I'm stuck with Windows as my favourite image manager, ACDSee, doesn't work all that well under Wine.
When I want to do online banking, I boot into Linux.
Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
#12Basically, I just need my OS to be a unix. On the desktop I also want to have great UI/UX (font rendering is part of it. Can't stand for weird font rendering on Windows, things are better on Ubuntu though.) So OS X is my choice. I also like such aspects of it as support of multitouch trackpad gestures, Recovery HD, hard drive encryption out of the box, nice backup solution built-in, awesome application ecosystem.
As Windows is not in option anyway, another point to prefer OS X over Linuxes and BSDs is Apple's Aperture app. I do shoot photos from time to time, so I need a nice app to process them and organize my library. Also, I need iTunes to sync with my iPhone and iPad.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
#13Ubuntu. I've found that a decent amount of software for development is just harder to install on Windows. The open source community seems to mostly be on Linux, and they often have the best support and installation processes for Linux.
For example, setting up Emacs and getting the packages I want installed has been much easier on Ubuntu than Windows. This has also been true for a lot of other great open source software.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
#14I use Linux daily at home and at work, but Windows 7 is probably my favorite:
Win7 is an extremely polished, and fast OS. everything just works out of the box and the UI (atleast on MS apps) is intuitive, except for maybe Windows Media.
I have a lot of gripes with OS X, especially the workflow. I find that it's slower to navigate around than Windows, especially if you don't have a trackpad -- OSX heavily relies on its touchpad to be efficient. The keybindings/macros aren't that great either, and are cumbersome and annoying to use. I also have many gripes with Finder. It looks pretty but it's not as efficient as other OS' window managers
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
#15Basically, I just need my OS to be a unix. On the desktop I also want to have great UI/UX (font rendering is part of it. Can't stand for weird font rendering on Windows, things are better on Ubuntu though.) So OS X is my choice. I also like such aspects of it as support of multitouch trackpad gestures, Recovery HD, hard drive encryption out of the box, nice backup solution built-in, awesome application ecosystem.
I'm in roughly the same camp as you here. I depend quite a bit on things generally working in a Unix-y sort of way. Not necessarily everything, but POSIX compliance is pretty important for me, since it means I can rely on a wealth of software that's already been made, in particular for command line use. Time Machine, disk encryption, and the applications already available for OS X are excellent as well.
Font rendering is also an important point of OS X for me. Generally speaking -- qua someone judging the OS based on whether I like looking at it every day -- Mac OS has the best font rendering. This in turn makes it much easier to stare at code, a terminal emulator, and many other tons of text all day. This is even better with the HDPI display on the recent Macbook Pros, which makes the screen really comfortable to use.
One of the biggest point for me is that Mac OS comes with bash and a terminal emulator. The flexibility that a shell on BSD, Linux, etc. offers me is far beyond what I could do with the Windows console back when I still used Windows as my primary OS. This is also somewhat more important on Mac OS, as Finder, the file manager (for those who don't know it), is absolute garbage. Windows still has the best graphical file manager I've seen, but I preferred to get around in the shell, so the Windows console was always inadequate.
That's probably changed a lot since then, especially with the advent of Powershell, but I'm still not convinced that Windows is any good for someone who relies heavily on a shell. Piping output into other programs and treating them as little functions to build up bigger things has saved my ass a lot. It's saved me often enough that I don't want to end up on a system that has a passable shell but lacks all the tools at my disposal on Mac OS or Linux. As such, I'm pretty committed to any OS that offers that same level of flexibility, and I've never gotten the impression that Windows could give me that.
Additionally, I also love Apple's APIs, at least Cocoa. The older C APIs are far less friendly, but they work and offer some very powerful tools as well. So, working in Objective-C (or MacRuby) is the way to go for me for a lot of personal projects. This is largely the only thing that keeps me on Mac OS now aside from it simply having all the software I know well.
All that said, it's troubling how much harder it's become to use all of my tools as I'd like. For example, in Mac OS 10.8, the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file, used to set environment variables in applications launched via Finder and such, was deprecated. I can work around this by editing a system file, but it's not a good fix, and I imagine it's only going to get worse. So far as I know, that sort of thing wouldn't happen on Linux, and is largely a result of Apple locking down large chunks of the OS, I think.
So, yeah, Mac OS for me, but only for as long as Objective-C remains mostly unusable on other platforms. That may be a long time, though, so I'm probably in this for the long haul. Either way, for the majority of the work I do -- mainly writing articles and software for my own use -- Mac OS is my preference.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
#16OS's I use in order of preference:
#1. Linux with KDE: For work, this can't be beat. KDE has insanely good virtual desktop support. You can multitask heavily and still be very efficient. I grew up with CLI's, so I view a good one as a pleasure to use, not a hindrance as some do. Customizability is nearly infinite. It's generally less work for me to get a Linux box set up to acceptable productive levels than a Windows box.
#2. Windows 7: This runs my HTPC and I use it for games, movies, etc.. There's pretty much no decent Bluray support on any non-MS OS, and I do like bluray! Win7 still has some bugs, but it's a very livable OS.
#3. Windows XP: Yup. Ancient! However, a lot of our lab gear has drivers that won't work in anything else. I use it because I have to.
OS's I have used and am glad not to anymore:
OSX. I had OSX on my laptop for most of last year. It's nice in that it has better interoperability with Linux software than Windows thanks to it's BSD roots, but if you want to use Linux you might as well use Linux!. It technically has virtual desktops, but management is primitive. I've never liked the OSX dock (Give me KBar or even the Win95 start-bar any day!). Bluray support (one third-party app that does key management over the internet!) is dodgy and gaming is still not so good, so it's not really a viable HTPC OS. Lion was also very buggy. Much worse than Windows 7. Customizability is the worst of any modern OS. Apple tries very hard to force you to do things their way. Oh, you can change things, but it's usually more trouble than its worth. I expect the OS's I use to be capable of adapting to me rather than forcing me to adapt to them. OSX is ahead of the game when it comes to trackpad gesture support, but hopefully other OS's will catch up fast.