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[Jaruzel]

Oh c'mon guys... you are refering to Win 3.1

If we're going to do a best/worst then at least stick to the current incarnation of each OS.

I mean theres no point comparing win3.1 to OSX is there?

-Jar.

[gnarly]

IME, the best desktop OS's at present are Windows XP and Mac OS-X. The worst I have ever used is Windows ME.

AmigaOS3 is incredibly fast/responsive and fairly intuitive but lacking a bit on the usability front IMO. Lets see what OS4 does to rectify this shall we?

[Insanity]

Best OS:
1: Windows 2000.
2: don't use other systems that much, so I really don't need any other OS.


Worst:
1: NT 4.0 (by far)
talk about crappy OS. Have anyone of you ACTUALLY tried to do anything with it(anything at all...)?

2: Windows 95, (lacking most drivers and stuff)
3: Windows XP, (just irritatingly difficult to alter things in)
4: Mac OS.

[Nightcrawler]

Ok... I still think WB3.0 is the best OS I've ever used. I guess I have a fetish of some sort :-D

Next best: FreeBSD. It was pretty hard to understand at first, but now I really like it. Logical and functional. I don't like the gui's that are available for it though. Or any *nix gui. They're probably very good, but any gui that isn't as comfortable as Workbench annoys me. I really hate clicking on things that don't respond immediately.

Worst by far: AROS. This is of course just a shameless attempt to annoy developers enough to work faster on it... Please tell me if it works. Can I please have a complete x86 native version now? I have a mini-itx system that's gagging for it :-D

Worst: Windows ME. Has anyone been able to find an OS behind the bugs? It cost me quite a bit of money, as I found that hardware was quickly accelerated upon trying to use it. Accelerated as in across the room...

Next worst: Windows 98. I'm using it now. It annoys me greatly. I get jumpy if I haven't seen a BSOD in a couple of days.

[mikeymike]

/me groans at how utterly predictable this thread started and will continue to be...

[Hooligan_DCS]

Well at least it wasn't too hard to guess everybody hates Win ME .. that really is utter #### and an example how an OS should *NOT* be done.

[hagar]

used and liked:
OS/2 v 2.1, 3.0 , 4.0 , 4.5
Ericsson Dos v 3.2
Microsoft Dos v 4.01, 6.22
Windows 2000

used and disliked:
Windows 95
Windows 98 (sucks even more than 95)

uses and likes:
Linux
Solaris

[Wolfe]

Worst & or Least Liked:

All Micro$, All Atari

Best or Most Liked:

Amiga 3.x, Mac OS X.2, Mandrake 3.1, NeXT

[hagar]

lempkee wrote:
WOrst: WINDOWS 95 / Me /3.11 , ATARI TOS
[...]

Windows 286/386, 3.0, 3.11 and 3.11 is just a graphical shell for Dos and should therefor just be considered as a crappy program for a very old operating system, not as an operating system.

[amigamad]

Th worst are
mac os the older versions
windows xp
windows 2000 pro
windows me
windows 98
red hat linux
mandrake linux


the best are

beos
qnx
suse linux
morphix linux
work bench version 3 onwards
windows 3.1
aros.
:-)

[Tomas]

wors os i have used:
1:winME
2:macOS 8 (an OS with worse multitasking than windows and crashed constantly)
3:win9x
4:winXP
5:win2k
6:winNT
(Not going to mention 16bit and older oses like Dos, win3.x and older..
The best microsoft OS was: WinNT4.0

best os:
1: AmigaOS
2: BeOS
3: linux
4: qnx

I think i would like os/2, but sadly i never was able to see it in action.

[Tomas]

hagar wrote:

Windows 286/386, 3.0, 3.11 and 3.11 is just a graphical shell for Dos and should therefor just be considered as a crappy program for a very old operating system, not as an operating system.

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

[Gaidheal]

OK... so the thread is predictable.. but funny LOL

Re: AROS, for someone who mentioned it, yes, it will run native on the x86, can't do a lot with it yet (some games and basic apps) but it does.. HDD installation not properly ready yet, though. Hosted under Linux on the x86 it will work fine.

Right.. the list...

ALL Windows 9x OSes were utter ####e. 95 was essentially a GUI for DOS 7.0 and not that good a one. 98/98SE were really bad, but did in fact replace much of the DOS aspect of 95. ME was a bastardized compromise between 9x and NT. It was utterly useless, cost me a lot of money and time and is probably my biggest mistake ever in terms of judging an OS - I actually said "I reckon ME will be really good, I'd recommend upgrading" to a lot of friends.. some still won't let me live it down. They are all bad because they have no memory management at all and are incredibly unstable even aside from that.

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). NT5 is very good (that's Windows 2000 and XP btw) and I currently use XP Pro as my desktop system. The GUI in XP takes a lot of flak, but it's simply personal preference, I hate the Mac OS look and feel, including OS X. Though OS X is a very good OS.

AmigaOS... dated now. Hence the AROS project, AOS 4.0, MorphOS, etc. In their day, the versions were pretty good from what I saw, although I did not use them to speak of.

Linux... which distribution? Linux is not an OS anyway, it is a kernel. I know this gets done to death some places, but it is an important distinction, because one "linux" can be utter ####e and another very good. And a lot depends on what you want to do with it. As a desktop OS I think it is pointless. But that is only my opinion.

BeOS.. never quite delievered what it promised. Older version of MacOS... I never liked them at all. Seemed to be hard to get the same range of good software at sensible prices too. FreeBSD I think is good, but a desktop OS it is not, really. I like it for dev work, sometimes.

AROS: well I am working on the project now, so I am hardly an objective observer.. but my thoughts are as follows;

AROS is going to be platform independent (in hardware terms), it is going to (I hope!) allow all the old Amiga software to run. It will retain and improve/update the old AmigaOS look and feel, while at the same time being a modern OS with the kind of features that OUGHT to have been present in AOS, e.g. some memory protection support, non-custom hardware drivers, etc. We also hope that the API will be easy to work with for developers, when we are done. So, I intend to switch to AROS for development and even as my main desktop OS at the earliest opportunity. That is not possible right now, but it should be very soon. (I use x86 hardware of course and want native support, not hosted on top of a Linux kernel).

John

[AxE]

best OS Amiga OS & Dopus magellan2
second best QNX
third "best" WinXP (with 300+ mb of mem)

[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.