best/favourite operating system

eurotrotter

recently bought a macbook
really impressed with some of teh features n mac os x
used the OS already when i was workin up in apple
was well impressed with it so decied to buy mac
however i have been met with situations now where i cant do teh most basic of things such as unzipping files etc, but i suppose this will all improve in time once i learn how.
However there is still a lot of features in windows that i miss, but from the security and stability point of view, I'd trust my mac over a windows machine any day of teh week.
I used linux in college a few years back but wasnt that impressed with its interface, thought it was very bland.
but since brickey has posted up those youtube vids, im starting to wonder abt it
so il conclude by saying mac is my favourite, cos its secure,stable,loadsa keyboard shortcuts, loads of fantastic little programs/widgets that make computing much better.
Thats not to say i dont like windows, i still miss a few features from there, such as the 'save target as' option that allows u to specify a specific location to safe to, whereas mac only offers desktop,musics,vids,pics, and recent (if u no how to specific an exact folder/subfolder,please let me know)
but i also like the mac since i can install windows with ease.
I can have the best of both worlds this way.
whereas if i bought a windows machine, id be fairly restricted in terms of OS' i can install, unless Bricky has managed to install mac os x successfully and tracked down some drivers!

I'd have second thoughts about linux, i hear its v difficult to track down drivers for h/w - this to me is a major drawback.
so let us know what your favourite OS is and why
Ed

maidhc

I use ubuntu on my laptop, XP on my desktop, and windows 2000 on my "HTPC" . I like all of them.

thebman

With the latest release of Ubuntu, I've made it my main OS over Windows (ie. its first in Grub listings). The other versions just weren't good enough IMO.

The new version is great. You can get fancy desktop effects but you have to install some extra packages. I've installed Beryl (and the unsupported Beryl packages for extra eye candy), emerald theme manager for Beryl, Kiba dock.

They are all still in development and supposedly unstable but I've not had any problems with them other than playing Open GL games which sometimes just quit.

Ubuntu now supports double click install of debs, Add/Remove programs (where you can properly add programs ranked by popularity unlike Windows), by using Synaptic package manager for individual packages for advanced users or using the terminal for even more advanced users.

Its really impressive and I've not had to use the terminal once (I have used it for convience sake but it could all have been done by GUI).

Cake Fiend

eurotrotter wrote:

I used linux in college a few years back but wasnt that impressed with its interface, thought it was very bland

There's no such thing as 'the linux interface' (unless you're talking about the CLI, which is hardly exciting in any OS) - and one of the great things about linux is the variety of window managers and desktop environments available for it. Try a few different ones (KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Fluxbox are some of the more popular).

As for my favourite... I'd say I enjoy mucking around in linux more than anything else.

humbert

I haven't used mac os but for day to day things I use windows, I've wordweb installed and so by hitting ctrl alt and w I can get a defn or spell check for any word, also skype for linux sucks balls. It's the little things.

As far as linux is concerned I'm a gentoo fanboy, learned so much about linux installing it and I don't think there's anything you can't set it up to do and because you set it up form the foundations you're much more comfortable futtering with it.

PhantomBeaker

Also for *nix interfaces there's Englightenment. I played with a livecd called Elive recently (www.elivecd.org) and I think it shows potential.

As for my favourite. I use Solaris on sparc systems a lot when I'm in work, and I think I'm in love with it (mainly because of sparc and jumpstart). But at home, I'm a gentoo fan using either KDE (brought up on that)... although I might swing back to gnome to look at the gDesklet stuff.

I don't like windows so much, unless I'm playing games. The main reason being that if it doesn't want you to do something, there won't be a way to do it. With any form of unix, enough hacking around, and it's doable. As for MacOS X, I've not played with it, so I don't know.