What OS do you use and why?

[Roman]

And how do you have it set up (your WM, DE, icon theme, etc)?

I use OS X, because:
1) It has nice design.
2) It is stable.
3) It has good compatibility with Unix programs.

Edit: I also used different Linux distros, Gentoo and Arch are my favourite.
Edit 2: on Gentoo I used a bare console, on Arch I used Openbox with Tint2, xcompmgr and other tools for customizing UI.

[max]

And how do you have it set up (your WM, DE, icon theme, etc)?

OS X for developing/other (best UI/UX, stable, unix but with all the software)
Windows for gaming

[EgeO]

I am using Arch Linux, Gnome-shell/Cinnamon and KDE as desktop.

[Peterbjornx]

For work: Windows
For all other stuff including osdev: Debian Wheezy using the GNOME3-Classic desktop

[thomasloven]

I use OS X.

...

[...] and why?

Edit: The quoted post has now been edited.

I also use OSX.
I bought a mac a few years ago because of the then supperior battery time for a laptop.
I was planning to run ubuntu on it, but soon realized that OSX has pretty much everything I ask for in a unix system.
The battery thing may have been an uninformed decision, and I've since ran into a lot of limitations, but I've stuck with it anyway.

[AndrewAPrice]

I use Windows 7. Why? We use Visual Studio at work. Video games at home.

I also use Arch Linux, with KDE. Why? We do a lot of work on Unix servers, so it's nice having a POSIX environment to develop on. I also like the ability to mount SSH directories on hundreds of different servers locally. Why Arch Linux? Because I'm most familiar with it and can support it myself.

I have a dual monitor setup, so I boot Windows and full screen remote desktop Linux on my second monitor. Clipboard is shared, and I mount a Windows share in Linux so I can share files. Works really well.

[Kevin]

Linux, because tyndur just doesn't cut it. (But I'm curious: Is anyone around here using their OS for more than just testing?)

[Combuster]

Is anyone around here using their OS for more than just testing?)

I rebuilt my foreign language training program to run on my OS (it used to be DOS.only), and I have done a few sessions with that.

[Brendan]

Hi,

For OS development, "networking services" (DHCP, HTTP, FTP, TFTP, NFS and samba, NTP), archiving and web browsing I use Gentoo Linux, because it seemed like a good idea at the time and I've been too lazy to switch to something else. Note: "seemed like a good idea" is very different to "was a good idea in hindsight".

For games, more web browsing and multi-media I'm currently using Windows 8.1, because I'm too lazy to change to Windows 7. Note: I thought I'd get used to the Windows 8 GUI eventually, but I still don't like it. What I'd really prefer is the Windows 8 "internals" with the Windows 7 GUI on top.


Cheers,

Brendan

[EgeO]

Gentoo is not a good place to be lazy (With all compiling time etc..)

[SoLDMG]

But I'm curious: Is anyone around here using their OS for more than just testing?

I originally started to get interested in OSDev a couple of years ago to create and install something on my crappy netbook that actually worked. I tried installing Dragonfly BSD and later on Linux multiple times (DSL, Ubuntu, Fedora among some others) and it didn't work. So now I'm kinda left on my own devices.

[onlyonemac]

I use Linux because Windows absolutely sucks. I used to have an old Xubuntu system but I put Linux Mint (the MATE edition version because I don't like the Cinnamon desktop environment) on my laptop because I got frustrated trying to watch videos on that other old system and I like having Flash and Javascript all working out of the box. I did try operating systems development under Windows before I switched to using Linux but I must say that Linux does offer much better tools - particularly something as simple and versitile as dd! (Although the lack of tools under Windows was not what meant that I didn't get going with operating systems development back then.) I like using dd to prepare kernel images where I can just link all the relevant bits together and then write it to a floppy (emulated or otherwise) along with another dd command to add the bootloader and another for the filesystem table. And of course I can put them all in a shell script so I just type "./preparedisk" and it's all ready for testing! (I actually had quite a modular approach to my scripts because "./makexxx" would compile/assemble the relevant part into a flat image and "./writexxx" would do whatever was needed to write it to disk. Then I could make "./preparexxx" to call "./makexxx" and "./writexxx" one after the other. And finally I could have the complete "./preparedisk" script which would call all the other "./preparexxx" scripts in the correct order to prepare a disk image with the operating system on it. I should have actually used a makefile but this was simple enough and the code compiled relatively quickly so it didn't matter that things were being recompiled all the time (and I hate it when there appears to be a bug but I actually wasn't rebuilding some important dependancy because of a mistake in the makefile LOL).)

Anyway we were actually talking about operating systems and what I wanted to say was that I also like old computers and I really like the classic Macintosh operating system in everything from its interface to its kernel structure. I find it very stable and everything works really neatly and it has a good, clean and elegant API which is not so convoluted that you can't remember it all at once (I find that I can actually remember the parts of the Macintosh API which I most commonly need without having to look them up, which is not my experiance with any other APIs except maybe the UNIX standard C library but that's only because it's consistent and logical, not because it's small and elegant). I also like DOS but it's really primitive compared even to the comtempary Linux systems. EDIT: I meant to add the Acorn RISC OS does have a few interesting ideas as well.

[Coty]

Curently I use 2 (Could count as 3) OSes

On my laptop I have Linux Mint 16 daul partitioned with windows 8. Linux is my primary but windows is used for anything I need windows for... like bioshock infinite. My chrome book is hacked with a spin off of ubuntu, works out really nice for a $200 laptop.

For games, more web browsing and multi-media I'm currently using Windows 8.1, because I'm too lazy to change to Windows 7. Note: I thought I'd get used to the Windows 8 GUI eventually, but I still don't like it. What I'd really prefer is the Windows 8 "internals" with the Windows 7 GUI on top.

Google start8, if you don't want to pay 5 bucks for completly moding the interface with a stable hack and disabling all the crappy hot corners, there is open source and freeware alteritives...

[Brynet-Inc]

OpenBSD, and a few embedded Linux devices. MacMinix.

[Thomas]

I have used the following operating systems extensively.

• OpenVMS
• Windows 7 , Vista ,8 , Windows Server 2008 , 2012
• Slackware , Elementry OS - ubuntu derivate, Lubuntu - my own personal systems.

--Thomas