The Best, Worst, and Ugliest OSes of the Decade 378
itwbennett writes "Hundreds of Operating Systems were released during the past decade, finding their way into microdevices, watches, refrigerators, mobile phones, cars, motorcycles, jets, even the International Space Station. Some worked; some even worked well. Others, sadly, didn't. And some were just ahead of their time. Blogger Tom Henderson takes a look back at the best and worst OSes of the decade. Among the worst? Vista, as you'd suspect, along with WinME. But what about GNU Hurd? And some of the best? Solaris/OpenSolaris 10, Mac OS X, and newcomer Google Android."
So you don't have to waste your time (Score:5, Informative)
A tiny, three-page article, with each page only having three to four paragraphs, and the list has exactly what you'd expect it to have. You really don't have to RTFA this time.
Re:I will stand by this forever (Score:3, Informative)
More RAM, yes, but also direct access to hardware resources, and predictable response times (a lot of the same reasons that made DOS a reasonable basis for embedded PC systems).
OTOH, DOS barely counted as an operating system.
OS Kernel (Score:3, Informative)
An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.
Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland (Score:4, Informative)
Vista was tolerable with SP1, albeit way to slow (I'm talking on a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB memory).
XP, on the same machine, not surprisingly, was a *LOT* faster
7, on that machine, is between the two, but close enough to XP that I don't mind using it.
Re:Why do games need 2 GB of RAM? (Score:3, Informative)
But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?
90+% of PCs are never upgraded. "needs 2 gigs of ram" is marketing speak, for "most computers sold with 2 gigs of ram will probably have a fancy enough graphic card to have acceptable performance".
The other interpretation is any game will run faster if its cached into ram instead of reading off the DVD... Reduces stuttering and pauses.
Re:What a total waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash?
The references to the CLI should give you an indication. The integration is between components running under PowerShell. PowerShell cmdlets use object pipelines to communicate: they send whole objects to each other, and can all access well known and defined properties of those objects. I haven't seen this kind of integration under Unix, where the standard model is to pipe character streams. This requires serialization, weird and often painful custom parsing with liberal use of text processing tools like awk, sed and so on. See here [wikipedia.org] for more details.
Re:uh, what? (Score:3, Informative)
The original sentence was probably something like "I like a bagel with my coffee."
I think his hovercraft may be full of eels actually.
Re:Slashdoted already? (Score:3, Informative)
This is about OSes.
Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.
This is incorrect. Windows/386, even though it started up under MS-DOS, once the 386 VMM was running was a full-bore OS. The VMM intercepted calls to DOS, and could easily remap to 32-bit routines implemented in VxD's. It's easy enough to test yourself, just write a TSR that hooks the INT21H DOS vector, and count calls to it before and after executing win.com.
This is all exposed completely in the (long out of print) book 'Unauthorized Windows 95' by Andrew Schulman (IDG Books). The difference with Windows 95? A revamped UI, and an automatic call to win.com. In essense, DOS was the Windows/386 VMM's glorified bootloader. It's as if you went from a world where you booted to the GRUB prompt and had to manually type in the commands to load Linux to the days of grub.conf and autoloading Linux.
Windows 95, 98, and Me were all built on the Windows/386 VMM 'OS' core that used VxD's and trampolinish hackery (thunking) to get the job done. Windows NT was built on a new kernel that exposed the same API's but didn't trampoline itself into control.
Windows 9x and Me 'safe mode' is DOS with the Win32 UI, though.....
Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland (Score:5, Informative)
It seems everyone forgot the DRM and 'Trusted Computing' (aka distrust the user) introduced in Vista, one of the major criticisms (not look & feel).
You may recall this analysis: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html [auckland.ac.nz], (Schneier wrote something here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows_1.html [schneier.com])
Not sure how 7 is now, but its not like the bashing against DRM/Trusted Computing/TCPA was not without reason, and might have worked. Also, since that time, complaining made music download websites turn their back to DRM.
Re:Is Solaris actually good? (Score:4, Informative)
ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.
Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.
Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH. ;P
To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:
root@host:~# zfs list tank /tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K
What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:
root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www
I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:
root@host:~# zfs create -s -V16G -o shareiscsi=on tank/vol/build_centos5.4-x86_64
Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot ...
drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00
me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/ ...my homedir contents from 11:00...
There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.
That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and ... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.
Re:Server 2008? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:like...WHATever, dood... (Score:3, Informative)
... Um. Wow. Just wow.
See, I worked as a microsoft support tech for a while shortly after the release of Windows ME. A dark period in my career, I'll admit. But aside from a few nice troubleshooting tools (msconfig FTMFW), ME sucked beyond belief.
Troubleshooting Step 1: Reboot. If that solved the problem, we told the customer it was fixed, and to call back if it happened again. Really.
And at least once a day, I would determine that a machine was beyond recovery, and we would FFR it. (Fdisk, Format, Reinstall). And my experiences were pretty standard, from what I heard around me on the support floor. People who had transferred to the ME support team from 9X complained about how buggy and poorly designed ME was.
*shudders* So... no. ME was not the best of the 9x line. Arguably, 98SE was the best, although some people preferred 95.
Also, the article completely messes up the history of 2000 / 9X / ME. 2000 was /NOT/ the hybrid of 9X and NT. 2000 was the end of the NT line, and a damn fine OS. I ran it for many years, until my last CD bit the dust, and I grudgingly updated to XP.
Re:Vista vs Win7 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I will stand by this forever (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And apparently biased... (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS X bias, too:
Sure. It "just works" on Apple approved hardware. :) Luxury on top? Hm. Control? I wasn't aware that Mac OS X allowed you to control your system as much as Linux or Windows. I thought it actually was simpler and didn't allow as much control - which is fine, it's a design decision that many people like, I have no problem with it. And what is "architectural philosophy" anyways? I thought Mac OS X was about being a good OS, not an architectural POC...
You are basically a non-technical person, correct? Your post would indicate it. It's also clear you know nothing about OS X or Darwin and have never used it.
Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland (Score:1, Informative)
;-),
I think your memory of HPUX must be somewhat foggy. HPUX API is severely crippled, the most common problem compiling open source software for it is that most of the nice functions found in Solaris or Linux is simply not there, or that you run in to fun HPUX only bugs in open source software because basically nobody is developing/deploying open source software for HPUX because of their crippled API. No you would thought that HP was a nice player and released the changes needed to e.g. kerberos auth mechanism under Apache, or Apache it self. But no, HP doesn't release any source changes or sources to any open source software unless its requiered by the licence i.e. GPLed instead of BSD/Apache lic.
Don't get me wrong, I love gnu tools, but please do not say non std switches in regards to Solaris/Unix tools, it's actually the otherway around, it's gnu tools that has non std switches to support new functionality. Nice new functions but still not std UNIX functions.
Cheers
PS: I could go on talking about the compiler env but to little time, you been to 3 different jobs, with 3 fsck sysadmin teams.. ;-). Just the said way of patching shows that..