I am an OS Junkie
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It's true. I love operating systems. Not just the concept but I love the variety and getting to work with many different ones. This is probably partially a product of my age having grown up in the world of every device having its own and the differences between them being highly pronounced. Very different than today. Much of my formative IT years were around the era when OS research was at a peak and product were vying for visibility and to prove value. The era when Microsoft still had three OSes on the market, not two. The era when Linux was an upstart and the UNIX world still had half a dozen key players not including all the newbie open sourcers. The era when Apple wasn't into UNIX but was trying to figure out where to head next (see what I did there?) The era when VMS was still prevalent, when OS/400 was a major player. You get the picture. The landscape was different and BeOS was thought to maybe be the industry shaker that would change the game for forever (spoiler: it didn't.)
Since that time, the cloud-era has arisen and the vanillification of the OS landscape has happened. The Linux world has been nearly reduced to Red Hat and Ubuntu, Windows is there and FreeBSD is hiding in the background shouting in a very far off voice "Hey, I'm here too, guys." That's it. The Suses, Archs, VMSs, NetBSDs, OpenBSDs, experimental, backwater, upstart and traditionally vendor centric (Solaris, anyone?) operating systems are just not available on cloud platforms (yet) meaning that most people have begun to limit what they learn and use to a very few and generally very similar two or three choices.
With our new lab capacity, I am so excited that this is changing for us (read: me.) I've had one day to be getting things loaded up and already we have DragonflyBSD up and running (yes, the one with the Hammer filesystem!!), Suse and other OSes that you aren't finding on your cloud platforms or for sale at Best Buy. Check out that shot, even Windows Server 2016 TP4 is ready to be installed. Linux Mint 17.3 is already running too. Heck yeah, this is where it starts getting fun for me.
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Weirdo.
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I was OS junkie for Linux distro's at one point in time. But I can say they've all matured over the past few years; become little more 'mainstream' and user friendly
Most debian OS's are pretty much all the same.
I'm a big fan of OpenSUSE and PointLinux
Was using SolydX for awhile - but after recent updates and changes.. not anymore.
Madrivia back in the day use to be the tits.
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Lol. Yes - sorry you're correct. This was early 2000's... i think 2004-2006 i used it?
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Mandrake stands to this day as the worst Linux OS I've ever used. And the only one that I ever paid for support on. And the only one that turned out to actually be a scam (no support people once you paid for support, literally nothing, the whole company was just running a scam.) OS didn't install at all, did nothing.
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They all sucked at one point.. and some Linux distro's still do. I use to burn new ISO's on a weekly basis
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@scottalanmiller said:
Mandrake stands to this day as the worst Linux OS I've ever used. And the only one that I ever paid for support on. And the only one that turned out to actually be a scam (no support people once you paid for support, literally nothing, the whole company was just running a scam.) OS didn't install at all, did nothing.
I had exactly the opposite experience with it. I didn't have any major issues with it, I got it to run without any effort on all kinds of hardware, even dial-up modems worked
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@ntoxicator said:
They all sucked at one point.. and some Linux distro's still do. I use to burn new ISO's on a weekly basis
This was near the end of Mandrake at the point where people had been touting it as the best thing ever for years. LONG after other distros were blowing Windows out of the water. By 2000, Linux was very mature and problems like not installing did not exist in the practical world. Long after mainstream Linux was by far the easiest OS to deal with for end users, Mandrake didn't install or have actual support.
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Same... even installed NVIDIA drivers and was playing Wolfenstein!
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@marcinozga said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Mandrake stands to this day as the worst Linux OS I've ever used. And the only one that I ever paid for support on. And the only one that turned out to actually be a scam (no support people once you paid for support, literally nothing, the whole company was just running a scam.) OS didn't install at all, did nothing.
I had exactly the opposite experience with it. I didn't have any major issues with it, I got it to run without any effort on all kinds of hardware, even dial-up modems worked
I'm sure that it worked some places. My issues with it were that the support option was a literal scam - it did not exist at all, and that it was less usable than any other distro I had used for the five years leading up to it and all since. It was sold as the user friendly one so I got it for my wife who, at the time, was a scientist, to use as a gaming rig (it was the gaming edition) and the whole thing turned out to be useless. But any other distro installed on the same box, no problems.
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A close friend of mine use to swear by Gentoo. I would roll my eyes. Yes Portage is cool and very powerful. However, having to compile everything needed for the system along with setting flags? Some shit could take a day or longer to compile. I would always ask him WHY? You'll shave what maybe a few seconds off some application launch times?
When most other distro's could be setup in far less time and use already set packages. Although, while he had a gentoo desktop; I was running a FreeBSD desktop.. so I guess to each their own.
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Gentoo was based on FreeBSD's approach, actually. Portage was a play on the Ports system.
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When I was working for local ISP (early 2000's), we actually officially supported Mandrake (or perhaps they changed it to Mandriva already) to work with wifi cards we were installing. I was the person responsible for handling all Linux customers. I remember that wifi was working much better on Mandrake with ndiswrapper than natively on Windows. We also didn't support Windows 2000 and below.
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I remember using ndiswrapper on Suse for years!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@marcinozga said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Mandrake stands to this day as the worst Linux OS I've ever used. And the only one that I ever paid for support on. And the only one that turned out to actually be a scam (no support people once you paid for support, literally nothing, the whole company was just running a scam.) OS didn't install at all, did nothing.
I had exactly the opposite experience with it. I didn't have any major issues with it, I got it to run without any effort on all kinds of hardware, even dial-up modems worked
I'm sure that it worked some places. My issues with it were that the support option was a literal scam - it did not exist at all, and that it was less usable than any other distro I had used for the five years leading up to it and all since. It was sold as the user friendly one so I got it for my wife who, at the time, was a scientist, to use as a gaming rig (it was the gaming edition) and the whole thing turned out to be useless. But any other distro installed on the same box, no problems.
I think I ran into that edition. I might have actually got a bootleg of it, because I remember playing Tux Racer
I can't say anything about support, because I've never had a need for it, and I wouldn't pay anyway.
I've had a lot of installation issues in the past, with all kinds of systems, and majority were attributed to bad optical media.
But in the end I don't blame you for moving on, I would have done exactly the same. If a system wouldn't install, I'd just grab a different distro. -
Has anybody here actually used BeOS? I remember having it as my major OS at some point. I got the CD from some magazine, and it had some weird booting process, I think it had to be booted from Windows, only the commercial version was using bootloader. But once running, it was really great system for working with music and videos.
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@marcinozga said:
Has anybody here actually used BeOS? I remember having it as my major OS at some point. I got the CD from some magazine, and it had some weird booting process, I thing it had to be booted from Windows, only the commercial version was using bootloader. But once running, it was really great system for working with music and videos.
Not only have I used it, I still have every major book published on it AND the original BeOS off the shelf box!!
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I wish that we could still get BeOS running
Anyone have any suggestions for cool OSes to be testing out? Desktop, server or otherwise?
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@scottalanmiller said in I am an OS Junkie:
I wish that we could still get BeOS running
Anyone have any suggestions for cool OSes to be testing out? Desktop, server or otherwise?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) ? And sure, I know one or two
