The Return of OS/2 Warp Set For 2016 (techrepublic.com) 262
An anonymous reader writes: We all know the ill-fated history of IBM's OS/2 Warp, while some others may not know about the first OS/2-OEM distribution called eComStation. Now a new company called Arca Noae, not happy with the results of this last distribution, has signed an agreement with IBM to create a new OS/2 version. They announced a new OS, codenamed "Blue Lion," at Warpstock 2015 this last October; this will be based on OS/2 Warp 4.52 and the SMP kernel. The OS/2 community has taken this news with positivism and the OS2World community is now requesting everybody that has developed for OS/2 on the past to open source their source code to collaborate.
WTF is "positivism"? (Score:5, Funny)
>> The OS/2 community has taken this news with positivism
WTF is "positivism"? It sounds like a drug advertised during football games.
Re:WTF is "positivism"? (Score:5, Informative)
So Sayeth Google [google.com].
Re:WTF is "positivism"? (Score:5, Insightful)
So...some company signed a distribution agreement with IBM to revive an old operating system and the OS/2 community reacted by taking up philosophy instead of developing or porting any software? Seems about par for the course to me.
It'll go nowhere fast (Score:2)
Not as long as MS is still holding the FS and DDK hostage.
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drivers in OS/2 are 16bit.
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Oh, come on, cite the Marxist definition, it's so much more fun:
https://www.marxists.org/refer... [marxists.org]
See, a bourgeois operating system for a bourgeois
You're so mainstream (Score:2, Funny)
It's some very nuanced shit somewhere between nouveau-modernism and post-primitive relativism that is popular in New York. It has to be viewed through thick black glasses while sipping PBR and smoking American Spirits.
I'd tell you more about the movement, but at 42, I can't skateboard as fast as I used too.
Gotta get home!
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Positivism can help with feelings of negativity, despair, hopelessness and issues arising from low self esteem. Positivism is not for everyone, ask your doctor if they are stupid enough to prescribe Positivism for you. Positivism may cause sudden sexual arousal and should only be used around really good friends. Test subjects also reported uncontrollable urges to lick someone's ear. Other reported side effects include sudden explosive flatulence combined with diarrhea, random r
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WTF is "positivism"? It sounds like a drug advertised during football games.
It's taken from the word "to posit", meaning "put forward for consideration", as in "I posit that no-one will give a toss about an attempt to resuscitate a decades-old 32-bit-only non-SMP OS for modern 64-bit SMP hardware".
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It means someone meant to say 'positivity' and used the wrong word. Perhaps it's because Chrome's spell checker seems to think 'positivity' isn't a word (it's underlined in red as I type this post).
Re:WTF is "positivism"? (Score:5, Informative)
It means someone meant to say 'positivity' and used the wrong word. Perhaps it's because Chrome's spell checker seems to think 'positivity' isn't a word (it's underlined in red as I type this post).
They should just have written "The OS/2 community has reacted to this news positively" which has the advantage of being normal English.
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Logical positivism holds that "only statements verifiable either logically or empirically would be cognitively meaningful." They reject any metaphysical entities that have no basis in reality, such as "the OS/2 community."
OS/2 was great (Score:2, Interesting)
I never used anything past Warp 3, but it was great running Win 3 software alongside OS/2. This was also stated as its biggest downfall, although this is really overplayed. I don't think any party not inclined to develop for OS/2 was influenced by this at all.
The DOS compatibility was exceptional.
Wine is really good now. I don't see this impacting Linux development in the slightest.
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I remember being so blown away by OS2/Warp's ability to multi-task so many applications at once, with such a clean UI. That was in the Windows 3.11 days, before Win95 changed everything. I had a friend who migrated to OS2, and I was seriously considering it myself. But in the end, I decided to wait for Win95. I think if OS2/Warp had come out just a little earlier and gotten more promotion in non-geek circles, it may have become the dominant OS and we would be looking at a very different desktop landscape to
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OS/2 Warp was, if anything, then a bit too early. It had steep hardware requirements (8 megabytes of RAM to run properly) when memory was very expensive.
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OS/2 Warp was, if anything, then a bit too early. It had steep hardware requirements (8 megabytes of RAM to run properly) when memory was very expensive.
Even Windows 95 recommended 8 megabytes, although it would theoretically run on 4, if you weren't bothered about speed, usability or anything like that. The hardware wasn't really the issue.
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Well, the point is that Windows 95 was released a year later when RAM prices were lowered. And it certainly ran faster on the same hardware, even though not nearly as stable.
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I think it was more due to really bad advertising from IBM. I remember OS/2 Warp Commercials, I was computer savvy enough to know OS/2 was an Operating system. Others at that time had no idea what they were trying to sell. Just a bunch of psychedelic colors and people looking amazed at the screen... Without actually showing the OS or its features.
