Poll: Which Operating System Do You Use?

[edearl]

Windows Xp professional version. You have to be in the real world.

Right now I have about 4 megabytes of free space out of 200 GB. That's right. And this thing is barely moving.

My wife, who uses windows, is a k-5 school teacher. She still has her Win XP machine for a backup, but it was slow and needed a faster machine. She works 60-70 h/wk and every minute she can save with the newer computer lets here sleep a minute more.

[Virgo]

My 7 year old Toshiba laptop with a Centrino duo processor runs next to lightning fast with windows. I use Google Chrome. I run Vipre Anti-virus daily and Malwarebytes every so often. I clean it up with ccleaner (free). I barely having anything saved on it. I use it mostly for web browsing.

Kevin

[edearl]

My 7 year old Toshiba laptop with a Centrino duo processor runs next to lightning fast with windows. I use Google Chrome. I run Vipre Anti-virus daily and Malwarebytes every so often. I clean it up with ccleaner (free). I barely having anything saved on it. I use it mostly for web browsing.

Kevin

Nice! Another 3 years and it will be a classic

[Madeliaette]

been a windows user all the time - except at the museum in Sydney - they had macs. i never did learn how to copy and paste on a mac....
got 7, prefer XP, didn't like vista muchly

[Malcolm]

Ubuntu's come a long way in the last few years Namdrol. Once its setup its a breeze.
Its a pity about Unity though. Gnome 2 was just fine. Hardware support is the main issue for me.

I never had problems with Linux. But for what I do, a mac is a far superior machine in terms of the support for unicode Tibetan and so on. Also I need to use acrobat quite a lot in my work with Tibetan texts.Linux equivalents won't cut it for me.

N

[Malcolm]

Too dense to understand any OS, so I stuck with Windows for years. Even after I got an "all-in-one" just so the desk would be clearer of machines. That AiO was an iMac; but I had a techie split the drive so I could have the familiar OE email etcetera. Then it got sick & died. I was going to replace it with one of the PC AiO machines now out there, but found out that Windows 7 cannot handle Outlook Express. So, what the hell, I got another iMac and am finding it not so terrible to figure out (provided I ignore 90% of its features).

I am using Snow Leopard because I heard of too many bugs in Lion. Anyone confirm or deny the flea-invested Lion rumors are true?

They fixed it with the iCloud release, OS X 10.7.2

N

[Tarpa]

Still running a 2005 1.25 Ghz. PPC G-4 e-mac with Leopard 10.5.6, can only put 1 GB. of ram in it so memories an issue but I mainly use it to run Pro Tools LE 8 and Reason 4 with no problems surprisingly, runs better than PT 6.9 on Tiger did.
Still putting along, the squirrel hasn't died yet.

You must be doing something right, my PC karma isn't that good, all my machines that old have died, but their memory is reincarnated in my newer machines.

I keep it pretty stripped down, at first it was an entirely pro Tools dedicated machine, keep the vents clean, run a maintenance app daily. e-macs are built like tanks, about as noisy as one too but I mainly work with midi and not mics so the noise isn't an issue, doesn't really affect monitoring. Had to get an external drive to run PT anyways so the low disk space was never an issue, can't get around the low memory capacity however and can't run big patches or the best reverbs or have many plug ins active but for what I do with it it's generally fine. Great little machine, probably have holes burned in my eyes from sitting in front of this CRT screen though, I keep a bottle of aspirin close at hand.

[Kyosan]

Still running a 2005 1.25 Ghz. PPC G-4 e-mac with Leopard 10.5.6, can only put 1 GB. of ram in it so memories an issue but I mainly use it to run Pro Tools LE 8 and Reason 4 with no problems surprisingly, runs better than PT 6.9 on Tiger did.
Still putting along, the squirrel hasn't died yet.

You must be doing something right, my PC karma isn't that good, all my machines that old have died, but their memory is reincarnated in my newer machines.

I built my wives machine in 2001 and it's still going strong. My daughter has started complaining about it being slow. I plan to build another one to replace it next year and will probably use the AMD piledriver.

The old machine still has the original hard disk drive. It must be a good one; it's gotten a lot of use.

[edearl]

[quote="Kyosan"
I built my wives machine in 2001 and it's still going strong.
[/quote]
Amazing! I guess random events prevent corporations from planing obsolescence for every unit.

[Kyosan]

Windows Xp professional version. You have to be in the real world.

Right now I have about 4 megabytes of free space out of 200 GB. That's right. And this thing is barely moving.

There are some things you can do to free up drive space. Delete the files you don't need and delete the cookies.

Empty the trash (or recycling, whatever they call it in Windows) after doing all the deletions. When files are deleted they are only moved to the trash, not really deleted. When the trash is emptied, the files are actually deleted and the space on the hard disk drive is recovered.

[Virgo]

My 7 year old Toshiba laptop with a Centrino duo processor runs next to lightning fast with windows. I use Google Chrome. I run Vipre Anti-virus daily and Malwarebytes every so often. I clean it up with ccleaner (free). I barely having anything saved on it. I use it mostly for web browsing.

Kevin

Nice! Another 3 years and it will be a classic

Yeah, and it will probably still be running then.

I used to game quite a bit. I really don't much any more but I still long in and get some XP every once in a while. Running this machine, as long as I kept it clean and didn't use much memory on it, and didn't run other programs while I played, I never had a problem. Gaming is where Vipre and some of the other things I use come in. When hackers and keyloggers are out for your account, you've got to bring out the best there is, or basically, get hacked. I have never been hacked.


Kevin

[maybay]

Ubuntu's come a long way in the last few years Namdrol. Once its setup its a breeze.
Its a pity about Unity though. Gnome 2 was just fine. Hardware support is the main issue for me.

