Poll: What OS do you currently use? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What OS do you currently use?

43 pointsdenysonique71 comments

Please only select one OS, your main one

Windows 8 with Virtual Box running Ubuntu. I do all my dev work in the VM, and everything else in Windows. I used to be a die-hard OS X user, but then I realized I could build a beast of a desktop for less than half the price of a Pro.

Win 8 over Hackintosh?

I'm very open to it, but never pursued it. Perhaps I'll build one in the future. I do use the Apple Wireless Keyboard so I'm almost there :)

> I do all my dev work in the VM, and everything else in Windows.

You must be my twin. I use Windows for Photoshop and everything else is in my Ubuntu VM.

Yep, Photoshop is one of my open applications :) Not that I'm a designer or anything, but it makes working with one a whole lot easier!

I use different OSes for different purposes. I use Windows in Parallels on a Mac, alongside several other Macs running various versions of OSX. I have a FreeBSD 9.1 server and an Arch Linux server, as well as a bunch of VPSes I use in my cluster.

I also have a laptop I use to run AROS and an older laptop and a couple of PCs that run Plan9. To be fair the PCs and laptop are mostly switched off, I mainly used them for distributed processing.

I desperately want to run AROS as a main OS but it's just not there yet for me. I've got haiku on my list of things to try as a personal desktop OS.

I use a mixture of iOS, stock Android and custom-built cyanogenmod firmwares on mobile devices. Granted, Android is technically Linux but I'm surprised neither that nor iOS were down as options.

AROS is an Amiga thing, right? What makes you want to run that in 2013? Just wondering what I may have missed, as a former Amiga owner.

I reluctantly started to move away from the Amiga as a primary OS in the late 90s and finished some time in the mid noughties. I've kept going back to AROS in the hope that I can get something Amiga-like going, but there's so much more that needs to be done to make it usable on a modern laptop.

I loved Amiga as much as the next guy… I remember installing a Kickstart ROM as a fourteen year old. But what desktop paradigms does Amiga offer now that aren’t present in other OS’s?

When creating a poll like this, it would be useful to specify the question in a bit more detail. Do you mean what is your primary OS or do you mean responders to upvote every OS that they use even only rarely?

I use OS X and Fedora at home and Ubuntu, RedHat, AIX, Solaris and Windows at work, so I upvoted every option except for BSD (and, strictly speaking, OS X falls under BSD too).

Need to add the following:

   Solaris
   Other Unix
   iOS
   Android

I use the following: Windows 7, iOS 6, Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, CentOS 6.x, Mac OS X 10.6.8, Android

Android ought to fall under Linux (Other), but he should still add it. He should also separate GNU/Linux (other) and BSD/Linux categories; see how many people are using BSD userlands like obase and magenta. So,

    GNU/Linux (other)
    BSD/Linux
    Android
    Linux (other userland)

Ubuntu 13.04 and loving every minute of it. Dual-boot Windows 7 for various things like gaming and managing my Zune HD.

I've considered running Mint or some other popular distro on an old laptop of mine.

What do you like about 13.04? I have it on a machine here but I mostly do 3D animation work on it, and don't really interact much with the Ubuntu-ness.

I don't mean 13.04 in particular, I mean Ubuntu in general (though 13.04 does come with some nice UI updates). Before I became a developer, I used Windows. When I started trying to get into more serious development, trying to do it in Windows was just awful. Ubuntu was a breath of fresh air. From an interaction standpoint, minor things like workspaces, always-on-top, etc are great for my workflow. Things often take more work to get up and running due to various issues like hardware incompatibility or lack of software support, but once you do get it running I feel like it's smoother and more stable than Windows. Software management (e.g. installing and removing packages, adding and installing from various sources, updating) is more logical and consistent than for Windows (e.g. downloading and installing executable, managing updates individually).

This is all subjective and I wouldn't consider myself an expert on either OS so I could be wrong on some accounts, but that has been my experience.

I see one vote for Other without any comment explaining which other OS it is. I'd be interested to see what pops up: Android, ChromeOS and FirefoxOS are really Linux variants; I suppose iOS stands on its own. VMS is certainly in use but probably not on the desktop. I suppose there are some Solaris folks...what else?

iOS is OS X. I'd bet it's someone who either didn't realize that the two popular mobile OS's are variants of common desktops, or someone who is playing with something like BeOS or Plan 9 or some other more obscure OS.

Could be someone who is writing their own.

Android is not really a variant of a desktop, it just uses the kernel, which is not desktop specific in any way, and everything above (from the libc up) is either custom or non-desktop specific.

Haiku https://www.haiku-os.org/

Would you consider ReactOS Windows... or Linux?

You missed sparrow / temple. Because "other" doesn't really cover it.

I use all of these so I upvoted all of them.

At home I use a Windows machine, two Arch Linux boxes, and an ARM Arch distro. I have a VPS with Ubuntu on it. At work I mostly use FreeBSD as my workstation and the production server cluster uses it. We have an ubuntu box in there somewhere too. Most of the office is using mac, so if the mood strikes me to go mobile with a laptop I pick one up from a stack of the things and wonder around with a mac. My hacker space has some old sparc machines I was thinking of grabbing... but I don't need another nightstand.

If you asked me this a few years ago, I'd say I used z/OS quite a bit too.

