Worst OS ever?

[erikd]

My vote: Symbian!

(rant alert)
I've done some Symbian C++ development the last couple of months, but my god is it awful. It's horrendously designed (think classes with *hundreds* of seemingly totally unrelated methods), frustratingly unstable and incompatible, and poorly documented (official code examples are known to often just don't work or even crash your phone, if they are at all compilable).

Any other votes (+ reasons)? 

[zammbi]

Bsd, had to use that for uni for programming.
Hate a Os that expects you to know a 30 character command to get a simple portable hard drive going. It was a long set of hoops also finding someone to know it.
Found it froze my apps at annoying times, therefore loosing work. Though I'm glad I was working in eclipse for some of the crashes.
There was a list of reasons why, but its been a while since I had to use it now. Now I have a laptop I'll be using that for my work now on using windows 7.

I haven't used Symbian, but that does sound annoying to work with.

[damaxxed]

My vote: Symbian!

I (luckily) didn't develop anything for Symbian, ever, but I have to use it on my W950i.. I never, never experienced such a slow and unstable OS before 

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Tobiking]

Bsd, had to use that for uni for programming.
Hate a Os that expects you to know a 30 character command to get a simple portable hard drive going. It was a long set of hoops also finding someone to know it.
Found it froze my apps at annoying times, therefore loosing work. Though I'm glad I was working in eclipse for some of the crashes.
There was a list of reasons why, but its been a while since I had to use it now. Now I have a laptop I'll be using that for my work now on using windows 7.

This reminds me of my university.

They only use sun rays (thin clients) which you can use to connect to some Solaris server to work on. One time we had to work on a software project with Borland Together (Eclipse + some commercial UML plugins). I don't know why, but Together didn't work on these Solaris server, so they had to setup a Linux Server. But instead of connecting to this Linux server, we had to connect to the Solaris server as normal, which then opens a X11 tunnel over ssh to the Linux server. Finally there were 60 students, connecting to three Solaris server, which connect to one Linux server. It took nearly 12 minutes to start Eclipse and nearly 30 seconds to open a context menu.

[Eli Delventhal]

Mac OS 9 pretty much sucked towards the end of its cycle. Windows Vista also sucks.

[EgonOlsen]

Windows Vista also sucks.

Most people who say so have actually never tried to use it...

[zammbi]

I found vista fine myself, sp1 fixed most problems and now sp2 is in beta. But I wouldn't want to use it on something lower then 2gigs of ram.

[princec]

The "core" of Vista is OK mostly, no worse than anything else really, but the "shell" part - the file explorer particularly - is straight from Satan's Book Of Bad Applications.

Cas

[Riven]

You mean how it took ages to copy, move or delete files?

I think their unit test was roughly:

1   2   3   4

public void testFileSystemPerformance() {    // come on, this is supposed to work }

[kappa]

I've lost a ton of productive time due to vista, it just randomly goes crazy on the disk activity and brings the whole OS to a halt preventing me from using it for a few minutes.

tis indeed an evil OS

I was a big fan of windows 2000 due to its fast and snappy response times and the fact that it just let me get on with what I want to do, no nagging about this thing or that, windows usability has since gone down hill for me.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Eli Delventhal]

Most people who say so have actually never tried to use it...

I have indeed used it, and it's the security bullcrap that ticks me off. Mac OS X seems to be moving in that direction as well which is really distressing me, because typically their biggest strength is user experience. But all I've done on Vista is development and I've never had zero problems with permissions or security or popups or whatever. That sort of thing is a big pet peeve of mine, one of the big reasons I've been a Mac person so long anyway (This is a secure page, by the way, this isn't a recommended folder to copy stuff into, by the way, etc. etc.).

But now on Mac any time I open something I downloaded from the net it says, "This is an app you downloaded from the net. Are you sure you want to open it?" Makes me want to crap my pants. This type of stupid mothering they're making OSes do now because of soccer moms and old people downloading viruses is just inhibiting to anyone who actually knows what they're doing.

[EgonOlsen]

I have indeed used it, and it's the security bullcrap that ticks me off.

You can easily disable that, if you don't want it.

[EgonOlsen]

I've lost a ton of productive time due to vista, it just randomly goes crazy on the disk activity and brings the whole OS to a halt preventing me from using it for a few minutes.

tis indeed an evil OS

Depends on the underlying hardware. On a current system with at least 2GB of ram, it runs just fine IMHO. With 1GB and/or a lowly single core cpu, it doesn't run very well.

[Riven]

Vista is obviously not the worst OS ever.
Bashing Vista is too easy



My vote is Finnix, a small Linux distribution. Although it
is extremely small (less than 100MB), I just can't manage
to reboot/shutdown the darn thing without turning the
power off KILL HALT signalling + 'shutdown now' to no avail.

[kappa]

Depends on the underlying hardware. On a current system with at least 2GB of ram, it runs just fine IMHO. With 1GB and/or a lowly single core cpu, it doesn't run very well.

yeh this was on a dual core laptop with 2gb ram, seems to have gone now after i disabled a ton of services that come with vista such as system restore and a few other search related ones.

[Matzon]

I've had the misfortune to deal with symbian too - oh my, what a shit api! - I hope it withers and die quickly and that android - with a proper jvm - takes over!

[phu004]

Unix based OS sucks. Windows FTW!!

[Eli Delventhal]

You can easily disable that, if you don't want it.

This is like the Microsoft user mantra.

