I just want a good operating system

[miriam_e]

Amiga OS is tiny (1MB) and works really well, but has lousy support for CDs and networking
Windows 3.1 is ridiculous
Windows95 has bad network support
Windows98 works but crashes all the time
WindowsXP is slow, bloated, insecure, expensive spyware
PalmOS is fast, works nicely in a small memory space, but is not suited to keeping track of millions of files.
Most modern Linuxes are too big and too slow, though they're reliable and stable
Puppy Linux is fast, secure, stable, but has some networking shortcomings... though it is improving quickly.

Looks like I may be convincing myself to go over entirely to Puppy.

Puppy makes a Pentium 300MHz machine act like a machine 3 times the speed. It fits all your office software and operating system, along with networking, multimedia, and other software into 90MB or less (40MB for some smaller distributions). It resurrects machines previously thought unusable and makes them fast, sleek, and responsive.

http://puppyos.org/

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough I'm struggling to network an XP laptop and a Win98 workstation now.

I've had networking problems on and off for two years at home.
Just installing the NIC driver has been a nightmare. For some reason I've having to point it in the direction of individual files on the floppy.

*grumble*

I did DL Puppy last time you suggested it. I have an old Pentium 133 I might have a crack at running it on.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I should mention that Puppy's networking shortcomings are to do with Puppy networking with other computers running Puppy.

It easily networks with Windows computers. I use Puppy on my biggest, fastest machine now, and backup all my Windows stuff there. I generally prefer to use my Puppy machine to view DVDs and video files these days too.

I can use FTP to transfer files between Puppy installations, but that's tedious. I want to use the networked filing system (NFS) to work on files directly. This is something that Linux is traditionally very good at... but Puppy is just learning how to do. I give it maybe another 6 months and that part of Puppy will likely be working properly too. In the meantime FTP is not a gigantic hurdle.

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Now I'm even more tempted.
*kicks machine*

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

A former housemate (this was years ago, mind you) loved Minix. At that stage, it was possible to boot and run from a single floppy-disk and have networking, a web-browser (possibly lynx?), email, a compiler, and so on, all happening on a very old laptop with failing hardware.
Sounds like its design aims are similar to PoppyOS.
As a side-note, it's interesting to see that a cut-down version of RedHat Linux will be used for the One Laptop Per Child project. I'd have thought it would be easier to start with a Linux distro that's been designed from the ground-up to be small and work on minimal hardware (but I'm no kernel hacker).

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of people pushing for Puppy to be used on the One Laptop Per Child project. RedHat (or Fedora) is very slow these days. Puppy runs circles around it. Puppy isn't as customisable, but it is small, fast, and has a heck of a lot in the base version:

Wordprocessing
Web page editing
Personal accounting
Instant messenging
Addressbook, Calendar
Web browser, Chat
Spreadsheet editor
File manager
Desktop publishing
Vector image editing
Outliner, organiser
Bitmap image editing
Audio
Video
Games
Conversion, printing, scanning
Package management
Network
Window manager
Database
Help (Many megabytes of help pages)

I always intended to give Minix a shot, but got discouraged by the limitations on rights (I don't remember the details now). Puppy is completely open.

[revbobbob.livejournal.com]

WinXP isn't that awful. Yes, it's slow and bloated and full of call-home crap, but virtual memory is just this close to almost working. And it's a lot harder to create files that delete properly but their directory entries stay around on NTFS than it is on FAT32. And I have yet to have WinXP make the middle of a file vanish mysteriously, which was a regular occurrance on Win95 and 98 and Me. So I'd declare XP's virtual memory and filesystem integrity almost as good as SunOS was 20 years ago.

But if you're actually looking for "good" rather than "can almost be mistaken for adequate if you don't push it too hard", you shouldn't be thinking any version of Windows.

I toyed with FreeBSD -- I always liked SunOS back in the BSD days. Writing drivers was a snap. I even know some of the mysterious hidden bugs. Alas, the FreeBSD installer didn't love my hard drive, and that was that. I even bought a new disk controller, but still no joy.

Which is what's pushing me toward one of the more popular Linux distributions. It improves the chances of it working on my hardware.

And I used a machine at work for a while that was running Red Hat and KDE, and that convinced me it would be nice to have something a little bit more advanced than xterm. Bloat sure is insidious, isn't it?

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Always been interested in, but never tried FreeBSD. Many of my friends speak in hushed, wistful tones of BSD. And there is that whole history of computing thing that I feel like I'm missing out on by not having tinkered with it...

See my latest post (not the one about the wallabies) for a followup on efficient OSes. (Hint: OS-9)