OS choice

[Euro-commuter]

Yes, choice.

How to choose an OS? Do you choose it, or do you just position yourself on the MS Good - MS Bad spectrum and go from there? Or indeed just buy a PC and take what you get on it?

In the 80s, when there seemed to be more choice, the sage advice was to look first at what you want to do; then find the software that would do that; and only then decide what hardware and OS would let you run that software.

Do any of us do this now?

[timh]

I make a list of all the apps I need to run, for work.
When I'm half way through doing that I give up and install XP again.

I hated CP/M!

[Euro-commuter]

I make a list of all the apps I need to run, for work.
When I'm half way through doing that I give up and install XP again.

Yeah, that was my method ROFL

[chicane]

Buy a machine with 1Gb+ of memory, and install virtualisation software.

[Euro-commuter]

Buy a machine with 1Gb+ of memory, and install virtualisation software.

That was my plan at one time, when I liked Linux but stuck on the need for Photoshop: I could find no replacement* but I thought it would be an admission of defeat to run it on Linux under WINE.

I have since eliminated Photoshop from my must-haves, by looking around for other software that would do what I want to do with it (which is photo work, both digital and scanned emulsion: Lightzone does what I want better than Photoshop).

But I'm still interested in making the OS irrelevant by being able to pick & choose: do you have experience of this?



* Photoshop vs other photo editors: if your source image is scanned emulsion, you are going to need to do what in PS is Adjust Levels. If you want a serious quality image out of it, you need to do this step at 12-bit or 16-bit. PS does this, most others incl the Gimp do only 8-bit, which is inadequate for this purpose. I tried Cinepaint/Glasgow but couldn't get it up and running right in a short enough time to persuade me that I might like it.

(By contrast, by about 10 minutes into the 30-day trial of Lightzone I knew that I'd be buying it. Incidentally it does have a legit free Linux version).

[chicane]

But I'm still interested in making the OS irrelevant by being able to pick & choose: do you have experience of this?

Not sure what you mean here.

[Euro-commuter]

Not sure what you mean here.

What you said, virtualisation software. Do you use it?

[Ardesco]

IMHO

Debian for servers in a datacentre (plug them in and forget about them, yes you ahve to keep them updated, but they keep on going with minimal problems)

Windows for client machines, like it or lump it you need to have MS Office to be productive in a business environment until MS Office format documents are no longer the standard. I tried Open office for a few months and loved it, but it took about 5-10 mins to tweak every document that I created to make it sdisplay properly in office which is just not worth it at the end of the day.

As for servers in a office environment, I would probably go with windows just for ease of connecting up the client machines. I would still probably have some Linux servers there for storage though, or as a gateway/proxy, etc.

[chicane]

Yes, although not on my primary machine as it only has 512Mb, and the OEM version of Windows with all the crapware installed uses most of that at initial boot.

Have a home server for with 1Gb that happily runs two instances of Windows and one instance of Linux on a Windows host. Works better than you ever might imagine.

With respect to running Linux apps on Windows, you could go one step further and start running applications on a server over the network, thereby freeing up memory on your local desktop/laptop, although that's somewhat outside the scope of this discussion.

[realityhack]

What you said, virtualisation software. Do you use it?

Brilliantly - Win XP Pro SP2 works like a dream on my Macbook using Parallels - and I can pretty much have any OS I like on there, and run them concurrently, share clipboard, drag-drop/convert files between them, and have shared folders. Best of both (or many) worlds.

You do need to fill the machine with Ram though.