
Ask HN: What is your favourite OS and why? - gitgud
What makes it your favourite? How is it better than other competing OS&#x27;s?
======
aogl
MacOS and Ubuntu

MacOS for ease of use, great for pretty much most things and feels very nice
as I'm a *nix fan. Ubuntu for anything server side, don't hate the desktop
experience either.

However, Windows has really come a long way, and with the ever growing view
towards WSL, things are looking better there as of late..

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alufers
Arch Linux with the yay helper.

Just typing `yay app-software-name` and hitting enter a few times to install
any app, no matter how obscure, or proprietary it is (at least for me 99% of
software I use is included in the arch packages or the AUR). Unfortunately the
installation procedure for Arch is quite daunting at first, but the Arch wiki
helps a lot and you can use Manjaro which is presumably user-friendly.

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jayp1418
NetBSD ->
[http://netbsd.org/~kamil/AsiaBSDCon/Kamil_Rytarowski_Enginee...](http://netbsd.org/~kamil/AsiaBSDCon/Kamil_Rytarowski_Engineering_NetBSD_9.0.pdf)

Abstract Multics first appeared in 1965, UNIX First Edition in 1969, 1BSD in
1977 and NetBSD 0.8 in 1993, followed by NetBSD 1.0 in 1994. The more modern
versions: NetBSD 5.0 was released in 2009, 6.0 in 2012, 7.0 in 2015 and 8.0 in
2018. 8.0 was officially announced on July 16th, 2018. The NetBSD-8 branch was
being developed as NetBSD- current between June 4th , 2017 and July 21st ,
2019. Net- BSD-9 was branched on 30th July and 708 pull requests (884 commits)
were processed in the branch until the final release on February 14th 2020.
The development period lasting 1.5 years brought a rich set of features to the
distri- bution. These include: support for new hardware devices, massive
improvements for the ARM 32-bit and AArch64 architecture, stub of RISC-V
support, new hardware-as- sisted virtualization options, improved Wine
support, ker- nel and userland sanitizers and fuzzers, security hardening and
CPU bug mitigations, graphics stack upgrade, ZFS upgrade, debugging interfaces
refinement, packet filter policy, 3rd party software upgrades, many bug fixes,
generic enhancements and removals of obsolete code.

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uvw
Debian flavored Linux.

Linux because I always loved to tinker, customize my stuff. Not just the
computer but my home and car and I can customize Linux as much as I want.

I also love using CLI. I like to have remote connectivity to my home computer
when I am out without having to render entire GUI on my handheld device.

It's also what I am most familiar with.

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potta_coffee
I like Linux, several flavors / distributions are fine. I think it's the most
useful system in the sense that it has the most similarity to the host I'm
deploying on (that's not true for everyone though). It's finally gotten good
enough that I never have to make tweaks or solve weird driver issues when
running it as a daily driver - this is on a ThinkPad, ymmv but I'm quite
happy. Also, I have all the software I need and in fact for the work I'm
doing, the tools work better than they do on Mac (Docker / Go / Python / Lisp
/ Scheme). Windows isn't even a consideration for me. I know it works for some
people the IMO the workflow for development is cumbersome and totally un-fun.
Of course if I were stuck doing .NET I would just bite the bullet and use
Windows.

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Delk
I've been running Fedora for several years now, after more than ten years of
Debian and Ubuntu before that.

I don't know if it's my favourite but I have no serious complaints, except for
the GUI software updater that's a bit over-zealous about rebooting after every
minor update. And perhaps the general trend of getting updates all the time (a
kernel every week?), but I guess that's just Linux nowadays.

The last time I bought a new laptop and made a fresh OS install I turned to
Fedora for a few reasons:

0\. Linux was almost a given because of familiarity, relative ease of setup
and use, and flexibility. Linux doesn't seem to generally install painlessly
on Macs, so if I had bought one and ended up not liking the OS, switching
wouldn't have been a given. Also, I like to have my OS open source. I also
have Windows but I definitely prefer *nix for development, and I'm also more
familiar with that.

1\. Easy (one-click) system-wide encryption in the installer. I think Ubuntu
had somewhat more limited disk encryption options in the installer at the
time, such as only home directory encryption or something. This is probably
different nowadays.

2\. Ubuntu was heavy on Unity at the time, and I never really liked the UI. Of
course other desktops were available and easy to install on Ubuntu but I
thought they might become second-class citizens. There was also something else
about the latest Ubuntu releases at the time that made me feel unconvinced but
I can't remember what it was.

3\. Fedora is still mainstream enough that it's still easy-ish to find e.g.
prepackaged or supported proprietary software in case I need that for
something. Of course it's generally possible to install just about anything
that runs on Linux on any distro, but I prefer to avoid the hassle. Usually
Ubuntu comes first (e.g. Spotify only provides debs) but if there's a second,
it tends to be Red Hat based distros. Also, while a new version twice a year
is perhaps a bit more often than I'd like, at least most of the packages are
pretty recent.

So, basically... a relatively hassle-free and mainstream Linux distro for
someone who had become too lazy to go through much trouble or to get too far
from the comfort zone on a daily driver, but who wanted something other than
Ubuntu at the time.

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fsflover
Qubes OS: [https://qubes-os.org](https://qubes-os.org)

It is not only secure but also provides a possibility to easily separate my
life into independent domains - virtual machines (work, personal, random
websites etc) with simple independent backups. Those domains are integrated
into the UI such that I only see colorful windows, not full "virtual
computers".

~~~
gitgud
Very cool, so it virtualizes apps and domains. Similar to the vein of
microkernels right? Isolated, rather than monolithic

~~~
fsflover
Yes, security through isolation.

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jquast
openbsd. a coherent, complete, simple, pretty secure, and very readable unix.

It's my desert island OS. Most especially because of such great offline
documentation and build infrastructure, I won't need to consult google for
random factoids.

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sahinyanlik
Even though most of us use Microsoft Windows daily basis I am sure linux count
will pass windows.

~~~
facorreia
This surprised me. I think that most HN readers use Mac OS, followed by Linux,
with Windows being used by a minority. It would be interesting to see some HN
website stats. Do you have any metrics?

~~~
neilsimp1
I too would love statics for this. However, I use Linux at home and Windows at
work, and I generally read HN from my work PC in the mornings. If others are
like me then this data wouldn't really be accurate.

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alexriabtsev
macOS for ease of use and Homebrew makes it even more usable!

