Which OS are the worst and the best?

[hagar]

Tomas wrote:
....
What about win95, 98 and me then? Was running ontop of dos too...

I must admit that you got a point there...  :-x

However I think that one should consider Msdos 7.0 (or whatever they called it) as an integrated part of win95/98/me, since you can't (or shouldn't)  replace the dos delivered wtih windows with another version.

If I rembember correctly Caldera (owners of Dr. DOS)  sued microsoft since win95/98 could (with some hard work) run under different version of DOS (including DR. Dos), and microsoft didn't play fair since they bundled  dos 7.0 with win95/98 and said that it was integrated...

However I don't know what happend with that lawsauit and i havn't seen a "beginners guide to use Dr.Dos with windows 95/98" anywhere on the net.

[carls]

All OSes suck, AmigaOS just sucks less.
I like most "modern" OSes (Windows 2000 and up, AmigaOS, MacOS X, *nix) - they are all good at different things. But the two OSes I really hate are Windows 98 (have to run it on my laptop, sigh...) and MacOS 9.

[T_Bone]

Worst: anything < 32bit

Best: Emacs :-D

[Ponos2D]

OSes I ever used or tryed

AmigaOS (all except 2.x)
MS Dos
MS Wintrolls (all)
Linux (Debian, RedHat, Mandrake)
BeOS

Best:
1. AmigaOS3.9
2. BeOS

Worst:
1. MS Wintrolls (all) :-D

[Lando]

xeron wrote:

Oh, and I disagree about Linux being one of the best. TBH, I think its a miracle it works at all its such a mess. (and no, fancy GUIs to abstract the user from the mess only addresses the symptom, not the problem :-D ).

I'm 100% in agreement with you there  :-)

[PMC]

It would have to be either Windows 95 or Windows 98 in pole position for the worst OS I've ever used.  Flaky, slow and cumbersome are words that often spring to mind when using MS operating systems.

Bizarrely enough I find XP to be quite good.  Sure, far too many games won't work with it (Grand Prix Legends, sob!) but it seems generally stable and well thought out.  Shame it uses so much system resources really.

AmigaOS (3.9) is responsive and easy to use but is now really showing it's age.  The lack of memory protection and some cumbersome elements let it down, but this can be excused when you remember that the last THOROUGH revamp was over a decade ago.  Neither OS3.5/9 are a true rewrite of the classic Amiga OS.

[Staticman]

Operating Systems I Have Used:

Microsoft DOS 3.3, 5.0, 6.0, 6.2, 6.22
Microsoft Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, NT 4, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP
Apple System 7, MacOS 8.5,8.6,9 and X
AmigaOS 1.1,1.2,1.3,2.05,3.0,3.1,3.9
Linux Suse PPC 7.3
Atari TOS
Acorn RiscOS (a few versions, not sure which)

My favourites:

AmigaOS 2.05 and up
Microsoft Windows XP
Apple MacOS X
Acorn RiscOS

Worst:

All DOS, and Windows pre XP.
Atari TOS is pretty woeful.

[Waccoon]

@Hagar:  Boy, are you the only other person around here that's used OS/2?!  OS/2 is what MS-DOS should have been, and I rather like using V2.0.  I just re-installed a Citrix Multiuser 2.2 system due to a bad partition table.  The more I use it, the more I like it.

I think I'm just doomed to adore obsolete sytems.  :-D

I agree that XP gets more flak for the GUI than it deserves.  My dad has the eye candy turned off, and it looks and works just like Win2K, aside from the stupid, and now wizard-"enhanced", network setup.  UGH!!!

[Waccoon]

Gaidheal :  Windows NT OSes are pretty good, NT4 works fine but is terribly dated now (and to answer an earlier poster, yep! I ran my desktop machine on it for about two years - for serious work it was perfect, being stable and powerful. It lacked the support for devices I needed later though).

I suppose, if you have service pack 6a.  Most of the NT4 systems I use at work have service pack 5, and are utter crap when it comes to stability.  It would be nice if I could upgrade the service pack, but Kodak won't let me.  They're afraid SP6a will break something.  Harldy appropriate, seeing how their damn DLS software crashes ten times a day, anyway.   ;-)

[jump2bnaked]

 The best OS i ever used is the Amiga OS 3.0 and 3.1
The worst OS i ever used is the Amiga OS 3.9 .

I used windows 98, it had its merrits.
I upgraded to windows xp and it works very well. I can't complain very much as it works fine except for a couple of times where it went down with an error    "ole error ". What on earth that means, well only those who know can tell.

Ok i use a draco for most of my work. I decided to purchase OS 3.9 to make things better and to my surprise, the amiga OS had never been somthing so stupid to use.
 
  After about 10 or so reinstallations and formating of harddisks i decided to go back to OS 3.1. That worked perfect until about a year or so latter when i had finished edittng a couple of important documentaries. I thought it was the right time to re try the OS 3.9 or else my money would have been a complete waste.
 
  I searched for trouble shootings and found out that some one had configured a workbench 3.9 to work on the draco. I contacted him and he informed of how much it will cost. I seatled him and he send me the cd rom with all the mojos on.
 
  All i had to do, was to insert his cd rom in and follow the instructions. All went fine until i had to remove some of the features that i find unneccesary. F.eg the background in a window is filled with some wierd silva sky image, i could hardly read the text.
 
