Looking for patterns between audio enthuseists who use Microsoft Windows compared to those who use Mac and those who use Linux or Unix based OS's

I personally use Windows 2000 Pro now. I used to use Windows 98 Second Edition, but decided to give a NTFS-based Windows a try. I've been running it for the better part of a year with no problems. Would have gone with Windows XP but I've had some bad experiances with it (registry seems buggy, icons mess up, a CD drive stopped showing up in My Computer, plus all the add-ins use too much RAM). Win98 SE and 2K have been very stable. Haven't tried Linux or Unix, though. I've heard that Mac is good for hardcore audio/video editing. Any thoughts?

I am using Microsoft Windows XP (non SP, SP1, SP1a and currently SP2) for a long time (about 5 years), this system for me is almost perfect, most troubles that are occurring have source in 3rd party software. I had used Slackware, Mandrake distros and some others, including Debian, and obviously older windows releases, (Win98, Win98 SE, WinMe, Win2k) but XP have all what you need for home computing. Maybe in future I would go for linux only, but time will show (Fedora Core or Mandriva).

Another vote for Win2K.

I use XP at work, and have had no issues with it. I hope to move to XP at home sometime this year, especially considering Microsoft no longer supports Win2K. Oh, and the funky checkboxes. Mainly for the checkboxes actually.

I'm not overly sure whether you will get any useful data from this poll, but good luck anyway.

For the record: I'm in the UK, and Macs in the UK are not widespread. I am under the impression that they are in the US, but may be wrong - I could be a decade out here. Macs are associated with DTP and, to a lesser degree, sound recording/audio processing. We used to have a Mac at work solely as many customers provided images in Mac format, obtained from their design company.

Linux and Unix is used solely by communists, geeks, and general troublemakers. Again, I may be wrong.


Edit: Following Gabriel's post: x86 in both.

I use Mac OS 10.4.
We dont have an EAC comparable CD-ripper and a multiformat audio player like Foobar2000, but other than that I find it great for all my tasks.

12 entries so far and most curculate Windows 2K or XP. Dosen't really suprise me because, let's face it, Microsoft has the biggest part of the market and most people use fairly recent versions. Had one for Server 2003 and one Mac as well. Could Mac users specify version? (Tiger OS and OSX are the newest). Also, could Linux and Unix specify what actual OS they are running. That would help me out.

What should I put down if I regularly use more than one OS?

x86 vs x64?

...same here. And they are quite expensive.

The most used. At least is that's what I did.

I'm using Win Xp PRO in my pc and Ubuntu in an old PIII machine. My XP works really fast and stable.

I've gotten XP to be about as light as 2000. It's really superior; everything's easier, more things are supported, and so on. I'd recommend looking into ways to lower its RAM usage online. There are many resources out there, although I can't reference any off-hand.

You Troll!

Win2k here, for as long as I won't be able to spend money to buy XP Professional for my 3 boxes (hopefully I'll get it before Vista becomes a standard).

Streamlined Windows2000 Pro for me.

"Windows NT or ME" is a weird choice, since both are based on a completely different architecture - but since almost no one uses that, i dont think its much of a problem - for your information:

9x-architecture: Win95/98/98SE/ME
NT-architecture: NT4, 2000(NT5), XP(NT5.1)

- Lyx

The one you use most or like the best.


The only x64 editions of Windows were XP x64ED and Server '03 x64ED.
feel free to post that you use the 64-bit edition and compare performance to the 32-bit counterparts. As for other 64-bit operating systems, i'm not sure.


I'm sure if I screw with XP enough, I could get it to work like a charm, like 2K or 98SE did when I messed with them. It's just that I've had friends and family use XP and have it take a poop within a few months. I'll give you that XP has the basis of a good OS. It's just that 2K with Servace Pack 4 and DirectX 9c have been stable thus far for me. (I'll also give you that my sis is a UCDI (Useless Crap Downloader and Installer), so that is probably why their XP system screwed up.


My mistake. That's about the time Microsoft split into two dev teams, one for 98SE and ME, and one for NT and 2K. Almost nobody used ME back in 1999 and everyone I ask about it said that ME was a royal load of crap, anyway. The only ones who used it were the people who got screwed with it in computer bundles. NT was used primarily by companies on their workstations for advanced security while people used Windows 95 or 98 at home. It would be interesting to see if anyone uses one of these still and why.

