OSDev.org

There is a thread currently active here on the forums asking what you hate about the os you use, so this is an opposite thread asking what you like about the os you use. This should exclude the os you develop, if it is in a state to be used day to day by you. This will hopefully serve as research for us all to find out what we need to be putting in our oses as opposed to what we shouldn't. Personally I use ubuntu linux and windows 7. I like ubuntu's friendliness as a development platform, that it has a tool for any programming I ever want to do, for free.
For windows 7 I like its compatibility with everything, it seems I can throw any hardware at it, and it just works thanks to years of commercial development.
What are your own opinions?

It just works. In another word, stable and robust, and mature software pool.
I like an OS that I can care less on the OS itself and focus on using applications.

I run Windows 7 on both my workstations. There are two reasons for this.

The first is gaming. I play a lot of games, and most of them only run on Windows (some on OS X as well, but let's not go there). When Steam becomes available for Linux (and that means they will probably port Source-based games as well) then I'll probably make the switch to Linux as the native OS on my machines.

The second is Outlook and Exchange. My life revolves around my Exchange account, and Outlook is the best calendar/task application I've found yet, hands down. I'd be happy to run this in a VM if need be, but it's still running on top of Windows.

So really, the thing I like about Windows isn't Windows itself (it has lots of defects, as people have detailed in the other threads) but the availability of a vast number of games and productivity applications.

I am using SliTaz GNU/Linux on this machine because:
-It is fast even on my computer (ThinkPad T20 with 700MHz Pentium III, 64MB of RAM and 30GB HD)
-It is customizable
-It is open source/free software
-It supports all the Linux programs I want to use
-It just feels comfortable (Used solaris shell on third grade in 2006, started using linux on fourth grade in 2007, then used OS X 10.4 from june 2011 to start of april 2012 and now back to Linux.)
-It has very familiar *nix shell and filesystem layout. I never really understood filesytem layout on OS X. (Biggest mystery was /etc/passwd)

I just love how *nix systems work and I don't have problem with multiple user intefaces. I also love AmigaOS and I am consisdering buying MorphOS license for my iBook after I get it fixed.

I'm using Linux Mint.

It works good out of the box, providing all the tools I work with anyway (and need Cygwin to utilize under Windows) in a well-preconfigured environment. It doesn't ask for ridiculous system performance just to run the OS itself. A wide choice of applications can be installed with active support of the OS - if I am missing a command line tool, the OS even tells me which application package I should install to get the desired command. (How cool is that?) It is very easy to keep both the OS and all installed applications up-to-date with neither the massive downloads nor endless "don't shut down the computer, updates are being installed" BS that Windows is giving me. It's free as in free beer, doesn't nag me about registering if I reinstall, and doesn't tell me that I'm a potential criminal at every corner.

Mind, there's lots of things I could write in the other thread, too, but I prefer to be positive about things once in a while.

I use Windows 7.

- the snap feature. I hate it when I have windows everywhere (when at most I have one full screen, or two side by side to reference something) - everything is so cluttered and cramped. When I have 30+ Windows open (spreadsheets, folders, IM windows, text editors, IDEs, browsers, etc) it can take forever to find the right window, especially when I'm rapidly moving back and forth between them. But with Windows 7 (and KDE, I don't know of any others), I can quickly drag the window to that side of the screen and it fills to take up that entire half.

- Microsoft OneNote.. I have a tablet PC, and I have tried to make the switch to Linux full-time on it, and run OneNote inside a virtual machine or Wine, but it's just not the same! The smooth crisp lines of the pressure-sensitive stylus that organically thin out as you release the stylus from the screen can't compare with the crappy tablet support in all of the virtual machines I've tried that draw blocky single-thickness lines that lag a second behind my hand.

- Direct3D - so I can play most mainstream games.

- NVidia 3D Vision - any Direct3D program automatically turns 3D. Sure you can purchase their professional version that support quad-buffered OpenGL programs - but you have to specifically code in support into the program - it's not automatic.

My favourite Linux distro is Arch Linux.. It has a nice package manager and build system.

I use it a lot at work when I'm working on software that uses the Unix build system. I run it inside of a VirtualBox in seamless mode, with the KDE taskbar on one screen, and the Windows taskbar on another. It's great - I can even copy and paste text and objects and even drag files between the two operating systems.