Microsoft actually showed the product and what new features it could do, although many of such features were inferior to what OS/2 can do, people actually could s
Re:OS/2 was great (Score:5, Funny)
I remember being so blown away by OS2/Warp's ability to multi-task so many applications at once, with such a clean UI.
As an older programmer, let me suggest one ought to be reticent about saying things like that. I know that by any reasonable standard it should make you sound experienced and therefore worth listening to, but if you have any gray in your hair it's bound to have a very different effect. Like the time I sat next to a guy at a banquet who was reminiscing about when his department got an IBM 701. "Yep," he said with evident satisfaction, "that was a stored program jobbie."
Employers are looking for programmers who were in diapers while you were being blown away by OS/2, so ixnay on that kind of alktay. Instead practice saying things like "Node.js is so 2015." And when someone asks you what you mean, turn to them, raise one eyebrow, then literally turn your back on them.
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OS/2 need windows 32bit working MS broke (Score:2)
OS/2 need windows 32bit working MS broke win32's with updates to hurt os/2.
Also maybe a better way to install fixpacks / updates as well.
A real safe mode.
Better config.sys
etc
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The OS/2 UI was completely unusable.
Mouse movement stuttered and input regularly stalled as foreground and background processes took over. While you could occasionally get the same effect in Windows 95 or Windows NT – on OS/2 it was normal operation. Hair pulling frustrating.
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I remember that WordPerfect ran faster under OS/2 than it did under Windows. This would have been in 1994 so I don't remember what version of OS/2 that was. I always liked OS/2 but thought the UI lacked a lot of polish.
in 1994 (Score:2)
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was is the key word here. OS/2 has been out of commission for so long. That I don't see any benefit of starting it back up again, other than for fun. But I wouldn't expect there will be any wide acceptance. Because it will behave a lot like the old version, and be dated, or if it were updated it wouldn't be distinguished as OS/2. Compare Windows 3.1 with Windows 10 or try to release a major Desktop Linux distribution with FVWM as the default Windows manager.
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OS/2 Warp was great. Windows at the time was junk. OS/2 would have been Windows if Microsoft hadn't abandoned the partnership and gone their own way. True, IBM wasn't the greatest of companies at times but they did have a better grasp of the big picture beyond a simplistic "make it run applications".
My goodness, what fortuitous timing! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Draconic, fascist Windows 10 comes out and Microsoft proceeds to try to force it down everyone's throat, and out of left field comes, after what seems like a geologic age, a new version of OS/2. Wow. Not sure what to think of that timing.
This was prophesised in Revelations.
Lo, and the huge and evil beast with 10 horns was smote by the small usurper, bent over twice in rebirth, and cast out of the heavens into the fiery pit.
Yea and verily, not until this comes to pass shall the chip be righted, and a thousand years of peace come to pass.
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'contribute'
I think I'm done paying for any OS, and I have no interest in 'donating' money either, as if I have any to spare anymore. I've got an old P4 laptop I got for free that's still running XP, I think I'll be picking out a Linux distro of some sort and learning how to use that, then when I build a new desktop finally I'll be all ready to load it up with that. The one or two pieces of software that I need to use that only have Windows versions will run just fine under WINE, from what I'm told.
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OS/2 is still alive? (Score:3)
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OS/2 is relegated to neckbeard's still maintaining their Amigas and C/64 machines playing block/character graphics games.
I really don't think so. The commercial interest in OS/2 isn't in desktop use or retro computing, but embedded and industrial appliances where OS/2 thrived years after the general public had forgotten it.
This new release is about protecting investments in such OS/2 based equipment.
Re:OS/2 is still alive? (Score:5, Informative)
Amiga, block/character games? You obviously haven't grown up with computers from that era, because the C/64 had graphics that were way ahead of the other similar 8-bit computers and the Amiga had the best graphics of them all. The competition at the time was the Color Computer 2, the TI-99/4A, the PC with either Hercules, CGA or EGA graphics, the Mac with black and white graphics or the Atari ST with much fewer colours on the screen.
Both the C/64 and the Amiga were king of their own class of computers. That is, until Commodore sat on their asses and everybody passed way ahead of them.
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You mean like Minecraft?
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I remember 2.0 back in about 92 or 93 and it was alright but not really special. And then it pretty much died. I can't imagine there are any significant projects still using it. Though I'll probably be told about several who never gave up on it. After all, there are still projects running Motif...
Well quite a few big companies bought into and built their own apps on it. And IBM of course continued to ship apps for OS/2. And there has also been a loyal geek user base which has ported a fair amount of open source projects to the platform. It is Posix compliant so porting isn't that difficult.
I must say, I liked OS/2 - especially Warp. It ran well on the hardware of the day and was way better than Windows. But IBM weren't as smart at marketing as Microsoft!
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I liked OS/2 - especially Warp. It ran well on the hardware of the day
As long as it wasn't Enterprise-grade Dell or Compaq running their proprietary disk controllers.
But some day the scars will heal, I know they will.
