To answer the original question... I started out using SunOS at college, and then switched a home PC to Slackware Linux around 1995 or so (I''d messed with Linux a bit before that - but I only really *used* it in 1995, amongst other things writing a MUD engine).

These days, I use FreeBSD. At work, we have several FreeBSD systems, and they rock - uptime is pretty much exactly equal to the time between kernel upgrades, the VM is REALLY solid (I''ve had a system hit a load average of 100 due to an errant script, and I could still get in - slowly, I admit - to kill the script without downing anything!), and FreeBSD is anal-retentive about internal consistency - meaning I can find what I need quickly, and greatly reducing the learning curve for new software. It doesn''t hold my hand - and I don''t want it to!

My home PC is currently dual-boot FreeBSD/WinXP, and we have a FreeBSD firewall on our cablemodem. I''ve played with some Linux distros, and Linux is definitely improving - but I really like the power & simplicity FreeBSD gives me.

(Amusingly enough, I don''t really like Mac OSX very much despite its BSD heritage. I''m not a big fan of wasting cycles making GUIs pretty; I spend more time in console mode than I ever have X! Even my copy of XP has as much prettyness stripped out as I can...)

Been awhile since I posted on these boards...

quote: Original post by Oluseyi

In summary, what I want is a Unix core and a highly usable UI. IMHO, KDE and GNOME spend too much time trying to be like Windows - and falling short - to meet my requirements. The problem is that my tastes are changing; I''m no longer content to tinker with stuff and set it up myself for the marginal gains or "cool factor" that yields.

I hear ya.

I used to feel a sense of satisfaction after spending a day getting X running on my laptop or hours locating drivers.
But, now, I no longer "compute for computing''s sakes". I want a computer that doesn''t waste my time and helps me get work done. No system is perfect, but Mac OS X is leaps and bounds better than any of the other major operating systems. Apple has been less ridiculous with their pricing of late, too.

Hi,

I have a newish 14" G3 iBook with 10.2 an I have to say that Apple really have done a great job. Their OS integrates supremely well with their hardware and brings a lot of advantages, such as the OpenGL desktop . Another cool thing is 5+ hours of battery life.

It runs all of the server stuff as well. I use apache, php, perl, tomcat, mysql, postgresql and jboss without any trouble.

Also, it has X11 support as well as it''s own windowing system, which allows pretty much any application to run on it.

I use redhat for my 3 boxes at home, as well as 5 servers at work. Everything works out-of-the box. RedHat is great because it''s Free, stable.

Also, I have to mention apt-get . I install it on all the machines I use. There is really nothing that I have ever used that comes close to the simplicity and power of apt.

The multimedia support on linux is great. One of my home machines is connected to the TV and Stereo and makes for an excellent entertainment platform for dvds, divx, mp3, ogg and anything else I can get my hands on.

-Spyro

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Also, I have to mention apt-get . I install it on all the machines I use. There is really nothing that I have ever used that comes close to the simplicity and power of apt.

I install apt-get on any Red Hat box I deal with.
I gotta say though, Gentoo''s portage tree has the same simplicity and a lot more programs to choose from. Of course, you have to wait for everything to be built from source - which has advantages and disadvantages.

I installed Gentoo on my laptop a few days ago and never looked back. It is now the only OS on my laptop My desktop, which is the machine I use for development, is a dual boot between WinXP and RedHat. I can't remember myself using the RedHat boot because it's a bloated piece of crap. I installed it a while ago out of curiosity and never really used it. Whenever I get some time (probably once college starts next year ) I'll replace redhat with Gentoo.

Currently my laptop has everything I need. I absolutely love Gentoo! There are currently a few conditions that have to be met before I use Linux more often then Windows.
- My current project is based on ASP.NET and I am tinkering with mono. In a few days I'm going to know if it will run my project, and if if so it will earn Linux some serious points on my scale
- I have to make sure wine supports my source control client (FreeVCS). There's currently no version for linux.
- (*) I have to find a *good* IDE. I use Visual Studio's ASP.NET designer a lot, so Anjuta and KDevelop don't fit my requirements. Perhaps I can get WebMatrix to run under wine...