Oh, more acronyms about my sis!
UCDI: Useless Crap Downloader and Installer
(WinFixer, anyone?)
MSPW: MySpace Whore
(98% of her time sucking bandwith devoted here)
PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
(self-explanitory)
NYECR: Needs You for Everything Computer-Related
('Can you burn a CD for me?','Can you figure this out?')
OAM: Oblivious About Malware
(ignorance is bliss untill your PC dies)

Alrighty, then. XP / MCE for me, but I use Linux for my now defunct file server. Though I may end up switching to one of the BSD variants, depending on the pros and cons.

I use Linux the most these days, comrade

Exactly! It is common knowledge.

I must admit I'm quite surprised by the number of W2K users. Why do you prefer it to XP? Aren't there any compatibility issues with software like games and video drivers?

as i'm not much into games anymore, i decided to give linux a shot. guess that makes me a commie now, oh well. unfortuantely, recently after i installed it (ubuntu, that is) my system suffered some mobo problems, so its being repaired now. apparently, my whole motherboard must be replaced, so it won't be ready till next week.

the little time that i have had to play around w/ ubuntu have been great though. its alot of fun. as far as audio junkie software, foobar2000 seems to run fine in wine, and i'm also excited about trying out lamip. for ripping, i'm trying to get ruby-ripper working. it looks promising.

i think i'm going to be happy w/ ubuntu linux for a while now... so that what i voted for.

oh, and if i continue to learn and get more experienced w/ linux, eventually, i want to try out gentoo, i've heard good things about it.

I think windows 2K is a really good hot-spot for Microsoft compatability for both hardware and software. Windows XP has some issues with older software (even other MS software: MS Office 2K, anyone?) and older printers/scanners/other things. Only one recent game won't work, Age Of Empires 3. (SimCity3000 Unlimited says that it won't work but does, and Age Of Empires 2 will if you get the Gold Edition) Usually programs work with Windows 98, 2K, and XP. Windows 2K (with SP4) works fine with all my hardware, software, and drivers. Here are my specs:
- Intel P4 socket 478 @ 3200Mhz (not overclocked)
- Abit IC7 Max3 Mobo
- 4x Corsair XMS 512MB RAM sticks (2048MB total)
- EVGA nVidia 6800 GT 256MB video card
- Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum sound
- Seagate 80GB SATA system drive +
- 2x Western Digital 250GB media hard drives on Promise TX2 controller
- Pioneer DVD-/+R/RW CD-R/RW (also supports dual-layer)
All drivers work fine, plus it's lightning-fast, too!

Computers in my office have WinXP and Office 2000. They are working nicely together.

I see no reason of sticking on old version of Windows if your machine has enough power to run the newer ones.

Windows XP is basically Windows 2000 with various eye candy, tweakings and improvements, e.g., XP boots faster than 2000 because of its boot-time optimization. XP SP2 also includes a basic, but working and secure Windows Firewall, and also Internet Explorer SV1 that has improved security, such as built-in pop-up blocking and ActiveX blocking by default.

For eye candy, think about nicer font rendering with ClearType. It looks much better than standard font rendering on LCD monitors, and it is only available on Windows XP.

I am using 2003x64.
Probably not faster than x86 most of the time, but at least it allows to play with x64. Not xp64 as you can only have 1 simultaneous user under xp.

Windows Server 2003. Because I like more the approach of 2000 than XP, for instance when talking about the state of the system after install. And also I have system that for all practicall reasons is on par with XP64bit - it's NT 5.2 (perhaps that's the true reason why it "feels" "better" than XP?), even though I only have 32bit CPU.

Second choice would be Ubuntu, but I'm using mostly 2k3 at this point. Probably because I don't have Internet acces...

I'm using SUSE Linux several years now for developing, browsing the web, email etc. Having configured my PC for dual boot, sometimes I use Windows XP Professional SP2 for playing games. In numbers, uptimes are 90% Linux and 10% Windows.

Switched finally to Linux (Debian). I am just configuring everything, and reading, reading, reading documentation....

PD: I made a list of things I need, there are packages for near everything!, but I won't be able of using one of the most importants things I wrote down.... guess what.. Foobar2000... I mean with this, Foobar2000 or something near to it, don't mind if it is not the original, but even this way I won't.

Almost anything which works on XP, does also work on 2000. There may be some issues with bluetooth, etc - i dont know for sure, because i dont need bluetooth. As someone else mentioned already, XP mainly is just 2000 plus eye-candy and some improvements(some of which can also be viewed as flaws).

