Primary Operating System?

[lyonadmiral]

With the advent of Windows 8, I'd like to ask my fellow community members what is their primary operating system, with primary being defined as the system on the computer they use the most?

Also, what are your thoughts on Windows 8? I was a beta tester for Microsoft for years. Windows 8 was the first version of Windows since I started to not be on the beta for, and I can say that my opinion is this, unless you have modern (Core iX or AMD equivalent CPU) and touch screen, don't bother with it. A colleague of mine said this about Windows 7. "Windows 7 will be the new XP." I think he is right.

 

[Ole Juul]

FreeBSD

 

[Agent Orange]

I preorded W8 and picked it up from the Micro Center on the 26th. Where else can you get a legal OS for $38.38? That was not what my main reason however. I'm currently upgrading my main box to include the new AMD FX-8350. This chip requires W8 to be fully effective running 8 cores. There was a severe issue with 8 core chips on W7 and eventually Microsoft issued a patch. The problem was that when handling multi-threads, a core would get turned off. I don't know if I'm going to like W8 or not. I will give it a shot and from what the beta testers are saying, it has the makings of a good gaming platform. I played with a beta release last summer and wasn't impressed. The Metro feature looks like it was designed for the touch screen crowd and seems a bit confusing. I understand that Microsoft has changed the name of the Metro desktop but I don't know what it has become. Time will tell but the price was right.

 

[commodorejohn]

Been using XP since 2004 and it hasn't stopped being a perfect fit for my needs yet. I'm crossing my fingers that ReactOS will be in a usable state by the time I finally can't keep XP going anymore.

 

[Caluser2000]

Xp here. It was free with the machine I was given. Windows 8 doesn't appeal at all. Linux peps were predicting the end is ney with the pif feasco but this XP box just keeps on trucking on.

 

[retrobits]

I love Windows 8 as a desktop OS. Yes, the tiles screen might throw you off at first (it did me). But once you get used to it, it's actually a lot nicer to have your programs one click away, instead of digging through a cascading hierarchical fly-out menu. Also, at the "Start" screen (the tiles), you can just start typing the program you want, and it will come up with a progressively narrowed list as you type. The fonts and iconography are nice. I know a lot of people don't like the look and feel - but it works for me.

 

[Caluser2000]

But once you get used to it, it's actually a lot nicer to have your programs one click away, instead of digging through a cascading hierarchical fly-out menu.

We did that in dos with the likes of Magic Desk and Quikmenu. Hardly innovative. Hell, thats what I use Window Maker for.

 

[lyonadmiral]

My XPS 720 will be running 7 for a very long time. The Core 2 Quad 6600 that it has doesn't have the SLAT instructions in the CPU that Windows 8 uses for Hyper-V and is required. I did try all the work arounds, but nothing worked for me. I used Oracle VMBox, but that just didn't have the simplicity for me that Windows Virtual PC with XP Mode had. There were some other things that were missing too, some visual, some not. I prefer Aero, and I am also partial to the classic menu system, not the tiles.

 

[DOS lives on!!]

XP has everything I need for my projects, and mainly DOS support. That is why I do not use Windows Vista or 7 much. For my Macs, it depends on the most recent operating system will run smoothly on it. My Mac Mini has OS X 10.4 and my iMac G4 has 10.3.9.

 

[Compgeke]

A mix up of Windows 7, Windows Server 2012 and Debian.

 

[Maverick1978]

My laptop and work desktop use Windows 7. My general-use computer is WinXP. I'll be purchasing Win8 just because it's cheap, but having using the RTM in a VM at work, I can tell you that I hate it, and from a tech support standpoint, it's going to be a nightmare. Apps ran in Metro aren't the same as program ran from within the desktop. Things are rearranged, etc. Getting computer-illiterate senior citizens to give forth the information needed for my guys to figure out where they're at in their operating system in order to help them will be a NIGHTMARE.

Personal opinion - metro sucks for computers without a touchscreen, and are great for those that have them. My solution? Start-8. It's $5, and it brings back the Windows "Start" button, automatically booting to the desktop. If and when I go with Windows 8 as a primary OS, this will be a necessity. IMO, an operating system shouldn't get in the way of the user's ability to use and be productive with that operating system. Metro, IMO, gets in the way if one doesn't have a touchscreen. So I will be using Start-8.

 

[Old Thrashbarg]

I use XP64. It's kinda the black sheep of the MS lineup, and it's true that there are occasional compatibility issues, but it's not nearly as big a problem as it's made out to be. So far there hasn't been anything I haven't been able to work out, and it's otherwise quite reliable. Machines where XP64 won't work get regular XP32. Vista would be my second choice (but only after attacking it with vLite to strip out all the cruft), followed by some flavor of Linux. I really don't like Win7... there's no one particular reason I can point to, there are just too many little annoyances that add up. And I'm just going to pretend Win8 doesn't exist and hope it goes away.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Although I keep systems with Windows around, for everyday use it's Ubuntu. On older machines, it's Debian or NetBSD.

