Which OS is fast, lite, best & stable?

[bhush_18]

Can't we think of something out of Windows & Linux, something which loads fast which is light (taking less RAM memory space) hence applications running on it can utilise the memory at its most. why do we require to upgrade our system with new OS? ACtually the OS should get lighter with latest version & run faster even on old machines?
Like home user do not uses all the features of OS. Office users do not uses some of the features like multimedia.

[klinux]

Disk Operating System ???

[theraven]

EXTREMELY good point made there
but u see ... even adding those new resources /features need extra processin power im afraid
an OS is ofcourse a pool of complex code ...
but each added feature is very complex in itself !!!

well thats where linux stops ..
but im afraid microsoft doesnt think thats enuff
they add extra eye candy into their OS's and again those require a lot pf EXTRA processing power as well
ofcourse everyone has the option of a vanilla OS ... but who doesnt want a lil candy ?

besides this it also depends on ur usage ...
if ur happy with what u can do with just a handful stick to it !!

Win 98 SE is still a gr8 OS ... and many ppl are still using it ..
on their old machines i might add !!
if u can make do with it .. why not ?

ofcourse the problem with these is that they are stable ... but not 24/7 stable ...
u cant keep ur comp on and never shut it down
ofcourse thats not the case with winXP either ... but my comp stays on for atleast 5-10 days at a stretch (MIN.)

and thats y we have linux ...
u can choose ur distro. which give u features YOU want ...
and u can keep it for as long as u want ...

if ur a genius ... u can compile ur own kernel as well !!

thinkin out of these 2 options is MacOS which runs only on apples
and then there were OS's like QnX .... and BeOS ...
never knew what happened to them tho !


the kinda applications that ppl require to run ... need an OS to support it ...
which in turn requires good hardware to support
im afraid thats the way it is for now

if we could find a way to TAP unused resource of old hardware ... we wouldnt even be needing new hardware would we ?

everything is a quest for "MORE"
MORE power
MORE hardware
MORE features
MORE eye candy !
but MORE comes at a price of some very expensive hardware !

[GNUrag]

Originally Posted by bhush_18

Can't we think of something out of Windows & Linux,

There are two broad categories of operating systems. Either Windows family.... or some UNIX clone... Mac has also moved its codebase to BSD Unix now... so we are left with only two broad choices. Using Linux or any other Unix clones can become monotonous after sometime... so i think we dont have choices. Exotic OS like QNX also have Unix heritage and application support is minimal.

Just wishing to have a new OS is not enough. There's a lot more that goes inside it. What about Day-to-day applications ? And device drivers ? Currently we are struggling to motivate hardware vendours to release Linux drivers.... so in that scenario, A third category of OS cannot survive without proper driver stack and application collection.

Source code evolves and get bigger every day, so we can't really have OS getting lighter side by side...

[vysakh]

i use XP home and i like it
but still i think 98SE is the fastest. its bootup is fast and most people use win98 (i dont use it anymore)
but when it comes to reliability nobody beats XP

[club_pranay]

Try DOS.....it hardly crashes

[pimpom]

I know it isn't what the OP had in mind, but I couldn't help having the Amiga immediately pop into my mind. The Amiga died as a commercial product in the mid-90s, not because of technical shortcomings, but mainly because, like Macs, both OS and hardware were proprietary and the owners failed in management.

The last major release of the Amiga OS was v3.0 in 1992. Imagine a 12-year old OS, taking up 4MB of hard disk space fully installed, running with full GUI and 24-bit graphics, needing just 2MB RAM for system AND display. And so user-friendly that a pre-school child could learn to use it in a few minutes.

Even today it can still run rings around any version of MS Windows in multi-tasking. Correction : comparing it to Windows in multitasking is an insult to the Amiga.

A crash was something that's rarely encountered with an Amiga. System resources requirement ? I once ran my own test by doing the following things all at the same time with 8MB RAM and NO pagefile/virtual memory (I chose tasks that wouldn't finish in a few seconds) :

1. Typed a document with a word processor
2. Printed a long document with another word processor on a slow DMP
3. Went online and downloaded a large file from the Internet
4. Formatted a floppy disk
5. Formatted a hard disk partition
6. Opened a file management software and copied several large files from partion to partition
7. Rendered a digital satellite image to generate a landscape
8. Played music
9. Ran an animation
10. Calculated the value of pi to 1 million decimal places
11. Ran a video titling composition

Peak memory usage was 5.5MB. Sure, doing all those things at the same time slowed things down as I was using a 14 MHz processor, but smooooothly, with none of the jerky pauses that we've come to regard as normal with Windoze.

