Why Love Your OS?
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What is the driving force behind your household’s adoption of whichever OS you use? What do you like about it?
I ask this as I sit here working on my Ubuntu notebook. See, at my house we use OS X along with a ton of Linux distributions. My wife is really not much of a Linux user and is quite happy with her Mac. While I, on the other hand, have built a working base for helping others by taking what I consider to be painfully sad oversights with the Linux distro Ubuntu, and find workable solutions for getting things running up to par.
So if I was to answer the first question above, I guess it would be the hybrid feel between Windows and OS X that Ubuntu offers me. Surprised? Don’t be. See, I do not find myself compelled to compile anything and shock many people by showing them that with a little work, taking a walk on the wild side can be fun.
Go ahead, hit the comments before or after the Thanksgiving holiday. Tell me what about your OS you are thankful for. Ease of use, control, stability, whatever.
3 Comments
Vinu
November 22nd, 2007
at 9:56am
I’m a Ubuntu fan, but i wish it were easier to use, so newbies wouldn’nt have to struggle too much with hardware setup.
aprior
November 22nd, 2007
at 10:02am
From reading the title, I was kinda hoping you would pose the question, why are people so fanatical over one OS?
I’d like to know the mental reasoning behind OS loyalty that some people (mostly Mac users) have. I mean, it’s like they have an unconditional LOVE for this piece of software.
Now, I use whichever OS I can to get the work done; unfortunately at work that usually ends up being Windows because of my company’s needs, but I’m “fluent” in Mac System 7, OS 9, OS X, Linux and Windows and I can’t seem to comprehend how people will seemigly fight for their life to “prove” that one OS is better than the other. When run securely and properly (read as not using default settings), they’re all pretty good.
I guess that’s a discussion for another day.
To answer your question, the main driving force behind which OS I use at home is price. Guess which OS I use at home.
E. Douglas Jensen
November 22nd, 2007
at 1:59pm
I’m thankful for the opportunity to have created and led a team of superstar Ph.D. students in the Computer Science Dept. of CMU to design and build a distributed real-time OS (”Alpha”) that was a totally different OS paradigm. See my web site for a reference to a conference paper. IBM and DEC started building products based on it until unrelated business issues intervened. But the keystone technologies live on at the middleware level since there’s little point in trying to introduce new ideas into the paradigm paralyzed minds of COTS OS vendors. OMG’s Real-Time CORBA and Sun’s Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java are based on Alpha’s innovative concepts. Those concepts have also made their way into classified DoD combat and surveillance platforms. And in the last four years we have published over 120 papers in the IEEE conferences and journals, so that others can build on and carry on our work. I am very thankful and grateful to my colleagues who made my vision a reality.