Me: "There's a stupid paperclip telling me what to do!"
MS: "You can easily disable that, if you don't want it."

Me: "My words are all being autocorrected to something I don't want!"
MS: "You can easily disable that, if you don't want it."

Me: "There are super irritating security dialogs all over the place!"
MS: "You can easily disable that, if you don't want it."

etc. etc.

Seriously, like any time I complain to a PC user about the needlessly massive number of dialogs that pop up in Windows and most Microsoft programs, their response is inevitably "You can easily disable that, if you don't want it." My question is, why not have the things an off feature in first place? "Easily" is completely relative to someone who knows where the option is in the overwhelmingly large number of menu items that are anything but logically ordered.

Okay, I'll stop ranting.

I used MINIX before, which was another small Linux distribution and it was pretty bad. Although I'm biased because I had to use it in OS class, and I hated OS class.

[Abuse]

I concur, my expierences with Symbian & Vista make them my least favourite OS's in their respective domains.

I gave the 7ista beta a try through virtual pc, and ignoring the obvious performance limitations of VMing, it seemed just as muddled as Vista - not sure what people are raving about.
I'll reserve judgement until it's released, but I certainly won't be going out and buying it like I did Vista. ( Cheat Me Once, Shame on You; Cheat Me Twice, Shame on Me )

[pjt33]

My vote is Finnix, a small Linux distribution. Although it
is extremely small (less than 100MB), I just can't manage
to reboot/shutdown the darn thing without turning the
power off KILL HALT signalling + 'shutdown now' to no avail.

Change runlevel to 6?

I used MINIX before, which was another small Linux distribution

No it isn't. It's the OS which inspired Linus to start Linux, because he wanted to demonstrate that Minix was taking the wrong approach.

[JoglHurt]

Windows Vista isn't actually too slow if you have enough memory and good cpu. It's just important that it doesn't have to use virtual memory and so. I know this sounds funny but I bought 8GB of DDR2 memory and it works very well. DDR2 800 Mhz is very cheap these days, only about 10 euros (10-15 dollars?) per giga so I decided to buy 8GB. I have turned of pagefile.sys or whatever it was so everything runs smoothly in my Vista.

One annoying thing in Vista is that elevation thing which is very annoying in some things especially if you want to run installer inside compressed file. Some times you have to run notepad or commandline as super user to do some simple changes to some files.

[gouessej]

Most people who say so have actually never tried to use it...

I think Windows Vista sucks and I had to use it several times to check if my bug fixes worked. I succeeded in limiting some annoying behaviors with some simple tips (deactivating the UAC...) but I go on finding it too slow, not reliable enough and really unpleasant to use. It uses too much resource for what it does and even on laptops with 2 GB I get quite unstable performance.

Unix based OS sucks. Windows FTW!!

You give a lot of arguments...

[darkprophet]

There are whispers that Android is coming to the desktop (most probably a netbook) so hopefully they will put in a proper JVM on it to speed things up......hopefully!

[woogley]

Personally, I love Vista. It was a little rough around the edges at first, but after getting my hands on SP1, I really couldn't be happier.

I'm running on 1GB RAM and a 3GHz Pentium D, and everything runs without skipping a frame. I don't see any problems with resources.. I have some of my biggest RAM hogging apps open right now (Windows Aero, Firefox, Outlook, etc.) and I'm only at 60% of 1GB

Also, Vista is easily the most dependable OS I've ever used. Check the attached screenshot. That's 369 hours (2 weeks) of uptime, not including the time it spent in standby. So I don't know what's more impressive... Vista, or my electricity provider.

Now.. the worst OS? I would have to say it would be Windows Me. Even though it was a victim of several circumstances (drive format transition to NTFS, driver issues with modems, printers, etc.), I can't help but remember the scars of 0% reliability. I literally had a BSOD occur while playing a game of Minesweeper (maybe I clicked a REALLY bad mine)

[pjt33]

Also, Vista is easily the most dependable OS I've ever used. Check the attached screenshot. That's 369 hours (2 weeks) of uptime, not including the time it spent in standby. So I don't know what's more impressive... Vista, or my electricity provider.

Ok, that triggered my sarcasm meter! Do you seriously think 2 weeks is a lot of uptime?

[woogley]

Ok, that triggered my sarcasm meter! Do you seriously think 2 weeks is a lot of uptime?

Compared to XP? Definitely. XP would be good for about 2 or 3 days but then the svchost.exe processes would hog (and keep) 90% of RAM, forcing a reboot. (Same box that is running Vista now)

Also, by statistics, my electricity should have gone out at least once by now (my boot stamp is Feb 15th)

[pjt33]

Compared to XP? Definitely.

Sure, it's better than the Windows 9x line, but Win2k should be able to manage a month easily and Linux can easily manage a year if you don't upgrade your hardware or kernel.

[woogley]

Sure, it's better than the Windows 9x line, but Win2k should be able to manage a month easily and Linux can easily manage a year if you don't upgrade your hardware or kernel.

XP is built off of Win2k..

[Martin Strand]

Sure, it's better than the Windows 9x line, but Win2k should be able to manage a month easily and Linux can easily manage a year if you don't upgrade your hardware or kernel.

RHEL4 without any kernel upgrades
~$ uptime
 18:02:29 up 1083 days,  6:55,  1 user,  load average: 0.34, 0.46, 0.47
It's a mail server processing ~100,000 messages a day

[DzzD]

probably DOS the Dirty Operating System