I never had problems with Linux. But for what I do, a mac is a far superior machine in terms of the support for unicode Tibetan and so on. Also I need to use acrobat quite a lot in my work with Tibetan texts.Linux equivalents won't cut it for me.

N

THDL provides Tibetan fonts for Ubuntu. They even package them in debians so you can download through the software center. Otherwise any font can be converted with the right program. PM me.

Acrobat reader is provided on Ubuntu. But if its straight Acrobat - for creating and editing - you can install it on Wine. Wine is a Windows emulator. Essentially you can install any Windows program. Only programs I've had trouble with are full-screen games. But I didn't give it much attention.

LibreOffice is the (free) Unix equivalent of Microsoft Office, and it exports to PDF just fine. I never had a problem. It can't edit PDFs though.

[edearl]

The latest patent on PDF files was issued Issue date: Jul 16, 2002. Utility patents are issued for 20 years, which means pdf will probably be proprietary until at least Jul 16, 2022, which discourages software publishers from making free PDF editing software.

[Kyosan]

Acrobat reader is provided on Ubuntu. But if its straight Acrobat - for creating and editing - you can install it on Wine. Wine is a Windows emulator. Essentially you can install any Windows program. Only programs I've had trouble with are full-screen games. But I didn't give it much attention.

LibreOffice is the (free) Unix equivalent of Microsoft Office, and it exports to PDF just fine. I never had a problem. It can't edit PDFs though.

Have you tried Internet Explorer 8 with Wine? I tried it and it didn't work out. I probably didn't have it set up right; I have very little experience with Wine and didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to run Internet Explorer 8 so I would be able to test my version of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra on it.

LibreOffice is also available on Windows. It's a really good program; about the only thing it doesn't have that I would like is grammar checking on the word processor. The developers are working on that now so hopefully we'll see that soon.

Firefox and Chrome web browsers and Adobe Flash Player runs on linux.

[meiji1]

Windows does indeed suck, but I'm condemned to using it if I want to play the occasional new PC game. Linux sucks too, because its state as a desktop environment is pathetically below par.

I have Snow Leopard running on 6 year old Macbook Pro, and it's very good. I think my next tower computer will be a Mac Pro.

[maybay]

Linux is not a desktop environment. Its a bootable kernal with a file system and a few other hardware related doodabs. Ubuntu packages Linux and includes a whole lot of Unix program like LibreOffice or Firefox which you can find on any other Linux distribution (Gentoo, Mint, Fedora, ArchLinux etc. The list is endless.)

[maybay]

Have you tried Internet Explorer 8 with Wine? I tried it and it didn't work out. I probably didn't have it set up right; I have very little experience with Wine and didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to run Internet Explorer 8 so I would be able to test my version of the Mahaparinirvana Sutra on it.

LibreOffice is also available on Windows. It's a really good program; about the only thing it doesn't have that I would like is grammar checking on the word processor. The developers are working on that now so hopefully we'll see that soon.

Firefox and Chrome web browsers and Adobe Flash Player runs on linux.

IE is the last program I'd try run on Wine, not least because browsers are cutting edge and security sensitive. Its also the last thing Microsoft designed it for. You'd need to check dll's carefully and understand a bit more about Wine than usual.

Better still, if you have more than 2gigs of RAM, install VirtualBox and setup Windows in that. USB support wasn't so good last time I checked.

By the way what format is the sutra in that it needs testing on IE? You got a link?

[meiji1]

Linux is not a desktop environment. Its a bootable kernal with a file system and a few other hardware related doodabs.

Ain't that the truth. What I wouldn't give for a stable, mature, versatile desktop environment built on top of X11 and that kernel.

[edearl]

Linux is not a desktop environment. Its a bootable kernal with a file system and a few other hardware related doodabs. Ubuntu packages Linux and includes a whole lot of Unix program like LibreOffice or Firefox which you can find on any other Linux distribution (Gentoo, Mint, Fedora, ArchLinux etc. The list is endless.)

True, but OpenSUSE makes it appear to be a windows knock-off, whether using KDE, Gnome or another windows environment. But, it is possible to configure a command line interface; though, I only see it if I run a terminal emulator.

[Malcolm]

Ubuntu's come a long way in the last few years Namdrol. Once its setup its a breeze.
Its a pity about Unity though. Gnome 2 was just fine. Hardware support is the main issue for me.

I never had problems with Linux. But for what I do, a mac is a far superior machine in terms of the support for unicode Tibetan and so on. Also I need to use acrobat quite a lot in my work with Tibetan texts.Linux equivalents won't cut it for me.

N

THDL provides Tibetan fonts for Ubuntu. They even package them in debians so you can download through the software center. Otherwise any font can be converted with the right program. PM me.

Acrobat reader is provided on Ubuntu. But if its straight Acrobat - for creating and editing - you can install it on Wine. Wine is a Windows emulator. Essentially you can install any Windows program. Only programs I've had trouble with are full-screen games. But I didn't give it much attention.

LibreOffice is the (free) Unix equivalent of Microsoft Office, and it exports to PDF just fine. I never had a problem. It can't edit PDFs though.

The best Tibetan Font, Monlam, is part of the Mac OS 10 operating system. Why bother with WINE? Windows programs leak memory like crazy and generally slow down any system they run on. Also font technology in the Mac beats Windoes and Linux handily. The screen redraw programs on the Mac cannot be outdone by Windows or Linux.

I need to edit PDF, and mamipluate them. Even Preview, on the Mac, is inadequte for this task. Also Mac OS 10 Lion is like 30 bucks and can downloaded for one price on multiple machines.