Ask HN: What is your favourite OS and why?
What makes it your favourite? How is it better than other competing OS's?
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.