All these applications can be run on their own public screens at different screen settings at the same time too.

OK, I think I've bored you enough with my reminiscences... I'll go quietly before you kick me outa here. Oh, just one more thing - I let my son use my Amiga, unsupervised, since he was 3 yrs old. And he never once messed it up enough to require a fresh installation of the OS.

[bhush_18]

Pimpom, it sounds gr8 AMiga. Well I would like to try that. Let me know where will I get it? Wish to use it & then conclude. Pehle istamal karen fhir vishwas karen!

[ujjwal]

As I am reading this thread I have just come out of PCQLinux 2004... "bloated" is the word which comes to my mind when I think of it. Not bad for a home user, but bloated nevertheless.
To have a fully functional operating system which looks and feels good you dont need a fast computer at all... linux wise you have distro's like slackware & gentoo and you can use a light window manager like IceWM, fluxbox, or openbox. Coupled with browsers like opera, dillo, lynx, etc you can run a fully functional system with bare minimum hardware

And in the windows world win98SE and win95 are pretty fast.

[rohanbee]

Someone please tell me :
since i have switched over to Windows 2000 from 98 it seems more stable, is this just my imagination or is it true.......

Currently using xp (Pro) at home and quite satisfied ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,have my fingers crossed though.

[yehmeriidhain]

Well i never wanted but to point out sth i'm doing it ......... people i am using XP with SP2 installed on it . & i think it works enough fast than ne other windows ... win98 is not as fast as U all have been singing abt .. it's slower than XP far more slower than XP ..... i disliked it only for tht reason + XP is far more reliable than nething else ....

Abt this thread even when i have used so many OSes like all of U , but still i dunt wanna post nething to this question of asking the best .. ofcourse sth might be light to ur system well the other might be a light candy & some other might be non-destructible OS ( i mean can't be attacked ) unfortunately we dunt have a one!!

So i think this question is pretty difficult to answer moreover i feel like people prefer OSes according to them ... which is unknowingly quite right ... it's the USER & all the decisions R upto him whether he prefers the running OS on his system or not ... although for views & options we can look some threads tht sound like helpful to this query( like this one only) but it is still the USER & answer will stay upto him only ....

gud luck....

[pradeep_chauhan]

Guys use BeOS it is extreemly fast compact and very good for multimedia applications. The OS has some things that even windows (or linux ) do not offer its memory management and handling of multimedia data is simply superb. Try it and you will not regret it.

[pimpom]

Originally Posted by bhush_18

Pimpom, it sounds gr8 AMiga. Well I would like to try that. Let me know where will I get it? Wish to use it & then conclude. Pehle istamal karen fhir vishwas karen!

I'm afraid an Amiga OS (called Workbench) isn't something you can just install as an alternative OS like Linux on a standard PC. It goes with its own proprietary hardware like a Mac. There are two approaches to experiencing the Amiga environment. The first is to buy an Amiga computer, and the second is to install an Amiga emulator software in a Windoze PC.

Amigas have not been manufactured for nearly 10 years now, but some are still available from old stock. I think they cost roughly 20k in India. I bought my two Amigas second-hand, courtesy of friends abroad, before they became available in India. The first was a 7MHz A500 of 1985 vintage, and the second was a 14MHz A1200 made in 1992, later boosted to 40MHz.

For the second option, there are a few Amiga emulators and the most popular one is UAE. UAE itself can be downloaded for free (about 1MB) but implementing it can be quite a hassle, especially as it needs an image of the Amiga Kickstart chip which is a distant cousin of a PC BIOS but more advanced - it's a vital part of the OS.

It's much easier to use a commercial bundle called Amiga Forever which is based on UAE and includes a licensed Kickstart image, the Amiga Workbench and some useful softwares. The total package is less than 10MB and installing it is a breeze.

If you'd like to know more, PM me with your email address. I don't want to risk boring other people here to death...

Another tidbit : An Amiga doesn't need a shutdown process - you can just switch off the power or reset whenever you like.
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[klinux]

@pimpom : boring ??? no way . nice to atleast hear abt amiga if one can't have it . i heard it was revived for some time for gaming purposes and the project went POOF!!!!