My main reasons for prefering 2000 are:
- Memory-Resources: i can make 2000 more lightweight than i could do with XP. Currently, a fresh-booted 2000 + firewall consumes less than 100mb on my machine
- CPU-Resources: The eye-candy of XP, some of its "improvements" and other features make the OS more heavy on the CPU. In my case, i *dislike* the eye-candy and dont need the additional features - so i can as well avoid them and have the freed up RAM and CPU resources available for applications and games.
- I dislike how XP obscures various system-settings - to me, the arrangement of settings in 2000 seems more clear and obvious
- Predictability: I work as a freelance pc-technician and my overall observation has been that with XP, sometimes there are problems or something runs suboptimal for no obvious reason. When something is wrong with 2000, then the reasons were usually obvious and therefore fixable.

- Lyx

(Completely retracted this post due to trolling.)
(Sorry...)

It seems I have trouble understanding this paragraph. More information on what is not working would be much more helpful.


If your machine has enough power, I have said it.

And I don't think Windows 2000 Pro provides everything I need. I have provided examples in my post, please don't skip it.

It seems you have a strong bias towards Windows 2000 and against Windows XP, so no more discussion is necessary.

I completely retracted my previous post.
I felt angered enough to write it because I had to fix an XP computer last night.
Probably just my sis anyway...
If I've affected the quality of this thread, I am deeply sorry.

I spend my days at work fixing Windows boxes, but all my home computing is done on the Mac. I am currently using Mac OS X (10.4.5). Personally, I think that Mac OS X (10.3) is probably the best OS Apple has put out to date. I base this opinion on RAM issues with Dashboard, graphics power needed for Quartz stuff, and overall stability and performance in my experience.
Mac OS X (10.3) runs really well on a 300MHz G3 with 384MB RAM and 16MB ATi Rage card.


Who gave the vote for BeOS and or Netware? I would be surprised if someone else had a box running the BeOS. let alone using BeOS for audio tasks.


I am currently running BeOS PR1 on a PowerMac 9500/120.

I've used just about every major -- and even some not so major -- OS's at different times, from all variants of Windows going back to 3.1, to Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, MSDOS, some old crusty version of Mac OS < X that I don't remember well, and even some older systems, etc.

Currently, I use Mac OS X 10.4 and Inferno the most.

Mac OS X is my OS of choice for general purpose work, primarily because it allows me to use most of the UNIX tools I need, but it provides a nice user interface that doesn't take as much hacking as a typical Linux system in order to make it usable.

I use Inferno for my research into novel OS design considerations and work in concurrent systems. I find Inferno to be a great choice for this because it can run as either an OS driven by a native kernel, or as an emulation layer upon an underlying OS. It runs practically everywhere -- on almost all notable hardware platforms and OS's. It's very light on resources, capable of running with both the entire OS facilities, in addition to active non-trivial applications, in under 1MB of memory. It's unique in that, as with Plan 9 (which I would like to become more familiar with someday), it greatly extends and improves upon the UNIX idea of "everything is a file." This greatly simplifies programming, making many traditionally difficult programming tasks, such as network or hardware programming, quite easy, and in fact often accomplishable via simple reading and writing of files through the powerful Inferno Sh. The filesystem itself is also unique in that it uses the concept of namespaces associated with processes to expose 'files', i.e., different processes potentially see different filesystem trees, and these filesystem trees are constructed out of binding various 'devices' (such as the network device, the pipe device, the mount driver, the server registry, etc.) to other parts of the trees in specific orders. Programs themselves can bind a sort of communication port to the filesystem, at which point reads and writes on the virtual file represent communication with that program.

Limbo, the native programming language for Inferno, is also like a breath of fresh air when compared to C, C++, or Java, particularly if using concurrency. Limbo is essentially like a merging of C with certain concepts from ML and also some from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes. It signifies a major cleanup of C: pointers are gone (but references to algebraic data types or lists or arrays are allowed), modules are added, algebraic data types are added, pattern matching is added, lists are added, proper strings are added, dynamically sizable arrays are added, tuples are added, and limited forms of type inference and parametric polymorphism are added. But Limbo does not mandate OO programming, which is nice. Modular programming, of course, is used, but it is supported through the ML style modules. Most importantly, Limbo uses a very powerful concept of typed communication channels (inspired by the CSP), which allow for concurrency via dataflow synchronization, rather than the ugly, error prone, and non-scalable shared state concurrency so common in C++ and Java programming. In Limbo, locks are practically never needed, which makes programming complex concurrent computations almost trivially easy by comparison.

I do occasionally use Linux these days too, mostly either in the form of Ubuntu or Gentoo. However, when I do tend to boot up the PC, it is mostly for the novelty factor more than anything.

I 'use' Windows usually only when I'm fixing other peoples broken computers.

