// The OS Journal // // by hacnslash // // http://www.oldskoolphreak.com September 23, 2003 What OS are you using? Think about it for a second. If you responded "Windows" to the question, you are one of a vast majority of people that have been ripped off. If you are using any form of *nix, then consider yourself one of the few privileged to have seen the true power of computers. If you're using MacOS, then you're way better off than those Windows people, and you have a waaaay better interface than the *nix people. Actually if you're using OSX then you ARE a *nix person. In this article I will attempt to uncover the differences between the three major consumer operating system branches and discuss their future. To better understand the future, you need to know the past. Let us discuss the nature of the history of the operating system. The earliest of computers lacked an operating system. This is mostly because they lacked internal storage. The user would come up with some punch cards and load the program and run it. After machines with support for libraries and linked code appeared, they spread more rapidly then before, although every manufacturer had a different OS (now, that's incompatibility, and you get pissed if some redhat dependency is off...). Up until the 60's, with every new machine came a new operating system. IBM changed that when they came out with their S/360 series of computers. These machines all ran OS/360. After this the AT&T Bell Labs spawned what is probably the greatest software invention of the 20th century: UNIX. Because of the monopoly/legal issues, AT&T practically gave it away. And so it became open-source. From UNIX the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was started at Berkeley. Linux is also an offspring of UNIX. Linux was the brainchild of Linus Torvalds, and you can imagine where the name came from (ultimate plug). I haven't mentioned yet that all of these old hat operating systems were all-console OS's. Yes, no GUI, no pretty transparency, just a raw terminal. The first company to introduce the GUI was Apple. Apple was started by a group of hobbyists in a garage. Microsoft was the second company to introduce an operating system with a GUI. Microsoft adopted the GUI in the mid-80's and since then has never let go. In the beginning Windows was just a different shell on top of the old MS-DOS operating system. With the newer NT-based Windows versions, there is no more DOS under Windows. At the present time Apple has gone old-skool on us and based their newest operating system, Mac OSX, on Unix. What could beat the best GUI ever conceived plus rock hard stability!? Microsoft is going on brainwashing people into using their OS by giving away free licenses. They are currently working on the future version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. This is supposed to include a fully 3D accelerated GUI, powered solely by the graphics card (like the X server in Linux). It will also have a new file system, incompatible with FAT or NTFS. In the meantime, we are all getting ready for the release of the 2.6 Linux kernel (now it test-5 stage). And, so we come to the end of this very short history cram session. Let's get on to the main part of the article. Let's start by making a comparison between *nix based system and Windows. When I say *nix i mean Unix, Linux, BSD and any other flavor of Unix you fancy - whatever floats yer boat. *nix was, from the start, an open source project with many people accessing the source code and able to input their idea or fixes. Windows has been exactly the opposite. From the start it was a project to make money. Only the people inside Microsoft have access to it. What this means it this: *nix systems have been evolving very rapidly and very efficiently. When a new *nix based system version appears, it is usually very bug free and very well tested. With Microsoft it is the opposite. Releases are almost always followed by a dozen patches intended to fix some bug that should not have been overlooked. You might think that Microsoft is cursed, but no, it is a very very simple reason. Think about it. How many people work at Microsoft developing Windows? Then look at how many people are working with the *nix sources. Now, if you look closely there are hundreds of thousands, maybe even a couple of million people developing for Linux and BSD and related OS's. Now, how many people work on developing Windows? It can't be more than a couple thousand. And think about this: if you're working on say... Internet Explorer, you probably do NOT have access inside the company to most of the operating system. This creates stability and compatibility issues and creates bugs and glitches that may not even appear in testing. Segue into my next point: testing. Open source projects rely heavily on real world testing by real world people. This is something Microsoft only does in beta stages of its software. The difference is this: however carefully you set up an experiment, however carefully you try to emulate the real world, NOTHING compares to real life experience. Not to say that