<p>I was discussing this with a few other people and was wondering what CC's opinions were about the operating system currently on their computers. I know a lot of people who would swear by Mac OS, along with an equal number of people who insist it shouldn't be used for college (I'd be in the latter group). And then of course you have people who went out and bought Vista Ultimate for the sole purpose of using it in college. So what's your take on your comp's OS? Prefer the shiny Vista or the slick Mac OS? Perhaps you would rather downgrade to XP? Still living Win98 (god help you)? Running Solaris (you're in the minority)? Living the FOSS life (hear, hear)? </p>
<p>BTW I've got Debian testing on my secondary laptop and sidux on my primary. (Linux distros) They'll definitely serve me well in college so I see no need to change.</p>
<p>I've got an Kubuntu/XP dual boot on my desktop (soon to be Debian/XP) and an Kubuntu/XP dual boot on my laptop. The laptop came with Vista, but I immediately switched the Windows OS to XP, as Vista was ridiculously slow, even after I did a clean install. I don't use Windows much though, so it doesn't really matter what my Windows OS is.</p>
<p>I've had to use Mac OS X extensively for programming-related internships, and I absolutely despise it. It's a desecrated version of Unix. All the basic Unix philosophies have been replaced by Apple's super-proprietary software ecosystem.</p>
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I've had to use Mac OS X extensively for programming-related internships, and I absolutely despise it. It's a desecrated version of Unix. All the basic Unix philosophies have been replaced by Apple's super-proprietary software ecosystem.
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Beautifully said, hehe =)</p>
<p>Kubuntu was a bit bloated and laggy for my computer. Debian, though, runs beautifully fast; I was able to do a completely minimalistic install and build up from there. Anything Debian based is fairly nice, although the *ubuntu family has deviated quite a bit from the original Debian. In fact, in many circles the *ubuntu series is despited and labelled the wannabe-Linux-users OS, haha.</p>
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in many circles the *ubuntu series is despited and labelled the wannabe-Linux-users OS
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Yeah, a lot of the older users feel that one shouldn't get to use Linux unless he/she has gone through the ridiculously difficult install process that was a part of Linux prior to Ubuntu's creation. I see that a lot on the Gentoo forums. It's unfortunate that good distros like Gentoo are marred by communities that are so elitist.</p>
<p>I like Vista. I don't understand why everyone says that XP is better. Vista is a lot easier to use and, from my experience, it runs very smooth. Even if you have a crappy computer, you can just turn off some of the graphics settings. I loaded Vista Ultimate on a Latitude notebook that I've had since 2000. It has a 700MHz processor and 512MB of ram. Vista automatically turned off aero and translucent windows. It runs just as fast with Vista as it did with XP.</p>
<p>Vista on my Presario (800Hz, 1gb ram) definitely ran slower than XP did. On my HP Pavilion there's no difference. File transfer in Vista is slower than in XP, for one thing. I also REALLY dislike Vista's whole "run as administrator" thing - how there's always a popup asking if you want to go ahead with things, having to right-click, Run as Administrator just to get a root-account command prompt. But maybe I'm just spoiled by "su" and "sudo" :P</p>