If Linux won't satisfy the requirements above, I'll use WinXP for main development and will probably kick off a pet project that will allow me to work on linux. Perhaps a small cross-platform graphics engine.

EDIT: I was pleasantly surprised to find FreeVCS client installing and working flawlessly with Wine!! The speed seems to be indistinguishable from Windows! Wine is a truly amazing (and useful) project. Now I have to see if mono can run my project (that uses some fairly complex .NET constructs) and if SharpDevelop fits my needs and runs under mono.

On a different note, I am a little disappointed in Linux's scheduler. I use gentoo sources that are supposed to be optimized for simulatanious work during compilation, but I find that KDE slows down unreasonably during processor or I/O intensive operations. Windows, for instance, has an option (usually turned off on servers and turned on on desktops) that boosts priority of a process that owns the window in focus. That allows the GUI to be very responsive during processor and/or I/O intensive operations. A lot of X users can benefit from this feature on linux. Does anyone know if it's available? I heard 2.6 kernel is going to have a much better scheduler, can anyone comment on that?

[edited by - CoffeeMug on July 14, 2003 2:34:59 AM]

quote: Original post by CoffeeMug
I have to find a *good* IDE. I use Visual Studio''s ASP.NET designer a lot, so Anjuta and KDevelop don''t fit my requirements. Perhaps I can get WebMatrix to run under wine...

Just because Anjuta and KDevelop don''t hae an ASP.NET designer doesn''t mean they''re bad IDEs . I don''t know what an ASP.NET designer does really (and I''m too lazy to look), so I can''t really help you find a suitable replacement.

(Random Note: I tried the CVS version of Anjuta 1.1 a while ago, it really is a lot nicer than Anjuta 1.0; Anjuta 2.0 is still a long way off though, since it''s a complete rewrite.)

quote: Original post by CoffeeMug
Now I have to see if mono can run my project (that uses some fairly complex .NET constructs) and if SharpDevelop fits my needs and runs under mono.

I thought SharpDevelop was done with WinForms? If so, I don''t think Mono has taken the time to support WinForms yet (since they have to do it through WINE, since WinForms was designed to be as non-portable as possible, heh).

quote: Original post by CoffeeMug
That allows the GUI to be very responsive during processor and/or I/O intensive operations. A lot of X users can benefit from this feature on linux. Does anyone know if it''s available? I heard 2.6 kernel is going to have a much better scheduler, can anyone comment on that?

Probably, the best you can do in Linux 2.2/2.4 is use nice/renice to boost the priority of X manually, as far as I know. Most of the "better scheduler" patches for 2.4 are half-hacks (they work, but only to an extent and are better for some situations than others). Yes, 2.5/2.6 have a godly scheduler (of course, 2.6 isn''t out yet, but it''s close, and it will have 2.5''s scheduler).

For whatever reason, I''ve never really run into the scheduler issues people occasionally complain about, even under full load building my own projects (I really like to abuse templates, so some things take a while ) X seems responsive enough for me (and I don''t renice anything, I''m on a mostly stock Debian system); whatever, I don''t know...

quote: Original post by Null and Void
I thought SharpDevelop was done with WinForms? If so, I don''t think Mono has taken the time to support WinForms yet (since they have to do it through WINE, since WinForms was designed to be as non-portable as possible, heh).

Bases on mono''s website there is active development on winforms with wine and with a gtk port. I don''t know how far they got, hopefully far enough to run SharpDevelop. If not, I may or may not contribute some code to get the subest of winforms I need working, depending on the amount of time I have

quote: Original post by Null and Void
Yes, 2.5/2.6 have a godly scheduler...

