Try 10 OSes You've Never Heard Of

PC Plus ^ | 22 January 2010 | Mike Saunders

[streetpreacher]

Geeze, kind of took my tongue-in-cheek comment and ran with it?

[MichiganMan]

If it was, then yeah I did. But its not like you gave us that much to work with.

[TChris]

Yawn.

Same Windows-bashing, different day.

1. Install anti-virus. There are good free ones available.

2. Windows comes with Defender, a decent anti-spyware app.

3. Use the hardware firewall in your WAP or router.

4. Windows firewall is already activated on install.

What Windows is vulnerable to in a magazine's lab is utterly irrelevant. Windows 7 is a very good O/S, and a HUGE improvement to Vista.

Here are the infection rates per 1000 executions of the MSRT for the most recent versions of Windows, prior to 7. There is NO question that MS has made huge improvements on this front.

[rurgan]

Back away from the Macintosh.

Microsoft Windows 7 will destroy all OS’s!

[altair]

I also like ReactOS

I didn't say I liked it in the sense that I like using it. The Microsoft Windows interface makes want to drive an ice pick through my forehead. I'd like to see Microsoft Windows as Open Source so stupid game coders don't limit their games to that platform.

I like Free computer software, but that certainly doesn't mean that I'm not willing to pay for it. I bought multiple copies of Turbolinux, for example, when I worked there even though I was one of the people who created it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Ha,...same as mine.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Looked at Linux Mint?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Does ReactOS address the Major problem of Windows,...It's allowance of access via the internet to activate command level actions ( my description ).

[altair]

Does ReactOS address the Major problem of Windows,...It's allowance of access via the internet to activate command level actions ( my description ).

I don't know. I would hope not as it's difficult to see a group of Open Source programmers deliberately putting in a security misfeature. At least in today's environment. A decade and a half ago, when I was Mr. XEmacs, a lot of people had their heads buried in the sand.

[antiRepublicrat]

Face up to the facts. Andy was wrong, Linus was right.

As far as the marketplace goes, sure. But Linux would be a lot more stable if it had used Andy's ideas. Slower, sure, but more stable. As we've seen with Microsoft, stability tends to be low on the list of desirables.

[altair]

But Linux would be a lot more stable if it had used Andy's ideas.

You use that word, but I do not think you know what it means.

I had my first 1 year uptime on a Linux server around 1996. My Linux desktop at work has never crashed in the 3+ years I've been using it. I haven't had a non-test box Linux machine crash in over a decade (I was employed as a kernel developer for a year in 2002/2003 and that doesn't count - I was working on crash dump code so I had to make the machine crash). Not even my Macs are that stable.

Tanenbaum is bright guy, no doubt about it. It's just that he is dead wrong about OS architecture. I think he may be a bit jealous too, because Linus is smarter. I've followed lkml since 1995 and I'm a bit jealous of Linus' skills, to tell you the truth.

[antiRepublicrat]

You’ve heard of video drivers crashing a Linux machine? I have. That can’t happen with a true microkernel.

[smith288]

Looked at Linux Mint?

Yeah and it’s still ugly.

[altair]

I’ve heard of it. It’s never happened to me, but I’ve heard of it.

It’s kind of interesting that you should pick this particular example. It’s maybe the one thing that Microsoft Windows got right and Linus got wrong at first. Video drivers, particularly for 3d rendering belong in the kernel.

[antiRepublicrat]

It’s maybe the one thing that Microsoft Windows got right and Linus got wrong at first.

The early NT had video drivers outside of the kernel, too. They moved it in for performance as of IIRC NT 4, for which we have to thank for video drivers being able to take down Windows.

[Knitebane]

Same Windows-bashing, different day.

Yes. Very sad. Perhaps one day Microsoft will fix their products so they don't take such a bashing.

1. Install anti-virus. There are good free ones available.

I'm sure there are some wonderful ones available. One must still question why this is necessary.

2. Windows comes with Defender, a decent anti-spyware app.

Yes, quite decent. Too bad it's still necessary.

3. Use the hardware firewall in your WAP or router.

Yes, if you have one. Else you have to spend money to protect Microsoft's defective products.

4. Windows firewall is already activated on install.

And is still vulnerable to 8 out of 10 randomly selected malware packages.

There is NO question that MS has made huge improvements on this front.

Yes, just like hitting yourself in the head with a 5 lb. hammer is a huge improvement to hitting yourself in the head with a 10 lb. hammer.

But frankly, without the raw data used to create that graph it's rather useless. Except for one fact...

Every single product listed there show some rate of infection by malware. And every single one is a Microsoft product. If Microsoft had data that showed that any other OS had a similar or worse infection rate than any Windows product it would be on that list and highlighted in a big, bold font.

But all that's there is Windows.

And that's pretty much the way it is. Malware, zombied systems, botnets, pretty much every major type of pwnage of systems is almost entirely a Microsoft Windows problem.

No other operating systems have this much of a problem. At last count there were a few pieces of malware for OSX in the wild, all of them trojans that require the user to actually bypass security and install the software. The same for Linux. None for Solaris. None for FreeBSD. None for OpenBSD. None for NetBSD.

And to pre-empt the debunked fantasy that Windows only gets pwned so much because it's more popular, note that Linux/Apache is by far the most common web server platform on the Internet. And it has an infection rate much, much lower than Windows/IIS.

It's possible to build an OS that isn't a petri dish for malware. Maybe one day, Microsoft will do it.

But considering that they've been saying that they're going to clean up their act for 10 years and still haven't, I'm not holding my breath.