Originally Posted by dangel
The bottom line is: XP is a good OS, and so's Vista
Sorry can't agree with that. Vista is better than XP overall, however neither Vista nor XP are a good desktop OS.
In fact, neither was 2000, 98SE, 98 or any previous version of Windows. NT4 and Prior was also not very good.
That said, all Linux distros are also not very good desktop OS's, and OSX is just as bad.
All modern desktop OS's available to anyone that's not an uber geek are bodged server OS's loaded with bloat and features totally irrelevant to a home computer and you pay for that in performance, complexity and ease of use.
There was a period in history when desktop OS's were generally good, however that passed over 10 years ago now.
OS's like STOS for the Atari ST (spit*) and Workbench for the Amiga were good desktop OS's (for the time)
Things have moved on now, however that doesn't mean that any current easily available OS is actually that good at what it is sold to you to do.
Before anyone starts pointing how these old OS's lacked things like multi user capability, file system security, process isolation etc, please re read my post. That is all irrelevant at that time due to hardware available and what people used to use their computers for.
* Since I owned and Amiga, I was required to hate all things Atari for no good reason
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