OT: OS/2, Linux and Windows (was Re: TZ)

[Simon Bowring]

>Well, why bother?  Look at the amount of effort being put into the
>Linux development.  Include the SAMBA stuff, the kernel, the KDE/Gnome,
>WINE, etc.  

All these componenets or their equivalents are "done" under OS/2:
OS/2's kernel, GUI, SMB networking support, SMP and DOS support are 
far far in advance of linux's (probably 10s of man years worth of 
develoment better).

There is an equivalent amount of work involved in order to
>duplicate OS/2.  
Much more in fact - OS/2 is much bigger than linux!

>And, since this has already been done for Linux, why not just bite the 
>bullet and move over to Linux?

I am a developer and work on a variety of operating systems, and I
just prefer OS/2, and have used it as my primary OS since version 1.1,
consequently I know it well and can get things done under it faster than
under Unix and expecially windows.  I use unix everyday, but I use
OS/2 as the client.  It takes a long time to unlearn 10 years worth
of know how, and learn something different (and often inferior).

Unix is flexible and powerful and allows you to build tools out
of it's components, but its incredibly user unfriendly and arguably
highly old fashioned, it is also very, very inconistent in operation,
and enjoys little or no binary compatibility accross versions and
distributions.

Windows is friendly has binary compatibilty (now they've dropped
PowerPC and Alpha), but is hugely inconsistent, but you can't make 
it do anything - you have to buy a program that does the job.

OS/2 is nicely placed in in the middle, it's friendly (still has 
the best GUI I've ever seen, despite it's warts), and allows you
build tools etc (with rexx and the WPS) without having to buy a 
program or be a computer expert.

OS/2 is more networking neutral than Unix or windows (which
prefer their own "native" networking to a greater extent than 
OS/2)

OS/2 has rexx as standard (Unix has shell scripts, ha, ha ha, ha!),
and windows has, er, no real native scripting), so under OS/2 you
can knock up quick little tools, automate stuff etc *simply* and 
portably with low resource overhead. Unix is similar but shell script
is arcane in the extreme.  Under Windows you're got batch files (useless)
or visual basic (overkill, resource intensive and non-portable)!

Most Unix programs are simple to port to OS/2 (thanks to emx
which is not part of OS/2, but has been there since OS/2 1.x days),
which means the defacto-standard GNU/unix tools and tcp/ip stuff
are all available easily. I know that these tools are now 
available for Windows, but it took years, and requires more 
effort to port to windows.

>It is a more reliable OS than OS/2
OS/2 can be quite unreliable on dodgy/cheap hardware, but it does
run reliably on good kit.  

>Linux is a full 32 bit OS (soon to be 64 bit), etc.
And the consequence of this is...?  Don't be fooled into
thinking a 32 bit program is faster than a 16-bit one.  For
small prgrams and certain drivers, the reverse is usually true, 
the "bitness" affects the amount of memory you can address and 
the "chunk" size you access it in.  

>And there are a lot of apps available.  In fact, I would think that there 
>are now more apps for Linux than there are for OS/2.
Unlikley - most Linux apps can be fairly trivially ported to OS/2,
many are a simple recompile.  Even Linux's X windows (XFree-86
which is about the most complex unix code anyone would ever wish 
to see) ports to OS/2 - no-ones managed it under windows, despite
having a grillion more windows experienced programmers "out-there")!

Linux has appalling mutithreaded capability (one reason why Java has
taken so long to port and performs so badly under linux), OS/2 has
an efficent natively threaded scheduler, so Java runs faster on 
OS/2 than *any* other intel platform (until it hits the GUI, since 
graphics performace under OS/2 is usually fairly poor).

Shrink Wrap

Under Linux, you have to compile your software to get it to
work (different distributions use different libraries and
executable formats).  Windows and OS/2 support shrink-warp 
software properly, and OS/2 has had about the best backwards
compatibility of any OS (apart from on mainframes).  With
MS you have to buy new or updgraded apps at the whim of MS, 
under Unix you have to recompile, but OS/2 runs 10 year old 
DOS and OS/2 1.x binarioes fine (usually!).

If you use the OS/2 server version, there a whole load of additional 
ways it beats Linux and NT (e.g. higher performance, client agnostic,
better disk and network subsystems).

But I can't be bothered with anymore, suffice to say there are
good reasons for sticking with OS/2, *IF* you're an OS/2 user,
there are not so many reason for moving to OS/2 though!


Simon - I promise I won't post anymore today!