Poll: What OS do you currently use?

48 points by olalonde ↗ HN
Desktop OS of course... Let me know if I missed one!

119 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] thread
Mac on the desktop, FreeBSD on the servers....
I use Windows 7 on my home computer but Open Suse a lot at work.
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Student and engineer, here: OS X on both my desktop and notebook.
CEO here, so naturally Win 7 to power Outlook, PowerPoint and IE. ;-)
CIO here, so naturally Ubuntu on both desktop and laptop ;-)
CPA here, so naturally VAX/VMS on the minicomputer ;-)
CLO here, so naturally a typewriter ;-)
FTO here, so naturally a cell phone to set off IDE's. OS of cell phone doesn't matter. It needs to be cheap because I'm just going to ditch it anyways.

Edit: Maybe a bad joke but a shoutout to the people of the world who only have a cell phone as a computing device.

Designer here, so OS X at home and work, DropBox across the board for files (hence making the laptops stationary), but I also use Outlook, PowerPoint - and check IE7/8 using Parallels when I absolutely have to. But I prefer Chrome. ;)
CEO replies to student: LOVE hackernews!
Pretty sure that reply chain is a reddit-esqe joke.
You mean Slashdot-esqe joke.
I run Ubuntu with a guest XP installation at home, a Windows 7 box at work for my e-mail and other corporate BS and a Solaris 10 machine at work as well for real work.
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Ubuntu dev and server, Windows7 pretty much just for photoshop! Havent had time to re-learn all the gimp shortcuts!
As much as I like Ubuntu and open source, Gimp won't replace Photoshop anytime soon. Photoshop is the only reason I still keep a Windows 7 VM on my machine.
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Rails and iOS developer, so naturally OS X on the desktop. Ubuntu on the server side (managed with Moonshine/Puppet).
FreeBSD desktop user here. We're as rare as the dodo, apparently.
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Mostly OS X, plus ubuntu on my netbook. I suppose I'm going to have to get used to Windows when I work at Microsoft this summer... (haven't really used Windows since XP)
I dare you to work in VirtualBox at Microsoft :)
You could definitely do it, it'd just get annoying - no benefit to a setup like that.
I ran freebsd in virtualbox at microsoft, and nobody cared.

edit: I should admit it would be nearly impossible to actually work in virtualbox (I was on the windows team, ymmv), but you can run it for whatever crap you want to do that isn't programming or email or editing docs

Arch Linux. The control of Gentoo without sitting around for five days while everything is rebuilt.
Probably more ahead of the game on new shiny things than Gentoo, too. Arch is the only OS that I have seen where the difference between testing and stable is about two hours.

No, really. The official process requires two signoffs on each architecture (x86 and amd64), and then they ship it.

And typically the AUR has whatever else you may happen to need, up to date as well. That was really what pushed me from gentoo to arch, maintaining portage overlays is a pain, and the official gentoo package repo never updates what packages _I_ think are important.
Back when I was compiling Linux on a 120MHz PA-7200 I would literally wait for days to compile KDE and a few other related packages, but with a modern CPU I now wait only a few minutes. I'm not sure that Gentoo has any real advantages over Arch but it's pleasant to use and it makes me feel good to tune my compiler flags and rebuild everything.
I use Emacs. I've had my session running for so long I can't even remember what my underlying OS is.
Then it wasn't Windows, Emacs crashes every so often on Windows XP/7
Yeah, I'd use Emacs too, if it only had a good editor...
It's okay, it's emacs, you can use it to build a good editor if you want to...
Vista, Win 7, Ubuntu Netbook, Ubuntu LTS Servers.

Vista is currently on my coding laptop, and I will be replacing it with with Win 7 or Ubuntu.

I dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my laptop.

I want to check out Mac sometime soon though.

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Use Windows 7 when doing engineering things (nearly all engineering programs are Windows only). Dual boots into Ubuntu for all my web development work.

OS X at work (Rails mostly & PHP).

Fedora, pretty much exclusively. Well, except for a random CentOS box here and there, and one really old, crufty box running RH9 (don't ask.)