[tarey_g]

Originally Posted by vysakh

i use XP home and i like it
but still i think 98SE is the fastest. its bootup is fast and most people use win98 (i dont use it anymore)
but when it comes to reliability nobody beats XP

98 is not able to use the newer hardware as efficiently as XP does ,so if u have new comp use XP.

[pimpom]

Originally Posted by klinux

@pimpom : boring ??? no way . nice to atleast hear abt amiga if one can't have it . i heard it was revived for some time for gaming purposes and the project went POOF!!!!

Yes, after the giant computer manufacturer Gateway 2000 bought Amiga, they announced big plans for it, not as a games machine but as a super multimedia computer. They seemed to be on the verge of releasing a new Amiga which was expected to be 5 times faster than the then cutting-edge Pentium 3, yet cost only half as much (That was when Digit - then called Chip - asked me to write an article about Amigas). But Gateway suddenly dropped it without giving any clear reason (and Chip lost interest, otherwise you would have had a chance to read about Amigas earlier ).

One feature of the Amiga OS that I sorely miss in a PC is the Ram Disk. This is the opposite of a swapfile/pagefile in Windoze. Unused portions of the system memory can be used as a virtual disk, and since an Amiga needs so little system resources to run, it can always spare some RAM for this virtual disk. Size allocation is dynamic and needs no configuration. It's just like a very very fast hard disk (R/W times in nanoseconds) and I used it all the time - for trial installation of new software, for temporary decompression of files, etc. It comes ready to use with the OS and is always present on the desktop.

There are third-party PC programs that can do this. I haven't tried them myself, but Windoze and associated programs are such memory hogs that PC Ram Disks are probably of limited use. And I've read comments that most of them are buggy.

Remember the fanfare announcing PnP with Win95 ? It was often called Plug-and-Pray because it was so unreliable. Well, Amigas had been quietly using it years and years before Win95. It's called Auto-configuring and it's totally reliable.

To be fair, Amigas have imperfections too. E.g., they have no Memory Protection, and a badly written program can cause a crash. Since the OS (Workbench) v3.0 was written in the days when a 4MB EDO RAM stick cost about 5k, it looks drab and dated compared to the colourful desktop of a modern MS Windows. But there are lots of ways to spruce up the appearance.

I've been out of the Amiga scene for some time now and I don't know what the current situation is with the long-awaited Workbench 4. This is to go with new Amiga hardware using PowerPC processors like Macs. Even the older Amigas are closer in architecture to Macs than to x86 PCs, and users of Mac emulators on Amigas say that it can run Mac software at the same speed as a real Mac (I haven't done this myself).

[klinux]

correct me if i am wrong , the site
http://www.winuae.net/
says the whole emulated os is 1.2 MB ??? Whole OS ?? . d/ling now , will try and tell u . do u have a webpage on ur articles on amiga , i dont want to see ur posts here disappear after 90 days limit in dig .

[pimpom]

Originally Posted by klinux

correct me if i am wrong , the site
http://www.winuae.net/
says the whole emulated os is 1.2 MB ??? Whole OS ?? . d/ling now , will try and tell u . do u have a webpage on ur articles on amiga , i dont want to see ur posts here disappear after 90 days limit in dig .

Part 1 : Yes, and that's including the emulator. The basic Amiga OS 3.0 fits, uncompressed, inside an 880KB floppy with some room to spare, with all the display and 4-channel sound drivers.

Now, 880KB may sound like an odd size to you. That's a double density (DD) diskette with half the capacity of current high-density (HD) diskettes. As you probably know, the raw capacities of a DD and an HD floppy are 1MB and 2MB respectively, but formatting takes up some space. Amiga formatting takes up less space so that an Amiga DD disk has 880KB space compared to 720KB for a PC, while it's 1.76MB vs 1.44MB for an HD disk.

I say "basic" OS because there are extras that come with the full package which, as I said in my earlier post, takes up about 4MB, and comes in 6 DD floppies. Those were the days before CD-ROM drives became affordable to the common man. The somewhat upgraded v3.5 and 3.9 come in CDs.

Part 2 : No, I don't have a website ATM. I just haven't found the time to put one up so far.

[pimpom]

klinux & others who d/led WinUAE, you might have missed the part in my earlier posts about needing the Amiga Kickstart ROM image to be able to run WinUAE. If you need help getting that, PM me.

rohandhruva, check your email.
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