What Operating System(s) Are You Running?

[Proinsias]

Just curious what OS's you lot are using when dropping by B&B.

I've been using mainly macs for ther past 8 years or so but have been getting a little more grumpy with each release since 10.4. Windows hacked me off beyond XP. I've tried a few linux disto's over the years: ubuntu, xubuntu, mint, puppy, debian etc, but never comitted to one as I never really knew what I was doing and there were always niggling little issues I couldn't quite solve.

I recently gave my daughter a lone of my 21.5" 2012 iMac as she's broken her ankle and can't do the fun things 9yr old's should be doing for the next 6 weeks or so. To keep me from IT withdrawl I've dragged out a 2005 Advent laptop with 512MB RAM plugged in a keyboard, mouse, stereo & a bunch of usb drives and booted up Arch Linux. Best idea I've had in years. It took a while to get a handle on it but so far I'm loving it, the Wiki & forum help is just awesome. Can't quite believe I'm enjoying interacting with a rather sad looking old laptop that in my mind was beyond comfortable day to day online usage a few years ago more than my shiny all singing all dancing imac.

I've had to go with lightweight applications to prevent this old beast from just freezing up and dying. Most of them seemed terrible ar first but after a few days of usage and a little reading they are a real pleasure to use.

I suspect most of the answers will be WIndows, Mac, Ubunutu, Android or Mint but after about 2 weeks on Arch I'm thinking some of the less popular distro's like Arch, Slackware, Gentoo etc might be more in line with the back to basics feel of B&B.

Anyway, what operating system(s) are you running? Any love for Arch or are am I alone?

 

[MrLara]

The latest Ubuntu version, on my laptop.

 

[Pebcak]

Debian on both desktops with a virtual box windows machine on one that I use to remote into work when necessary.

 

[Darkbulb]

Laptop: Win7
Tablet: Android JB
Phone: Android Froyo
N810: Maemo

 

[professorchaos]

Chromium at home, Windows at work.

 

[njpaddy]

Too old to want to be bothered learning new software so I'm still running XP on the pc I built almost 6 years ago. It runs my MS Office 97 Pro and games just fine.

 

[Slash McCoy]

Win7 here on the laptop. Don't like Win8. Didn't like Vista. Liked XP. Didn't like ME. 98 was okay. 95 blew chunks. DOS can be extremely powerful depending on what ver you got, if you know how to do shell and batch commands, etc. The Command Line has lots of handy stuff. I have tried a few different Linuxes and yeah they can be pretty okay depending on your hardware. A good Nix distro can really make a tired old 486 or similar box fly with the eagles. Tried BeOs and it was pretty cool. But my alltime favorite OS was OS/2 Warp. Lightyears ahead of its time. The banks still use it in some South American countries, under a different name. It was a sad day when IBM stopped supporting that fine operating system.

For other devices I have an unlocked and jailbroke iphone 4S running ios5.1 and I am having issues right now because apple won't let me access the app store via the app store app unless I update it and also update the OS and I don't want to do that.

Droid to the rescue! I am relying more and more on my Samsung Tab2 7" tablet, unlocked and rooted. Google doesn't care what I do with MY phone or MY tablet. It is mine, I own it, and they figure it is none of their business. Apple wants to hold my phone hostage and worship at the wormy fruity altar and be a good little cub scout and eat my vegetables because THEY know what's good for me and my preferences are of no particular importance and are not in any way meaningful. Android is really a pretty nice OS for most things.

I am sort of stuck with Windows for some things for which only very specialized software does the job for me. I won't go into the gory details, but trust me, some few of my needs simply cannot currently be met with anything else. But for everyday stuff like spreadsheet or word processing or arithmetic or graphics or audio or video manipulation, or most communication needs and internet needs, almost any OS will do. But Apple has really disappointed me after a 4 year love affair with it once I discovered jailbreakery. No more idevices for me, ever. Android, 'Nix, W7, or XP for the foreseeable future, though I am thinking about loading up OS/2 v4 on one of my laptops just to play around with it again.

 

[Graybeard57]

OSX 10.something

 

[Darkbulb]

If there is anything more polarizing in the western world than politics and religion...it's what OS you use on your phone

I dislike Apple as a company and will never use any of their products but it's been a VERY long time since I felt the need to be defined by the OS I use and to evangelize one OS over another. These days my approach is "Hey, whatever works for you" - and then move on. It's better for my heart as well - and heaven knows there are SO many bigger issues to worry about

(Note: Nothing against this poll at all - it's interesting to see what people are using - just my own personal mini-soapbox).

 

[Darkbulb]

Just curious what OS's you lot are using when dropping by B&B.

If you ask nicely maybe a mod will even provide the OS split here

 

[evnpar]

I've had about every Mac since my first one in 1976, and they've been nothing but a joy to use. I usually don't upgrade to the newest OS for at least six months after a release, until most of the bugs get worked out. I see a large number of Intel engineers as clients, and the majority use a Mac for their personal computer at home.

 

[Greg1911]

OS X 10.8, Linux Mint 13 & 14, Win7 64bit as a VM, iOS on the iPad.

 

[Lexbomb]

I just built a new PC and I installed windows 8 on it. Im not sure on in yet, I have duel monitors and I think that makes it a lot more user friendly. If I only had one I probably would have gone back to Win7 by now

 

[OldAF]

Win 7

Andriod 4.2.1

 

[Heron]

Vista. I don't know enough about computers to know why everybody hated it. It works fine for me. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
And Android 4.1.2 on my phone.

 

[Darkbulb]

Vista. I don't know enough about computers to know why everybody hated it. It works fine for me. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Actually later on the Vista got updated to be rather good. The vast majority of the negativity surrounding Vista is from the release months.

 

[JVasky]

It's nice to find a fellow Arch user! Huge fan of the pacman package manager.

 

[ImAdummy2]

Ubuntu on my laptop and iMac on my desktop simply for my photography programs like Photoshop and Lightroom.

 

[Toothpick]

OSX since 2011. before that Windows.

 

[cb91710]

Win 8 at home (with ClassicShell). Win-7 Pro at work.
I still have XP on a notebook and need that for my Techstream software.

I loved XP, but MS is dropping support for it next year, and the script kiddies are storing up all of the exploits that they find and are planning to unleash all of them after MS stops providing security updates.
Those still on XP and connected to the 'net need to consider moving on soon.