Edit, just noticed the "desktop OS" specific part. So, yeah, Fedora on my laptop, and - if you want to count this - Android on my phone.

Chrome OS...
Oh my god?
It's just a Linux with a browser instead of a shell, nothing too fancy :)

There is a 64 bit kernel floating around but I haven't tried installing that yet.

There's something weird about the hardware specialization with chromeos though. About fall 2010 I accidentally my whole win 7 notebook and installed a copy of chromeos onto the harddrive before switching to arch Linux. Twas terribly slow and unresponsive, but this may have just been because of it still being a sec build not designed for a dualcore lenovo box.

Happy to report CR-48 is much more stable and fast with latest daily images.

I use a CR-48 for email/Twitter/Facebook/HN/etc., and everything else when I'm not at home.
Try out Jolicloud? I don't have a CR-48 and so I tried installing Jolicloud on my laptop but it wouldn't recognize my wireless, other than that, it seemed cool.
At work a combination of Linux and Windows 7. At home, mostly Windows 7.
Dual boot my work laptop Windows 7 (Work image) and Ubuntu (personal image). The "browsing laptop" at home is on XP and Ubuntu. The netbook is Ubuntu NBR. The desktop is Ubuntu. Two other laptops had recent, uh, physical failures in their LCDs and mainboards getting too thirsty - both ran Ubuntu.

Android and IOS on the phones.

OS X is sexy for dev
Yeah... i Accept. OS X is more glamour than any other........
That may have been true back in ... oh ... 2003.

At that time if you read articles about people going to Java conferences(1), they kept remarking about how many people were using Powerbooks. Apple also had this really small Powerbook ... 11 inches?

Anyway, Apple also had the most modern Java installed by default. Linux was still involved in a persisting match with Sun about whose freedom was the freest (probably just Stallman, but nobody wants to get in his way), so Java was hard to find and would get you ostracised. IBM had their own bizarre mutant version that ran on their boxen. Microsoft was still not returning Sun's calls after the big court battle over visitation rights, and the version of Java you'd get on any new PC was essentially random in the range of 1..N-1, where N = most recent Java.

So, if you wanted to do Java development, Apple was the coolest.

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But here's the thing. Apple fans may mock Balmer(2) jumping around on stage like an Orangutan screaming 4.('developers!') but Apple doesn't grok developers the way Microsoft does, and probably never will.

Apple is just a hair's breadth away from actually disliking developers. There's times when I feel like if they could they'd lock third party devs out and never even shed a tear over it. There's times when they throw us a bone, but those are few and far between. And fairly often they'll just take the bone back.

Example: their language support is spotty. They gave up on Java, they supported and then gave up on various trendy languages and their respective Cocoa bridges.

Apple may grok consumers (though I'd argue that) but they sure as heck don't get devs.

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(1) lots of things were cooler back in 2003... nowdays.... not so much.

(2) There were plenty of Microsoft fans doing exactly the same mocking of Balmer, so don't interpret this as an 'us vs them' thing

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Recently installed Peppermint-Ice, very much impressed by the speed and ease of installation and use.
OS X on my netbook (a hackintosh). Debian on my home server.
What notebook do you use for this? Is it fully compatible?
1983-90: DOS 3.3 and ProDOS

1990-95: MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, and OS/2 Warp.

1995-97: Windows 95

1997-2001: Windows NT 4.0 (Came free with Visual Studio 6.0)

1998-2005: Various versions of Red Hat, for both desktop and server.

2001-2007: Windows XP

2005-2011: OS X (Latest Version)

That's almost identical to my timeline (currently a mix of OS X and Ubuntu.) I wonder what is next. In your timeline you've been on OS X for 6 years and the longest duration you list for any OS is 7. I wonder if I'll ever use Android, iOS, or Chrome enough to consider it primary? And if not, what?
My first computer was powered by Windows 3.1 and DR DOS 5. I made it a dual-boot with RedHat Linux several years later.

When I was working as a developer,there has has been a dual-boot between FreeBSD and Windows XP. But in most of the years I used to run Cygwin on a Windows XP. But Finally I switched to a pure Ubuntu workstation last year.