Computer Room
Comparative Operating System Features
I've been a computer user since 1993. In that time I've run a number of operating systems at home, at school and at work. What follows is my own perception of the computing market over the past 10+ years and where the real value lies in operating system software, the very basis of computing.
In case anyone doesn't know, the operating system is the most important piece of software on a computer; without an OS, the system does not do anything. You cannot browse the web, send and receive email, watch DVD movies or write a school paper on the computer without an operating system. As such, it is important that your OS be technically powerful -- capable of doing all the things you need it to do, to do so in a timely and efficient manner, and to make the best use of the available hardware to get the job done without annoying program crashes and errors. Security of the OS goes along with its technical power. An operating system riddled with security holes will leave a user's personal information wide open for exploitation by remote users or make the computer vulnerable to computer virii and so-called worms which frequently cause data loss, poor performance and network congestion which slows down computer-to-computer communication such as file transfers.
Since the operating system defines most of what you see and hear and how you can interact with other programs, it is also important that the OS be visually appealing. Plain green text was okay in 1980, but the world has moved on. These days people expect their OS to display proportional text, as opposed to the old style standard-width text, that it show thousands or even millions of colors at once and that all the parts that make up the graphical user interface (GUI) be appropriately sized and positioned on the screen so that accessing often needed tools is quick and easy and there is plenty of open space for other program windows.
And lastly, an operating system alone is rarely enough for most users; you need available software to run on top of your OS, such as office productivity software, program development tools, web and email clients (or servers), CD and DVD player programs, etc.
With these four things in mind, the following chart has been made to give my impression of many common operating systems for personal computers over the past 11 years. I have personally used most of these OSes during that time, and have seen how each system has evolved from one version to the next. The chart attempts to show my current (August 2004) perception of the value of each operating system. Things would be slightly different if I were to rank each system on how I felt about it at the time of its release (for instance, OS/2 Warp 3, in 1994, would have earned a 5 for visual appeal, because quite simply it was the best looking PC operating system at that time).
Figure 1
The next chart takes the values given above and compares them to the typical price to purchase each operating system. However, since most of the OSes cannot be purchased (as new) in 2004 (how many places still sell Windows 95 or NT 4?) I have based their relative prices on how much they would have cost to buy when they were new. In general, a price of 1 means under US$49, price of 2 means US$50-99, a 3 means US$100-$149, 4 means US$150-199 and a price of 5 means US$200+. The "Bang for the Buck" value is then based on the total score in figure 1 divided by the pricing tier of the OS. BeOS r4 and r5, while not the best performing systems in history, rank especially well because they were very inexpensive to buy (I bought the halfway release BeOS r4.5, new in box, for US$49 in 1999). BeOS r5 was available in a limited free ($0) version and a complete $49 version.
Figure 2
