Best OS?

[jim boy]

Have to agree with most of the sentiment here, although I'll pump for 2000.

but whatever happened to MSDOS 4??

MACs are good of course, but I can say from experience that they can be just as flaky and unstable as Windows given a bit of time.

 

[David Votoupal]

I've never had a crash with any NT, 2000 or XP machine I've used, including my own. Prior to installing XP Professional, I used 98 on my PC, and I also used 95 and 98 on previous computers- all of which proved troublesome to say the least. Not that they were all bad, but they simply couldn't handle the amount of stuff I did on my computer.

I'm definitely not in the anti-MS camp but I'm not without my criticisms of them either.

For PCs, the alternatives are Linux, *BSD and OS/2 (aka eComStation since IBM's more or less hived it off to Serenity Systems). Another excellent alternative was BeOS, but unfortunately Be Inc went under apparently though attempts have been made to continue the system.

And then you have proprietary OSs tied to particular architectures:
- the proprietary UNIX OSs (Solaris on SPARC, HP-UX on PA-RISC, AIX on PowerPC, IRIX on MIPS, Tru64 on Alpha)
- VMS on Alpha
- Mac OS, on PowerPC
- RISC OS 4, on ARM (aka Acorn)
- RISC OS 5, on XScale (Iyonix, made by Castle Technology)
- Amiga OS4 on PowerPC (OS4 is due any day now)
- MorphOS on PowerPC (Pegasos, which is not unlike Amiga)

Most of the above platforms will also be able to accomodate Linux and *BSD.