OSs

I've only read (mostly) about windows and linux, and how much one sucks and the other rules, on any posts having to do with them. I've read a bit about FreeBSD, but not that much.

What I would like to know is about the other OSs out there besides windows. I would like to know what makes one good and another suck, what each is best for, Why are many based on Unix, what the advantages and disadvantages of them are, etc. I'll take all the info I can get.

Thank, much appreciated.

the difference that makes one OS suck and the other rule is that for the one there are few ppl and a specific company developing in and very unwilling to share the knowledge (thus not getting help for fixing the many problems)

the difference that makes one OS suck and the other rule is that for the one there are few ppl and a specific company developing in and very unwilling to share the knowledge (thus not getting help for fixing the many problems) while on the latter thousands of ppl sharing their minds (and i think it is more helpful that way) to create and improve any OS

Fantastic question! I want to start with your 'Why are so many OS's based on Unix?' question. Even though AT&T had some really messed up ideas about licensing and such, they made Unix Open Source almost from the beginning. Most Computer Science departments at Universities were given the source for research purposes, and the Cause -> Effect of that was and still is that all University educated programmers learn to write code for and about the design of Unix based OS's since the source is not only available for example, but it works very well. This is essentially where Linux came from. Linus had source code and a very popular OS as an example of how to build an OS from scratch. It is easy to forget that in the very early beginning, Linux was just a personal project to see if he could do it, and to get some suggestions from more experienced OS developers on design and implementation.

Another very cool OS is VMS. (V)irtual (M)emory (S)ystem, although it uses a sort of mangled version of C as it's base code, it is very PCDOS like at the command Line, I would assume that many of the command line functions in PCDOS were borrowed straight from VMS, because VMS is almost as old as Unix, and was widely used by companies before Unix, so user familiarity probably inspired this sort of command copy cat that happened in DOS. By the way, VMS was the first OS to use virtual memory to expand the amount of available memory, hence the name.

Although Mac and DOS/Windows have grown to outnumber the amount of systems that run Unix or VMS based systems, I would day that just about all of the other OS's that I can think of are Unix based in design including the new and pretty darn spiffy OSX.