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Posted on Wednesday 15th of November 2006 at 14:01 in Software

What matters more: O/S vs. Software

It's that time again, another Seopher.com vote - this time the topic is What matters more: The operating system or the software that utilises it?. This article is the backing for this vote Ok so you have three options:
1. The Operating System
2. The Software
3. Society

What do they mean?
Ok so let's look at the three options you have available:

The operating system - do you think the operating system means more than anything else? So if you could do everything you needed elsewhere on the same software you would stay on the same operating system whatever happened, because that's what you need more than anything else.

The Software - you only use the operating system as a means of getting to your software, it doesn't strictly matter what O/S you're on provided you have the ability to do everything you do currently.

This could prove interesting due to Microsoft users needing to rethink their loyalties with Vista looming above our heads

So get voting, this should be an interesting topic on the basis that Vista is about to land and it's made myself and those around me what we actually need out of our systems - do we rely on the operating system or the software in it?

So yes, let the discussion begin!

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Comments

Showing most recent 5 of 5 comments

@acker:
splendid! thanks a lot!
rysiek
rysiek,

this is the link you need for changing languages in Firefox 2
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/dictionaries/

you can also get there by right-clicking a text field, going into the languages option and selecting the next option of "Add dictionaries..."
acker
oh, maybe I just like "hipo’s" =]

I use Ff2.0, but got the spellchecker spell-check my default language - which is not english. I still haven’t had the time to figure out where to change that setting (and don’t ask, how in that case I find the time to write some completely irrelevant comments on some blogs ;) ).

anyway, Oli, I don’t think you’re a "standard windows user" - the IE-Word-Excell-PowerPoint kind of guy (no, I’ll re-phrase that - I *know* you’re not, I seem to remember something about VS.Net, right?). people like you know the difference between "The Software" and "The O/S" and choose their answer cautiously.

"lot of people that think about the issue will always chose the software you use rather than the OS" - agreed.
"The OS is just the means of getting there." - agreed again.

but your hardware is, too, only the means, right? nevertheless, you always try to choose the best hardware. why? well, BECAUSE hardware *should* stay only the means, not the problem itself.

same thing with the OS. if you’re using some apps that are one OS specific and cannot be replaced, well, obviously you have no way of changing your OS of choice.
but if one’s using apps that can be replaced - or which are cross-platform - one’s rational decision would be to select the best OS, reagrdless of whether it’s linux, windows, mac or whatever at the moment.

the funny thing is: but most computer users understand, why having good hardware counts, but don’t care much about the OS.

cheers
rysiek
rysiek
rysiek you need Firefox 2 with its spell-check... "hipothetical" indeed =P

Anyway, I would say (as a mainly Windows person) it’s the software that runs in the OS that’s far more important than the OS itself. If I could run all this in Linux, I’d be there last week.

I’ll just clarify that I have tried a full migrate to Linux before and Seo can testify to this. My heart was in it. My body was in it (don’t read too far into that). The device drivers were NOT in it.

More importantly to that anecdote I was knowingly going to make several sacrifices to the way I run things. I was prepared to keep a VM up for windows so I could still use the software that only runs on Windows (that cannot be replaced).

I think you’ll find that a lot of people that think about the issue will always chose the software you use rather than the OS. That’s the reason you use the computer after all. The OS is just the means of getting there.

And agreed. This textbox and the font-size needs a HEFTY boost.
Oli
ummm... I’d say this vote has a design flaw. let me illustrate:
I am a Linux user. basically, I can do anything I do on my linux box - on windoze (albeit I *do* feel Linux-specific implementations are often superior to their windows counterparts - take Kate/Kedit on Linux and Notepad on Windows), but obviously - I won’t.

when a windows user comes here and reads the poll - and votes "The O/S is more important", I feel he would mean "I am used to the O/S I was using for years and it is important to me that I stay on this particular O/S" - or, shorter, the look’n’feel;
while when I came and voted for "O/S", I rather ment: "The O/S is more important - that’s why you should always choose the best (most stable/virous-free/fast/etc) O/S available." (yup, and that’s why I’m axperimenting a wee bit with HURD, too). that’s inner-workings, as I know that look’n’feel can be made almost the same across different OSes.

the problem is: me and my hipothetical friend here both voted for "O/S", but ment two entirely different things. why?

as I see it, it’s just because it’s very hard to tell where "The O/S" ends and "The Software" begins. look at GUI toolkits: would you say GTK or Qt are part of the system? if yes, well, we have a problem, both have windows implementations.
if not, ok, where does the O/S end, then?

a "statistical windows user" understands "O/S" much broader than a "statistical Linux user", or at least so it seams. that’s where the problem lies, and that’s why the results this poll might come out to be quite hard to interprete, I’m afraid.

although, off course, I may be wrong. :)

cheers
rysiek

p.s.
oh, by the way: would you mind making the comment body input field a bit bigger? I use a self-made stylish theme for this, but I am sure there are more people that wouldn’t mind if it was 450 by 225 px (and it looks ok, too)
rysiek