12 OS compete with MS

Curious if any of these you guys have tried & your opinion on them ? I know a lot of you use Linux or still do ! Some i have never heard of. Let me know your comment on the ones you have tried & are you still using it ?

Once again, an article claiming that Linux is an OS. Linux , unlike Unix, is not an OS.
Linux is the kernel and is headless.
Various Distros running variants on top of Linux make it an OS.
But it's putting the dot on the i and nobody really cares.

I have tried many Linux distros and settled for the beautiful XeroLinux .

Yes, I've tried several. No, I do not continue to use them on my workstations. I only use a Linux variant to run my NAS (TrueNAS based upon FreeBSD).

Linux continues to have one major drawback which causes it to not be accepted by the masses which is the lack of hardware support and their required drivers! It's been this way for years!

I use Linux Mint Cinnamon running from a VM quite frequently for file recovery. I haven't dug very deep into the system nor dealt with Linux terminal yet, but I'm impressed with how easy it is to navigate. The basic configuration does everything I need it to do. It's hard to turn my windows mind off and start thinking a little differently while using it, but I think I could switch from Windows to Linux in a heartbeat if necessary. But Mint is not as pretty as Windows with all its bells and whistles that most people never use anyway. It's appearance is kind of flat in comparison because it looks more like XP.

I've tried to keep Win11 clean of a bunch of stuff I rarely use so have not installed Delete On Reboot app so I've learned another trick. If in Windows I encounter files I can't delete, rather than jacking around with permissions, etc in order to delete them, I boot from the Live Linux distro, choose my Win11 drive, delete files, and poof, they're gone.

OAT said:

Once again, an article claiming that Linux is an OS. Linux , unlike Unix, is not an OS.
Linux is the kernel and is headless.
Various Distros running variants on top of Linux make it an OS.
But it's putting the dot on the i and nobody really cares.

I have tried many Linux distros and settled for the beautiful XeroLinux .

Click to expand...

What is Linux? - Linux.com

"Just like Windows, iOS, and Mac OS, Linux is an operating system. In fact, one of the most popular platforms on the planet, Android, is powered by the Linux operating system. An operating system is software that manages all of the hardware resources associated with your desktop or laptop. To put it simply, the operating system manages the communication between your software and your hardware. Without the operating system (OS), the software wouldn’t function."

Linux, an Operating System or a Kernel?​

Linux, in its nature, is not an operating system; it’s a Kernel. The Kernel is part of the operating system – And the most crucial. For it to be an OS, it is supplied with GNU software and other additions giving us the name GNU/Linux.

from: FOSSLINUX


As we can see, opinions vary.
Linux became widely used because it was free , Unix wasn't.
It therefore became very attractve and lucrative to mobile technology manufacturers.
Android is a restricted and slimmed down linux kernel with a UI tacked on to it to make it work.

My pet hate with Linux is each distro is totally different. It is so fragmented it makes an Italian coalition look like a coordinated single entity.

As for the rest - well if I wanted ChromeOS, I would buy a dirt cheap ChromeOS device.

Android OSs - well why bother when you can run fairly decent emulators in Windows, and I have various android devices anyway.

MACOS - only for military service in Star Trek Enterprise?

FREEDOS - who in their right mind would go back 30 years?

the rest - never heard of them.

PS - shouldn't this post should be moved to Chillout Section (@Brink)

cereberus said:

My pet hate with Linux is each distro is totally different. It is so fragmented it makes an Italian coalition look like a coordinated single entity.

As for the rest - well if I wanted ChromeOS, I would buy a dirt cheap ChromeOS device.

Android OSs - well why bother when you can run fairly decent emulators in Windows, and I have various android devices anyway.

MACOS - only for military service in Star Trek Enterprise?

FREEDOS - who in their right mind would go back 30 years?

the rest - never heard of them.

PS - shouldn't this post should be moved to Chillout Section (@Brink)

Click to expand...

Hey, watch it with these Italian jokes! LOL

I think you are absolutely right, GNU/Linux might have had a shot if they weren't so fragmented in their approach.
Everybody took the kernel and tacked on their own layer.
Today, there are over 600 active Linux distros.
Some of the most commonly used are Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Kali Linux, Arch Linux, and OpenSUSE, Linux distribution usage statistics show.
And what does that divisive approach give you? Well the numbers speak for themselves.


from Truelist/Statista

cereberus said:

My pet hate with Linux is each distro is totally different. It is so fragmented it makes an Italian coalition look like a coordinated single entity.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that is always one of the biggest challenges in the linux ecosystem. The whole point is that it's free to use, and free to change and therefore people are going to tailor versions to what they need it to do.

I've been supporting Linux servers in my career since around 1998. It was a huge learning curve way back in the day. i did come from MS-DOS, and have experience with Cisco IOS devices, so I was always pretty comfortable at the command line.

While I have used Linux desktops over the years for a while, I always end up back on Windows as my main machine. Primary reason is gaming. And being tech savvy, I've always been able to keep my machines up and running, free of malware, and away from viruses. So, this primary issue with Windows isn't an issue that impacts me.

My Linux experience is almost exclusively in the Red Hat area or it's variants. A lot of CentOS. With Amazon Linux, which we use a lot in AWS, has a lot of RedHat in it as well as Ubuntu.

Tons of infrastructure these days runs on Linux. Kubernetes and containers are heavily leveraged today in the IT world, and the vast majority of these run Linux.

For those interested in an IT career, stay open to Linux and learn everything you can. it's not going anywhere, and it's important to know.

For those interested in an IT career, stay open to Linux and learn everything you can. it's not going anywhere, and it's important to know.

Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more, it is a must.
I started on Unix many years ago and coming from MSDOS on IBM, it was a huge learning curve as well but I quickly realized the
benefits of Unix as it put DOS to shame.

OAT said:

And what does that divisive approach give you? Well the numbers speak for themselves.

View attachment 49226
from Truelist/Statista

Click to expand...

At the desktop layer, people need standards. They need consistency. Hardware needs to work with applications and games. Clearly a system like Windows or MacOS is going to work best here.

In the server room though, Linux is heavily, heavily used. it's built and catered to very specific tasks. It does what it does, and it does it very, very well. It's less costly, it's much smaller, it's patched faster, and it's been built as a multi-user system since day 1, so many of the growing pains windows experienced back when everybody was an admin weren't as invasive.

Nobody in the Linux world really wants to have a standard. Nobody is going to agree on what the standard would be. Linux is free to use and it's free to change and people are going to do just that to meet their individual needs. The good news is that if you learn Linux and know how to move around and use it, you can survive in any distro. Generally speaking it's the management tools that each uses that is different.

The other thing is that many, many distros are based around the same underlying upstream distro. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the de-facto standard for RPM style distributions. Other distros like Fedora, CentOS, Alma Linux, Scientific Liunx, Rocky Linux, etc...are all derived from RedHat being the upstream starting point. Therefore, they are all more or less the same under the hood. It's just how they are supported, updated, and what costs may be required to run them.

Ubuntu is the de-facto standard for .DEB style linux distros. Things like Mint, PopOS, Zoren, Faren, elementary OS, are all baesd on Ubuntu being the upstream parent OS.