users have a very wide range of hardware and software configurations, and this allows a very detailed documenting of bugs and programming mistakes. In the end, the idea is that open source has the advantage of being available to many people who can help in voluntarily. It's one thing when you write a program because it makes you feel good to create something, and it's another thing when you program because you have to sustain your family. Now, where does MacOS come into play here?! Well, it's not completely open source. The *nix core is open source and can be downloaded from Apple's website, but the rest isn't. So, how does Apple manage to create such a stable OS?! Well, first of all Apple was started by people who were enthused by this new personal computer technology, so they have the hacker background. But why now can Apple still manage to create such beautiful operating systems, both aesthetically and programming-wise? Apple is a company that targets a certain market. It makes computers for professional graphics designers. It's as easy as that. Of course, they branch out and you can find almost any type of software for the Mac, but this is the Mac's primary target market. The current Mac OS has the advantage of being a very stable hybrid between extreme good looks and extreme *nix stability. Also, Apple has started to branch out in the consumer market with the introduction of the ipod and the myriad of accessories available. Other Apple inventions (such as Firewire) have helped the company into other markets. All in all, Apple is probably the best you can go for if you're into good looking OS's and if you like an OS that can take care of its own configuration. The problem with Apple is cost. Nobody except Apple makes Mac hardware, so the prices are a bit steep. But not as steep as some PC manufacturers *cough*alienware*cough*. So, which is the operating system for you?! Well, people often tend to group OS choice by computer usage. By usage I mean what you use it for, not the duration for which the computer is on... So, I am not going to do that. I am going to group OS recommendations by the level of tech-savvy you posses AND by your usage of the computer. If you grew up using the command line and configuring text files, then the best OS for you is probably BSD. If you want to try *nix without going all the way, just use Linux. It WILL provide a lot of config files for you to play with, and after all the hard work it always feels good to have a rock-solid OS running stable on your machine. If you want the *nix goodness without all that ugly config file editing, you should try some of the "n00b" Linux distro's, like: RedHat, Mndrake or SuSE. If you want to go all out and have the moolah to do so, go Mac. OSX does have the best GUI, in my opinion, ever developed and its ease of use if superb. The other reason to use a Mac is if you are doing graphics work. While you can manage with graphics on Windows and Linux, the software selection is more refined for MacOS. If you dread the command line and hate the config file, then Windows is the way for you to go, but I am an advocate of "everybody can learn to love" an OS. Look, using Windows will increase your chance of data loss, being hacked into and being made fun of by Linux people like me (haha). Think about this: there are thousands of times more Windows viruses each year than there have been Linux viruses EVER! With Mac I believe the number stands at under 100 viruses ever, but I might be wrong. With Linux that number drops even further. This alone is reason enough to warrant a change from Windows to Mac or Linux. Although there are actually people who say that Linux isn't ready for the desktop (bullcrap), I have been running it on my personal rig for a long time now and have never been happier with the performance my PC oozes. We've talked about the past and present of operating systems. But, what about their future? What can we expect from the OS's we all know and hold dear? Well, I can tell you what I think the next evolutionary stage in the PC's family tree is. Not too far ahead in the future, we will begin to see an all in one computer, probably much like the imac, that runs an open-source *nix based operating system. It will have OSX style looks, probably with a 3D interface and with the ability to self-configure. Apart from this, we should see newer versions of the current OS's. Microsoft is coming out with the next version of its OS probably in late 2005 (code-named Longhorn). In 2007 it plans to release Blackcomb, the next server edition of Windows. The next Linux kernel release will be 2.6 (right now in test-5 stage). This will include even more configurable features and will be a big joy to all you kernel-recompile whores out there. Apple is currently working on version 10.3 of OSX, hopefully it will be available at a smaller price than 10.2 was (guys, these are point releases... get yo shit together). So, as we await anxiously for the next release of our favorite operating system, please give a thought to the other OS's and maybe, just maybe you will find your right match.