My personal opinions...
Since everyone so far in this Unix-chain writes about every Unix except
SGI IRIX I thought that I should write about that since it is my favorite operating system. I have used Sun Solaris, SCO Openserver, SCO UnixWare, FreeBSD and Linux.
And yes, I do like them. But my personal preference is the IRIX system on the SGI platform.
SGI IRIX is by far my favorite OS. It is the only OS that can do "really" professional
3D graphics(1) (Industrial Light & Magic, the people behind Star
Wars:Ep1 and Jurassic Park are using SGI computer systems for example.),
real-time 3D visualization, function as a server and a great programming platform at the same time.
It was the first truly 64-bit operating
system and the first supporting SMP with 128 CPU:s. It is based on SystemV r4.0 with BSD enhancements. It supports the full
real-time POSIX standards and a lot more. Great as
server with clustering, load balancing and XFS. IRIX is sharing a lot of things with the Cray
supercomputer operating system UNICOS. (SGI owned CRAY corp.)
More specifically I have tried and used UnixWare 7.1, UnixWare 2.1.2, Openserver 5.0,
Solaris x86 2.6-(2.)7, Solaris SPARC 2.4-(2.)8, FreeBSD, Linux (a lot of distributions) and of course IRIX.
And... oops! I have tried Windows 3.1 -> Windows 2000 and I don't like them. Don't get me started in argumenting why they are not good
operating systems. I'm only using them when needed for third-party software that
isn't available on Unix platforms like new games. (I have an old PC with Windows at home which I use
primarily for gaming). Windows 2000 is by far the best Windows but it
still comes up short when it is compared to real Unix:es.
My opinion on Solaris and UnixWare are that they are superb and stable servers and great development workstations. Solaris also has really good real-time qualities.
Linux is a good OS although its not standardized enough yet for my liking and I will not use it except for great scientific and research software.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD is great to use for development and as servers
and firewalls, but it has no graphics software at all, and the configuration is nearly all textbased. My personal preference is graphical configuration tools that outputs standard textfiles so you can choose which one you prefer.
The free operating systems Free/OpenBSD, Linux and Solaris would really benefit from an Journaling
filesystem like XFS, hopefully it will become a standard feature soon.
Free source-code is a big advantage however.
More to come later... as always.
(1) I know that other Unix:es also supports 3D but since there isn't any professional
3D software available it isn't an option...
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Matured since 1982
Runs only on great hardware
Good programming tools (MipsPro, ProDev.)
System V with BSD enhancements
Full real-time support
Clustering, load balancing
XFS Journaling Filesystem
Professional 3D software support
4Dwm - greatest WM , it even has anti-aliased fonts
Available software (ILM)
All SGI computer systems beginning from 1996
is module built, even the cheapest ones.
Video support
And the most important, It feels really great to use!!!
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Hardware and Software price
As with all Unix systems there isn't a good
Web browser available.
Hopefully Netscape 6.0 will change that
Short list, eh?
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