  This is where my disapointment begun. I follw the way one has to do it as it always has been and it just dos'nt work. There are also so many patches added that you don't know which belongs to which.
 
  The worst of it all is, there is no documentation of those haks and patches. As i use the machine mainly for serious work, i don't have time to fidle with such rubbish which is non productive. I even run the risk of doing something stupid which will force me to format the harddrives. The least is somthing i realy don't hope .
 
   At the moment, if have to read somthing from the diskette, as i often do due to transfering of data from pc to draco. Exspecialy if i rendered images from lightwave on the pc. I will have to insert the diskette in the drive then reboot before it will be readable. This was not the case pre Os 3.9.  Imagine rebooting 720 times to load 720 frames of iff images to do acommecial of 30 seconds.
 
  So, now do i have to consider that i upgraded my system or made it worse.

                            Your's Faithfully

                            Jump 2 b naked  
 

[meerschaum]

Best:

IRIX
OSX
FreeBSD
SuSE Linux
AmigaOS 3x
Win2K/XP

Moderate:

BeOS
QNX
OpenBSD
NetBSD
VMS
AIX
Solaris
HP-UX
RiscOS
Red Hat Linux
Debian Linux
Slackware Linux

Worst:

TOS
Win95
Win98
WinME
Win NT 4.0
SCO
MSDOS
True64 Unix
AllTheCrapLinuxDistros

[jeffimix]

@Hagar Argh, I don't have it anymore ( I cleaned out my old links) I used to have a link with that tutorial. It was difficult too, not really worth it to do.

DR DOS is IMO a very nice OS in its own way.  

PalmOS (no-ones even mentioned it yet, why?) is my favorite OS for what it does. Sketching, writing, gaming, organizer. It simply gets out of your way and Works.

I've always had bad experiences with Linux, but it's a nice OS - not great for desktop though IMNSHO.

Widnows Xp is actually a fairly nice OS, I still say its bloated and slow though - though on my 1.4GHz Vaio, not too slow, just slow in bursts sometimes.

Windows ME sucks, it just sucks, couldn't install my DSL set-up on it because I have a DVD-Rom drive. It's a documented problem too, stupid stupid thing.  Slower than 98se and no real advantage from what i've experienced (98se is a fair version of windows)

I've never had much experience with Macs, the OS9 and below (school used to have) always seemed very similiar to windows to me.

*Nixes are always to me business machines, for point of sale or network/web hosting, not home use.

Amiga OS is nice and friendly, from my rather limited experience.

Never used an Atari (other than 2600), anyone want to send me one?

Also I've not had any experience with WinCE and OS/2, both of which don't make me feel I'm missing anything. Palm is wonderful for handhelds, and OS/2 is not very up to date.

[uncharted]

In no particular order.

Favourites
===========

MacOS X - It just does it's job so well without getting in the way of actual apps, and combined with iApps and Apple hardware it's the first TRUE home computer since Commodore bit the dust. It doesn't look too shabby

AmigaOS3.x - Just for simplicity and shear tinkerability

+3DOS - Simple, easy nice with a clear text menu interface

RiscOS 3 - Very nice at the time, was perfect for the education market it was successful in.  My first experience of a GUI, and my introduction to digital art which later lead me to the Amiga.

MS-DOS - I used to enjoy being geeky and making a boot disk for every single game I bought. :-D

Windows 2000 - In my stint as an admin I had to look after lot of Win2000 machines, and I found it a good stable powerful and relatively smooth OS.  The only real issue I ever had was with a driver for a USB-Serial adapter on a laptop (Which wouldn't of been an issue if the dumbass network engineer who went out and bought  laptop would have bought one with a serial port like everyone else had - especially as half it's use was to console into routers and switches via serial :-o)

Worst
=======

MacOS 9.x - I can't believe people prefer this over OS X, it has to be the worst, most unstable, overly cluttered, ugliest OS ever made.  I tried it once on my dual boot eMac and when installing a program is crashed halfway through and killed the system, making it refuse to boot.

Windows 95 - I couldn't believe how bad it was when I was forced to downgrade from DOS/Win3.11.

Windows XP - This is a odd OS, if you run it and have no problems it's a pretty good windows version, but if problems hit, they hit BIG time!  It's telling when the UK's biggest PC reseller has to attach a recovery information leaflet to every recipt of every computer they sell.

Amiga(D)OS 1.x - UGH!  It's no wonder Amigas ended up becoming a toy/game machine when they were supplied with a toy GUI like this one had.  No standards in the UI (even different gadget syles in the OS itself!!!!)

[GadgetMaster]

My favourite OS has to be Windows Millennium................. I mean............. Its the only one that can make me laugh, no other OS has managed to do that :-D  :lol: :-P

As for worst OS it definately has to be Amiga OS............why?............because  it has a bad habit of  getting left behind nowadays, when once it was ahead :roll:

[GadgetMaster]

Oh and BTW now that my coursework is nearly finished I should have a bit more time on my hands.

I might install Windows 2003 on a spare hard drive just to see what it's like.

Has anyone tried it yet?

[Hammer]

@Hagar: Boy, are you the only other person around here that's used OS/2?! OS/2 is what MS-DOS should have been,

I have used OS/2 Warp  (i.e. given away free with magazine cover CD** and from IBM’s X86 PC software bundle)...

**Should have done it earlier i.e. before Windows 95’s release…