An eclectic selection of technology with some cookery
My thoughts on Operating Systems
Below is my list of criteria for an operating system. Items 1 to 5 are critical for every one the rest is my preference.
It’s getting much less irritating over time although having said that my Window 10 system bricked it’s self recently during an update and I’ve still not got around to fixing it. Windows is still the only operating system where I’ve had a broken system for over a month. I updated a system from 8 to 8.1 and it would not restore to 8 when it broke. I took so long as the hardware vendor took a lot of phone calls and shipping time to ship some install media to do a fresh install.
Fundamentally yes I’d use it but only if I had to and certainly not by choice, it has a reasonably long OS update coverage for your hardware which is good regards security but it still does brake badly for me as of Win10. Fundamentally I don’t know it will last long term as it’s very much proprietary and driven by one company when the rest of the world drawing from open source unix / unix like platforms.
Great platform, it’s amazing what you can get for free and you normally get an amazing update system to keep things patched / quickly install software. However one wrong keypress editing a config file in sudo vim could spell disaster. Most modern distros have very good user interfaces so needing edit files at the command line is not necessary any more.
Fundamentally would I use it: Yes and I have done on and off since and late 1990s. Being Unix like it’s a similar platform to all modern operating systems and is complied for pretty much every processor architecture going depending on distro.
As much as I like Linux, MacOS just works. Having ran a MacOS system since the mid 2000’s I’ve never had a system down for more than about 30min and that’s only because I broke it doing something stupid or upgraded a hard drive and had to re-install. I’d love to run Linux but Mac’s have proven to be very reliable and easy to fix. Don’t get me wrong they have bugs and your at the whim of Apple as to when it’s fixed but it’s normally liveable with.
Fundamentally do I use MacOS and I plan to carry on doing so however I keep an eye on the Linux world as one day I will get on a par and I suspect it’s not far off. One issue is the Apple hardware is getting more and more fixed which makes a mid life RAM upgrade impossible however this does add to the general robustness of the design. Their integration to other Apple systems is also very hard to beat.
I’ve only had a brief experience of Android and it put me off. I’d only had the phone a few months when a major exploit was published for the browser which Google fixed in the next version of the OS however my hardware vendor never pushed out an update meaning I could not brows the internet on my shiny new smartphone for fear of exploit.
Fundamentally would I use Android: No, Although I believe updates are more forthcoming you don’t get them for long. I think 18months from launch is a rough guide as to how long you can expect your system to get security parches. Most manufacturers won’t even publish this time scale. I simply can’t afford to buy a newly released phone every 18months. It’s also a horrendous environment impact trowing that much hardware away.
I’ve ran iOS devices since the late 2000s and have to say I’m impressed with the ease of use and quality of the hardware. The support is amazing, I have a device that 6 years after launch is still getting patches pushed out meaning I still use the hardware and don’t need to bin it, yes the original battery is still going strong.
Fundamentally would I use iOS: Yes. Decent hardware although I’ve seen better cameras on Android but having smashed my fair share of phone I’ve never done more than a small dent on an iOS device and the life time of support is pretty amazing. One other very important factor to me is the privacy in iOS. As of iOS14 You really get control of your data and can limit every app as you want. As an aside I believe the devices to be very cost effective as you can get 6 years use compared to say 18months on Android as I’d never run an unpatched system and would strongly recommend no one does.
I hate to say it but Apple Software just works, No random system bricking and no needing to use vim / vi commands. I’d love to move away from Apple’s tied in eco system but life is just to easy and the length of hardware support is great compair to other systems.
Keywords: OS, Mac, Linux, Windows