So anyway, that sums it up for me. That's half OS talk and half programming talk, but I guess that about explains my priorities. I don't tend to do much with audio anymore these days, ironically enough. I wonder... is it possible to be off-topic in the off-topic section?

What about the media player for OSX you were planning? Did you give up on that?

I have windows xp on my laptop for school use, i also have arch linux on that laptop. I have gentoo linux on my main computer and i'm very happy with it. It's not perfect, but at least if it breaks it's fairly easy to figure out. It's also very flexible. I did have to make a cli frontend to make cd rips in the way i want, but now it's much more convient than using eac, foobar, etc to rip and and encoding. I'm very happy using music player deamon as music player. I will never go back to using windows on my main computer, it's too frustrating at times and not flexible enough. But then again, i'm not an "avarage computer user".

I use windows XP (eXtra Poopie) sp1 (sp2 is evil and causes more compatibility problems, that's why it will never get near my computer)

I use it because many programs being made these days don't work on win98se, and I can't just 'move' to linux because I very often use avisynth and virtualdub and I can't do without those. So I'm stuck with this junk OS

note: triple booting with: msdos7.1 & win98se, winXP home sp1, & mandrake linux 10... so I can run everything all on a 40gb hdd

At home: Essentially Windows 2000, sometimes Kubuntu.

At work: Mostly Debian, lots of Solaris and a little HP-UX

I have seen a lot of this kind of comments, but I am yet to see how evil SP2 is.

At work, we have ~60 machines with XP SP2 installed, connected to a Windows 2000 AD, and not a single one has a "compatibility" issue, though it is just limited to work-related applications (e.g. no games).

And yes, I am the ONLY system administrator and technical support for those machines, and yet I have a lot of free time visiting online forums (read: HA ) and local newsgroups.

SP2 on XP Pro works fine, and I would recommend that everyone update.
SP2 on XP Home, is praying for problems.
A couple of things I've experienced from upgrading XP Home to SP2:
1)Unable to get any network activity (for no good reason).
2)Video going to 4 or 8 bit with 16 colors and refusing to change.

The above are just the quirks I remember.

I have installed SP2 on XP Pro AND Home before on various machines, and I have not encountered your issues, not even once. So I think SP2 is NOT the one to blame. Instead I would advise you to check the drivers.

Basically XP Home and Pro are the same thing at core level. XP Home merely has something taken away from Pro (such as security privileges and the UI).

Windows XP Pro SP2.

I tried Fedora Core and Kubuntu each for a couple of months (dual boot), but somehow I could never get used to it. The GUI just doesn't look nice enough for me, especially with things like webbrowsing it is very noticable. Also, I had some small hardware compatabiblity issues.

I personally find Kubuntu look nicer than WinXP (for my taste, probably).

I am eagerly waiting for Xgl and Compiz, and of course their effects. E17 also looks promising.

Me too. My system works flawlessly.

That was the first thing I did.

Then what was the brand of your network card and video card?

I seem to recall one of the network cards being a Realtek, and one of the video cards being an ATi. This was 6 months ago (in October) so it's no longer an issue.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that nobody was using Win98.
I do use it. And I do not understand why should I use any other one if mine is 100% stable and quick.
I tried WinXP... It wants too much from me: a new pc, extra gigs of memory, authorisation, dehumanisation, dozen other -ations, sensations and godknowswhatelse.
Btw, I do not really find it funny watching some silly dogs and cats with spyglasses running all over my screen...

[quote=Brink,Feb 17 2006, 04:23 PM]
[quote]Macs are associated with DTP and, to a lesser degree, sound recording/audio processing[/quote]
...same here. And they are quite expensive.
[quote][/quote]
yes they are expensive, they had to pay a guy $14k to make winxp to run on new mactels.

macs have been associated with dtp/image processing like 10 years ago maybe? well, not today.

They still are often used in that field, at least here. Perhaps today it's mostly due to tradition/to what people are accustomed to...but so what, why change it for the sake of change if people are productive.

Linux from me has one problem : USER INTERFACE FONTS,
they are not acceptable for me.

For example?

Smackin' down the Search Puppy!
Like the MS Office Paperclip Dude Thingy!

I should check back more often...
Any thoughts on Vista?

This is the dumbest poll I've ever seen.

Linux is not UNIX, it was intended to be SysV-ish (Unix-like) but the gulf just keeps growing. I refuse to vote with this poll and put my vote with a bunch of linuxkids.

No distinction between Mac OS X and Mac OS Classic? These are totally different operating systems.

Lumping Netware, an OS designed to run unattended on a file server with BeOS? Are you kidding?