I used dos and then win most of my life.

In uni I got introduced to unix/linux and it seemed cool and "hardcore" in a nerdy way, but it was always a bit of a hassle. And it didn't run games.

In 2009 I bought my first mac, a mb pro 17" and I've never before experienced such techno lust as when I opened the machine for the first time. Mac makes hands down the best hardware and osx had the best UX i've ever encountered, but you pay a pretty penny for it. Also, the game selection wasn't that great.

But sadly, I bought an iPad 1st gen in 2010. 2 years later apple stopped releasing updates for it. That left a bad taste in my mouth cause that kind of forced obselescence is complete bs. It's ridiculous that we need to buy new hardware every 3 years to do essentially the same tasks we were doing 15 years ago. That plus the the high prices turned me off apple products. But I do understand why people like it.

Then I started working at a company that allowed us to choose our OS, so I picked linux. And for software dev, I think linux is the right fit for me. Plus it has other benefits, package managers being one, a decent terminal another, and it has the hacker cool factor (I'm one of those weirdos that likes browsing r/unixporn and ricing my setup) and also the warm fuzzy feeling of being OSS and free (as in speech) and all that jazz.

But it sucks for games and getting gfx drivers to work properly can be a bitch, especially on laptops.

So yeah, they're all good in their own way, and they all suck in their own way.

I don't really get the iPad story as forced obsolescence. It still worked right? You just don't get new features?

I think overly backwards compatibility updates can be a real drag on new features.

Think every iPad model except the first can do ios9.

agree about the hardware. however, i think the superiority of their UX is greatly exaggerated, and one of the great emperor has no clothes tricks of our time.

I think they cared about the UX way before Microsoft knew what the term meant and they are the reason there have been any improvements in it industry wide. I think the idea that an OS is "intuitive" is pretty dumb and claiming one interface is more intuitive than another is also dumb.

I hate in MacOS how the menu bar doesn't go with the window. So annoying if you are used to windows.

Can't stand osx and I own a MacBook obv. You can't page down with one hand? Are you kidding?

You think it's normal to stop releasing updates, including security updates for zero-day vulnerabilities, for hardware that's barely 2 years old?

It worked up to a point. But very quickly software started coming out that was ios 6+ only that could have easily run on the 1st gen hardware. And some older software that was working fine suddenly stopped working, like youtube last year.

+1

In 2012 Apple released the iPad 3 and the iPad 4, the iPad 3's processor was 2.5 times faster than the iPad's, the iPad 4's processor was 6 times faster. When processors are advancing that fast I do think expecting support for older hardware is optimistic. I don't want my new hardware cobbled because of some misguided attempts to support hardware 1/2 to 1/6th as powerful.

ios 6 ran on the iphone 3gs which was less powerful than the iPad 1.

Regarding Windows and OS X, remember Apple's product evolved from a closed system and Microsoft's evolved from an open system. In fact as far as desktop systems are concerned Microsoft doesn't have a hardware product. You can buy really good desktop systems running Windows but they are really expensive.

ios9 marked the first time, i believe, apple specifically tried to address not just limited storage space on older devices, but also limited processing power.

It runs, as I say, on any version of device that isn't ipad OG.

Sad as it is, seems like you just happened to be the early adopter for just the wrong product.

WRT OS X, I'm not a huge fan. I can usually get most of what I want to do done, but not always. There's plenty of times I spend hours just trying to figure out how to do very simple things I know how to accomplish on Windows, only to find out it's not something you can do.

I tend to say Mac is the OS for pure usability (even though I disagree), Windows is usability mixed with customizability, and linux is pure customizability. Just figuring out basic things like copying or moving files in linux can be daunting ffs.

really?

Not all of us were born with silver command prompts in our mouths!

iosys ranking for operating systems.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Number 1 spot is given to popular and not so popular Linux distros.

Number 2 is given to any OS X version, some will argue that 10.6.8 is the best and others like me will prefer the latest release at the time of now.

Number 3 is given to Windows 95, Windows xp, Windows 7 and 8.1

Number 4 is the TempleOS an amazing feat for a single person with or without schizophrenia and in this case with.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm an OS X person, saying that my OS shouldn't be at the top, what gives?
Currently the thing that is a big deal for me, that apple is not going to do but would be really nice is make the whole thing open source.

Whenever some Linux disto pops up that follows what Apple has done exactly or does better, i'm jumping ship but I could very well jump to another ship as time progresses.

[Operating System rating by Points]
Note: Design, User Experience, and Open Source matter in an Operating System.
-(1)Closed source is bad when it is an Operating System.
-(2)Users like an OS to look good because they're looking at it when they use it.
-(3)Operating from task to task should feel intuitive to the user.
-(4)Open source is good for an Operating System to be trusted.

