed.  Some things 
are well documented, some things aren't.  My first reaction when I knew we 
needed to implement some interoperability mechanism with Windows Server 2003 
was fright.  I imagined having the same troubles has the people developing 
Samba had.  Nothing of the sort happened, probably because we don't have to 
dwelve deep into anything.  Sure Windows Server has some oddities, but 
nothing came close to show-stopping yet.

Running XP itself isn't much troubles.  It's pretty stable.  We are having 
troubles interoperating with it and the consumer products that usually come 
with XP (read MS Office).

In fact, I'd say that more a matter of lousy design than stability.  Those 
products were not thought with interoperability in mind.  Pluggability and 
interoperability is obviously not only something MS utimately doesn't want, 
but it's an afterthought in the core of their products.

Open-source projects are absolutely not perfect in that regard either.  The 
software we have the most trouble with is Thunderbird.  Yeah it has many 
plugin, but from what I've heard (I have not personally worked with it, but 
the guy who did is one desk beside me), it's an absolutely lousy and buggy 
platform.

> > - We prefer to use Debian for servers, but there are some Fedora Core
> > Whatever box out there.  We don't like those.
>

We don't like those, because nobody at work, except the boss which is a Fedora 
user, know their way around Fedora.

> There is a lot I like about Fedora, especially with the recent release.
> It has some features that I'd like to see in Debian/Ubuntu. First and
> foremost is the ability to run the 64-bit version and very easily
> install 32-bit software if necessary.  It's *much* tricker in Ubuntu.

That is nice to know.  I'm getting a bit annoyed at my 32 bit chroot and would 
like to find alternate solutions.  I sure hope this is coming soon on Debian.

> Frankly, I love Vista. I've been quite lucky. From a driver standpoint
> I've been very lucky. The only problem I had was rather frivolous (it
> took Griffin Technology till last month to come out with a Visa driver
> for the PowerMate - which I don't really use anyway).

I hated Vista the 15 minutes I've used it.  I also feared I'd succomb to 
epilepsy just be looking at those shiny shiny colors and eye-candies.

What I don't subscribe to is focus on eye-candy in user interfaces...
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