I no longer need to write Windows code (thank heavens) and about the only thing I do on the web is browse and email. Almost all EDA tools are available in *nix versions and the security is better than Windows. I've been on and off of Unix since about 1978, so it's not as if it's strange territory.

 

[dpatten]

At work we still use Windows XP. They finally upgraded to service pack 3 about 2 years ago. They finally got rid of IE6 about the same time. Yes, they are a bit risk averse.

On my personal machines I held out upgrading to XP until 2007. I ran 2k on all of my machines, except the wife's which was 98SE until that time. By '07 Service Pack 2 was out and XP was stable enough to consider using on everything.

I still run XP Pro on on my wife's new machine because HP decided not to release a new Windows 7 scanner driver for our $500 professional quality scanner, instead coughing up a generic hairball driver that doesn't support all of the scanner's features like automatic picture scanning and the back lit slide scanner. Also, her machine only has a PCI-e X1 slot for a graphics adapter upgrade and the built in vampire video doesn't support Aero.

I will admit to early adopting Windows 7, but only because it was really a renamed Vista Service pack. I have found it to be uniformly excellent.

Running 64 Bit Win7 Pro with "XP Mode" installed, I can run literally every program I've ever owned for Windows. Right down to Windows Entertainment pack for Win 3.0 that I had on my 286.

I've tried Ubuntu in the past and it works OK, but WINE generally hasn't been able to emulate all of my legacy Windows programs. It's been a couple of years so maybe its time to try it again.

 

[Chuck(G)]

You can run XP in a virtual box under Linux also. That's for the hard cases. Most of my Win32 stuff is pretty tame. For DOS development, DOSEMU actually does quite well (there is also DOSBOx, but I find the integration of DOSEmu a bit easier to work with).

 

[generic486]

I do not like Win 8. It is a simply a tablet OS that could be used on a desktop. This is a Microsoft scheme to drag people away from desktops. Desktops are declining in sales and I think bundling Win 8 with them is a bad mistake. I will be keeping Win7 for a long time I'm afraid. Nothing will compare to XP. Best MS operating system of this century. XP was innovative, stylish and designed for desktops (or the then many less people then who had a laptops). I thought that Win 9 when released will fix this for desktops but after reading the article below, the chance of microsoft going back are almost none.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2615...eady_why_waiting_for_windows_9_wont_help.html
Some compared this to the transition from DOS to 3.0, later 3.1 in the early 90's, however I don't remember so much negativity about it.

 

[dpatten]

You can run XP in a virtual box under Linux also. That's for the hard cases. Most of my Win32 stuff is pretty tame. For DOS development, DOSEMU actually does quite well (there is also DOSBOx, but I find the integration of DOSEmu a bit easier to work with).

XP Mode is virtualization, but it doesn't run in a box. Well, not an obvious one after you initially install the target program anyway. It puts a shortcut for programs that you install in your XP virtual machine on your Win 7 start menu. After you initially install the program in the Virtual XP environment, you can thereafter run it transparently from within Windows 7 without having to manually fire up the virtual box. It runs as though it were just another program instead of what it really is; an emulated machine running off of a virtual hard drive. With file sharing installed it's a wonderful thing.

Of course if I wanted to run something natively I could just use a 32 bit version of win 7 which supports 16 bit windows code and thunking.

I've got virtual OS's ranging from Dos 3/4/5/6 and OS/2 2/3/4 up to XP and Windows 98. It does make it handy when I have to interact with a real machine.

 

[GottaLottaStuff]

I'm about 50/50 between XP and Android. I don't like Vista, Win 7 looks OK, Win 8 looks terrible. It's usually best to skip every other version anyway. 3.0, no. 3.1, yes. 95, no. 98, yes. ME, no. XP, yes. Vista, no. 7, yes. 8, no. They try to innovate, it comes out awful, then they fix it on the next one. Then they try again.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Um, I was talking about Linux, a la QEMU/VMWare or VirtualBox. (I thought I mentioned Linux)

 

[barythrin]

I'm afraid I got tired of maintaining multiple systems so I do run what I have on the system and generally unless I'm upgrading the hardware there isn't much reason to upgrade the OS to me. My primary though is the same as the sheeple these days though. I sorta put up with whatever it comes with (well I take that back I build my own systems) so while my notebook is win 7 my home computer and work computers are triple booted with xp, 7 and freebsd (home) and gentoo which I don't use much anymore on work. I spend most of my time in Windows though for day to day use, the others generally are for troubleshooting or server configuration, etc.