There's no point in upvoting them all...

... except for the fact that I use them all, so all of them should be voted for?

I use a Macbook Air, but spend most of my time in Ubuntu. I've just come to like doing all my development work in it. I use OS X in places where I run into services that don't support Ubuntu.

What machine do you run Ubuntu on, or is it in a VM?

Ubuntu at home and servers, OSX at work.

Ditto for me. I'm switching to Ubuntu at work when I get a new laptop.

Ubuntu at home and for personal projects and OSX at work. When you're at work it's easier to just go with what the majority of the team already uses.

I dual boot, use Ubuntu for majority of my work, but occasionally I switch to Wintendo 7 when I feel like killing time with games.

OS X for the main development, on a relatively venerable 17" 2009 MBP, so that's the single upvote I offered.

But, the code's deliberately platform agnostic, and I do secondarily maintain a Windows version, under Parallels, for the DirectShow filter build. I'll likely bring it to Ubuntu later as well, for render farm deployment.

Ubuntu as main machine. I have OSX on a MacBook Air for wife (I actually dualboot Ubuntu for me as well).

Ubuntu for all servers everywhere.

I use Windows 8 in my two PCs because it's fast, I like the UI and I'm in love with Office.

Server runs OpenSUSE.

On main laptop: OS X 10.6.8 with VMWare Windows XP and VMWare Ubuntu 12.04

On personal server: Ubuntu 12.04

On phone: Android 4.1.2

I see no option for GNU/Linux.

Windows at work because I have to, and Arch Linux on everything else with a Windows partition on my main desktop's home drive to play games on and any other miscellaneous things I needs Windows for (not much at all these days).

A bit picky about my Linux desktop experience. I check in with Ubuntu at every .10 release to see if it yet passes my picky standards. It was getting much, much closer in 2012. I'm actually looking forward to this year's.

I use elementary OS (Ubuntu-based distro) on my laptop and Windows 8.1 on my desktop.

Ubuntu and Linux (other)? Really? What, do people think that Ubuntu is suppose to be the "be all, end all" of Linux or something?

Anyway, rant aside, I use Fedora Linux on my laptop and a mix of Fedora and CentOS on servers.

Debian (wheezy stable - latex [VM]; aptosid - surfing\reading\developing; raspbian - testing hardware)

Sabayon (surfing\reading\developing)

Fedora (packaging [VM])

Gentoo (server)

...

Plan 9 ([VM] - cpu server; 9pi terminal - developing)

...

Android (tablet)

...

RockBox (Sansa Clip)

Stupid cellular brick (Nokia's s40 Symbian OS I think)

Whatever the Xerox printer is running

Whatever the Panasonic camera is running

Windows (car's IVI)

...

No Mac, Ubuntu or Emacs.

So you run Plan 9 in a virtual machine? Any issues?

Upvoted Mac OS X but really there should be iOS on there too (and Android for good measure) since I'm on there doing stuff (and sometimes it's real work!) almost as much as I am OS X!

I use OS X with VMWare for a couple development Linux machines.

I just can't shake some of the Apple apps (e.g., Aperture, Pages, or Keynote) to be able to switch to Linux full-time.

Xubuntu for 90% of the time (development and general stuff)

Windows for gaming

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, with an Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit guest running inside VMWare Workstation. It's usually always on, and I use the VM heavily for dev.

FreeBSD everywhere except for the Macbook Air. I guess I should count the Ubuntu box I have as the "Ubuntu Update Canary" though.

I currently use Windows 8 with OpenBSD running virtually. I intend to give Plan 9 a try again soon, probably in a virtual machine as well.

Windows at work, Mac OS X on personal laptop. But both of them are basically just SSH clients.

CentOS/RHEL on servers.

Linux Mint for about 5 months now. Even got the wife to convert other desktop to Mint.

OS X, Widows 8, Ubuntu Server, Chrome OS, Android in no particular order

OS X for work (and non-work related coding, etc), Windows 7 for play

I use all of these except BSD, unless OS X counts in that regard...

Windows 8 for entertainment, With Ubuntu in VM for development.

Ubuntu with Arch in VirtualBox at home. Windows 7 at work.

Windows 7 (for gaming) + Debian on VM (for development).

the strange thing here, is that IT people would probable say linux or mac (at majority), but everybody use windows at work.

so why we still promote windose at work?!

Linux Mint on my laptop for 2 years. Win7 at work.

Ubuntu, Windows XP, 7, 8 and Chrome OS...

Hacker News audience are Mac-OS-X-ers.

OS X with Ubuntu 12.04 on Virtual Box.

Qualifies as the OS X answer.

Why? What are you trying to measure?

I use exactly that setup too. I'd spend most of my day in the Ubuntu machine and the rest in a web browser on osx. The only reason I have both is that I used to need photoshop.

Perhaps you should reformulate the poll to "Which OS do you use most frequently?" or "From which OS did you answer this poll?".

you cant just choose one ..i use all of these throughout the day:

osx, ubuntu, windows, amazon linux, android, ios

My other computer is a data center.

I have Windows and Ubuntu on mine

OS X, Windows with Ubuntu VM.

Arch

Debian, ArchLinux and OS X

Crunchbang #! (Debian)

windows

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