What is your favorite operating system?

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I am certain that this forum has had this topic before, so I apologize for any redundancies. I am curious about what others think of different operating systems. What are your favorites? Which one are you currently using?

I recently acquired this great application on my Mac OS X called Parallels Desktop. It allows you to create virtual environments (machines) within your main operating system so that you can run different operating systems within Mac OS X. I have created a virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux, Chrome OS, and Fedora Linux, and I am downloading CentOS and OpenSUSE at this moment so that I could try them out.

My favorites so far are Mac OS X and Ubuntu. I have a virtual machine for Fedora Linux, but I haven't tried it out yet. I really want to try FreeBSD, but when I installed it, I rebooted, and I entered my login information in the BIOS prompt, but then all that came up was support information and I couldn't exit the BIOS screen to access the desktop environment. Any suggestions? In the meantime, I will go to the FreeBSD community forum to find out what is going on.

For some of your experimenting you may want to try something that uses less speed hacks and better known for stability than parallels, such as either virtualbox or vmware fusion. It would probably resolve your BSD issues.

Thank you very much. I will try Virtual Box.

Mint was the first Linux I ever tried and I really liked it even though it could not access my printer, then Debian became my favorite when it somehow added some SATA drivers Windows 98se could use in my multi-boot system ... but then both Debian and Mint became troublesome, so now I am back to being stuck with Windows XP Pro most of the time.

I like Windows 7 (the software, GUI and taskbar is awesome) and a couple of Linux distros like Debian, Mint, Arch, etc. I can't get wifi on most Linux distros though. If I could I'd be using Arch on my laptop.

I've actually come to like Windows 7 a lot, even though there are still a few flaws here and there, but so far it's been stable as a rock even though I haven't formatted my main computer for a fairly long time (about 8 months). When I had XP and Vista, the computer would get quite slow after half a year at most even though I berformed a good deal of maintenance (ie. defragging, antivirus, antispyware, registry cleaning etc.)

Ubuntu linux has also been quite trusty and works like a charm on most of my hardware while still being easy to use... However, I find it relatively slow and clumsy.

A few years ago I used to run Fluxbuntu on my previous laptop. Suffice to say, that even though the fluxbox WM needs some getting used to, it was very fast compared to Windows on far newer laptops. Plus it had access to the standard Ubuntu packages, meaning I could use it for school as well... somehow it also made my wifi card much better at picking up the school's WLAN for some reason.

Gentoo is by far my favourite. Although it's farily difficult and time-consuming to set up, you get rewarded by having an OS tailored to your use and your hardware... you can make yourself a very speedy OS even on old hardware if you know how to.

Just switched to mint from ubuntu. I like it so far, but it broke a game in wine.

GNU/Linux. I prefer Debian and derived distributions (currently on Mint as Canonical keeps making foolish decisions with Ubuntu).

Windows 7 is actually fairly nice, but I have no use for it. There isn't anything important in Windows that isn't in GNU/Linux, at least not for me.

I've been meaning to try out PC-BSD (FreeBSD with user-friendliness) but I had wifi troubles the last time I tried.

Windows 7. Because XP is almost 10 years old and Vista was an obese dude eating my RAM like McDoubles.

Mac OS X would be nice for me if it weren't for the fact you have to buy a $700 (at cheapest) computer in order to enjoy it. (No, I would rather not use Craigslist/Ebay)

Linux is great for servers, not ready to overtake the Big 2 for desktops.

Thats fair. Its not as if Windows is ready for web use after all.

lol

It's no different than Mac OS or Linux when it comes to web capabilities. It's an OS, not a browser.

Linux lets you browse the Internet, with the browser of your choice.
Windows lets the Internet browse you.

Have you tried Debian? I've found it to be really fast.



Gentoo is the one Linux distro I know I will never use. Every time I try to build open-source software from source, I get compiler errors. I run the configure script, then go into the directory from the terminal and run the makefile, and gcc barfs out a series of error messages that point to syntax errors somewhere in the thousands of lines of code, code that I have neither the C skills, nor the time, nor the patience to go and edit to get it to compile correctly. I've tried it with remind, Word War vi, Xaric, Alpine, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff with no success. Thank god my Debian box has good package management; I don't know what I'd do without it.

I think he's referring to the server end, not web browsing. Linux/Unix is much better for servers than Windows due to its speed, its ability to handle large amounts of data at once, and its better management of resources. I'm with Orwell in that Windows has nothing to offer over other platforms, with the exception that more software is written for it, which has nothing to do with Windows being a good OS and everything to do with its ubiquity in the desktop market. Windows is still unstable and insecure compared to a *Nix, its interface is tedious, its command line is a joke, and it's about as programmable as a block of wood.