Apple: 1,2,3
Linux: 3, 4
Windows: 1, 3(?)

Final score: Linux 7 points, Apple 6 points, Windows 4 points.

Some will argue that 'x' is deserving of (2) but no it really isn't.
A decent background and some nice icons here and there doesn't suddenly make it deserving of # (2).

I don't remember the exact issue, but in order to dual boot with windows, you need 4 partitions, which mine has, but you need two (maybe one, long time) partitions open. I don't have enough partitions open to resize to dual boot.

In any case, last night was a total joy. At 9:30pm, I didn't know how to swap a hard drive. At 10:30 pm, I still didn't know how to swap the hard drive for my computer, lol. I also didn't know you needed to extract the information off the ISO disk, and I kept on booting, swapping the hard drive, rebooting to windows, until I finally a) figured out how to burn from an ISO, and b) found a burner that actually ****ing worked.

Setting up Fedora was easy, obviously, but I downloaded the version with KDE Plasma. I lasted about 30 minutes with that nightmare and now I'm back in LXDE land. The DEs for Linux all suck, and it is just a measurement of deciding which one suck the least for you to use. I'm used to LXDE. I just wish it had better hot-key support and automatically resize windows, but overall, it is okay to use.

Edit to add: I obviously don't have anything to compare the speed to, but this setup is blazing fast. The boot time is so fast that I didn't even notice that the DE was up and ready for me. I'm so used to waiting and so used to nag boxes.

Of course, I proudly took my new getup to work and lo and behold, I couldn't connect to the internet. Have to wait for tech support to get on that one, but I really can't wait to measure the speedups on the databases I get from this thing.

I have no opinion of the OS thing, but I'd have to pay $2000 for a Macbook Air that matches the specs of my 4-year old machine with the SSD I have on it now. I'm pretty sure the processor is stronger on mine as well. I know about Retina screens, but I'm unimpressed with fancy graphics and couldn't care less, plus my eyes aren't good enough to tell the difference. I'm not quite feeling rich enough to spend that kind of money on a computer either.

Your eyes not being good is the reason to get a retina display, they are much easier to read than regular displays.

What are the specs of your 4 year old machine?

My machine:
i5, 2.5Ghz
6g memory
480G SSD

The base model of the 13" Air is:
i5, 1.6Ghz
4g memory
256G SSD

To be fair, I have a 2nd gen chip, so maybe these new gens are more efficient?

KDE Plasma is my fav DE of any OS lol. Granted I use the Kubuntu version so idk if Fedora butcher it somehow

Glad you got it setup nicely in the end. Linux boot time on an SSD is a revelation if you're coming from Windows on a HDD for sure. Tho to be fair, Win 8.1 did pretty well in this regard also (didn't try 8).

Quick question:
Since the bureaucracy is getting in the way I have decided to create my own little setup.

I'm collecting tweets from the public stream, it's 18-20 GB/day. I have no dedicated machine except a for a laptop. I'm collecting with a python script and directly writing the tweets (with all metadata) to mongo. Only mass storage I have is a 4GB external USB HD. My plan is to log a day -> write to usb, rinse/repeat and eventually merge into a bigger DB after each week or month.

It's not exactly the greatest setup in the world but it works (-the transfer to storage...running out of space on the laptop). Collecting for an entire year generates 7-8TB of total data so I'd just buy another external HD when done and have half a year archived on each drive.

[I think I could also write the data to the USB directly...not sure if I want that though (massive small writes don't sound like a good idea)]

Does that seem like a reasonable approach considering the hacky nature? Any suggestions for improvement? I'll eventually think about backups/redundancy and it's not horrible if the collection stops for a bit so I don't need max uptime and failover or anything like that. Just a quick and dirty data collection setup.

I'd rather start collecting now than fiddling around for longer.

I use i3, a tiling WM (and no DE).

I realized that 99% of the time I use a computer, the app is fullscreened. And when I don´t, I spend time resizing windows so that they utilize the maximum screen space. i3 does that for me with minimal hassle.

And as a plus its lighting fast on any hardware. Con is you need to tinker with it to get the maximum benefit.

Well the next generation took advantage of lessons learned from the first generation to up the clock speed. For Mac owners, would it be possible to upgrade a Mac with a first generation i5 to a second generation i5 without voiding a warranty of some sort?

This highlights a point that I think is relevant, with Linux being a kernel, comparisons with Apple and Microsoft products are fairly done when comparing kernels with leaving the UX part out. Comparison with different distros is of course fair.