Could you mention a few more details about 2.5/2.6 scheduler (if you know them, of course). From what I know the scheduler is targeted at enterprise customers and will not work well on desktop. I hope I''m mistaken...

quote: Original post by CoffeeMug
Could you mention a few more details about 2.5/2.6 scheduler (if you know them, of course). From what I know the scheduler is targeted at enterprise customers and will not work well on desktop. I hope I'm mistaken...

There are a couple "standard" schedulers in the 2.5 kernel that you can select at boot time (with selection without reboot as a possible future feature). The default scheduler is "as" (the "Anticipatory Scheduler").

The 2.4 scheduler has high throughput but is not as fair as it could be (better for servers and such than for desktops, generally). The anticipatory scheduler has about equal throughput, but is a lot more fair (good for most machines: desktop or server; with a couple rare usages that it isn't quite as good at). There are a couple other schedulers with varying goals but generally they don't deliver throughput that's quite as good as the 2.4 scheduler. (Hopefully I didn't screw up my descriptions any there .)

The 2.5/2.6 kernels do have a lot of support for "enterprise class hardware" (better SMP support and the like), but that doesn't mean that their support for regular desktop machines is any worse ("as" being more fair than 2.4's scheduler will probably fix your issues). You're not the only person who received that impression somehow though, I've had to read a lot of rebuttals and explanations over the last couple days (with 2.6-test1 being announced as the primary cause).

If you want to do a little reading of your own about the anticipatory scheduler (and how it compares to the others), here is a kind-of-old (a bit before "as" was merged with 2.5) link: http://www.kerneltrap.com/node.php?id=592&cid=2656

Edit: I can't type.



[edited by - Null and Void on July 14, 2003 4:27:00 AM]

I use 4 different OS unix variants - Debian, OpenBSD, RedHat and FreeBSD, in that order.

OpenBSD is only on machines that do what OpenBSD is for - my firewall, to be precise. I don''t develop on or for it, it just.... operates. But it''s beautiful. Oh and I have an old laptop (a 486!) that I couldn''t easily get any recent linux onto (not much disk and so on) but OpenBSD 3.3 runs just fine.

Debian is my chosen development platform for server or server-like software. I only run it on old machines operating like servers (they don''t have displays or anything). The biggest selling point is that I have easy access to all linux software without the need for expensive hardware. I use mainly two types of machines, old P90s (5 of them) and PPro200 (2 of those), neither of which will allow me to install any of the flashy linuxes like recent redhat. For my needs this is perfect - I do mostly architectural and system exploration things, not performance heavy "actual game" development.

I dual boot RedHat (9, upgraded recently) on my workstation, mostly for fun.

FreeBSD is the one I wish I could work more with. I really love FreeBSD and have been fortunate enough to get to work a lot with it professionally, I love to be able to use it more for my own projects but last I tried to move to it it just didn''t quite work. From slowness of ports appearing to various porting issues in my own code to a slightly steeper learning curve compared to linux, small things keep me away.

I also looked at and tried gentoo but haven''t quite found a use for it yet. Ideally one should have a better connection to use it exetensively, and recompiling so much of the system makes things very slow when working with older hardware. Maybe later.

Changing, customizing, fitting the system to one''s needs - I think FreeBSD is a strong contender for that. The beauty making a minimalist install, and just making the KDE office suite and watching it pull in X and the bazillion of dependencies, and finally it just works, automatically with zero fixing or setting up (no port install/compilation has ever failed for me - never)... it''s so beautiful.

Something that works more smoothly than linux, yet is a really enabling digital platform - I don''t know if such a unix exists.

My workstation and main development environment remains windows (XP pro), and I''m not sure I even want to change that.

quote: Original post by Null and Void
You''re not the only person who received that impression somehow though...

Actually that impression might have been faulty: I found out today that my DMA controllers were turned off Perhaps the system behaved the way it did because my harddrive settings were very primitive. Unfortunately I screwed up my entire installation by choosing an incorrect setting and corrupting my entire filesystem... It was all so nice, with all the software installed... Eh, may be I''ll waste another week on another install