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My school had some systems that ran on it in the mid-90s. It also, after the member of staff who brought it in left, had nobody who knew how to use it. Our IT "teachers" were elderly Catholic priests teaching from a series of worksheets that basically had step-by-step instructions on "how to save a document in Word" and so on. There were no dedicated IT support staff, only an off-site support contractor.
I ended up teaching myself to use it and doing a few admin-type jobs for the school, in exchange for a ta
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Well, yeah, it really didn't catch on.
And that was pretty much Microsoft changing their core APIs to ensure OS/2 broke as much as possible. I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run", even if it was just a myth.
Which is really a shame, because while Windows was a still a crappy OS without real hardware-level preemptive multi-tasking, crap resource management, and an inability to actually use all of its memory, OS/2 was a pretty solid operating system which didn't let a single cras
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I think the old saying was "Windows aint done until Lotus won't run"
I had heard the "Windows ain't done until Novell won't run" as well. Microsoft went out of their way to build in incompatibilities that broke all of their competitors. There's no myth about that. It just gets swept under the rug.
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Guys, the actual quote was 'DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run' and that was in reference to Lotus 123.
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ATM's also went to USB and more network based as (Score:2)
ATM's also went to USB and more network based as well.
Older ones used to be dial up where they dialed when used or only dialed at the end of the day.
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An Amiga? Sure it didn't have memory protection (ie Guru Meditations) but it did have preemptive multitasking.
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The object-oriented GUI was one of the few bright stars in an otherwise dismal system. To this day, I don't know of another OS whose desktop system allows you to open directory windows that are customized to show one particular type of object the way that the Warp desktop could. I think that maybe the Mac Finder desktop had some similar capability, but nothing modern that I know of.
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OS/2 is a special OS - because unlike modern OSes designed for portability, it's one of the few that exploited a lot of x86 specific features. That's how it could not only intermingle 16 bit DOS, Windows and OS/2 apps together, but OS/2 1.x was actually a 16-bit OS. Later versions moved to 32-bit, but had the capability of runnin
Change the interface! (Score:3)
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Perhaps your recollection isn't very good at all, because OS/2 2.0+'s user interface with the object-oriented Workplace Shell was a triumph, with superlative user and programming documentation. I can't think of anything modern that betters or even equals it. OS X? Not even close. Windows XP, 7, 8, 10? Bah. GNOME? Sorry Charlie.
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I'd still take the Windows 3.11-like interface than the default Fisher-Price look of Windows XP.
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Re:Change the interface! (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps your recollection isn't very good at all, because OS/2 2.0+'s user interface with the object-oriented Workplace Shell was a triumph,
What? I used 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0, and all of them had shit UI. The defaults were all insane and made you use more buttons for no reason. The GUI elements were all oversized, too, so they wasted screen real estate. OS/2 was contemptuous of computing resources, because it came from the IBM mindset that anything worth doing is worth spending a lot of money on. When Open Source Unixlikes became a thing, it had no more reason to exist.
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Yes because the most intuitive thing when I want to STOP my computer is to press the START button. It only became intuitive because we got used to it. At first there was a lot of confusion and jokes make.
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It may have been technically great but it looked terrible and clunky even compared to Windows 3.1. I'm not a fan of Windows (any version) because I'm constantly fighting with the interface. I didn't have that problem with OS/2 but it really needed some polish.
"Positivism"? (Score:2)
I liked OS/2 (Score:5, Interesting)
The release is probably mostly for embedded use where OS/2 had quite some use since it was so much better and stable than contemporary MS Windows.
I quite liked OS/2 in its time and found it very superior to contemporary Windows versions.
Still In Use (Score:3)
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small company, not IBM (Score:3)
RTFA, this isn't IBM releasing a new version of OS/2, it's a small company that has gotten a license for OS/2 and is making a release. OS/2 is still as dead as it has been for years.
if the production value of the YouTube announcement linked to above is any indication, this is a tiny company run by people who are a little out of touch with current tech.
Digging up some history... (Score:4, Informative)
The deposition and testimony provided by Garry Norris - IBM's chief negotiator with Microsoft before and after the introduction of Windows 95 - has provided a cornucopia of fascinating evidence in the Microsoft trial. Much of it was previously unknown or unconfirmed. His evidence showed how Microsoft effectively controlled IBM's PC hardware and software businesses by making the price of Windows considerably higher than for other comparable PC makers. Mr Norris described in detail to Philip Malone, counsel for the Department of Justice, five cases where Microsoft had succeeded in modifying, or had attempted to influence, IBM's choice of ...
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Interesting read. That is also (more) proof that hardware without software is essentially useless.
--
Microsoft Windows 10: A 64-bit compilation of 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition with 0 bit of understanding good UI.
(Yes, I know Windows 7 is WinNT 6.1. Windows 8 is WinNT 6.2, Windows 8.1 is WinNT 6.3, and Windows 10 is WinNT 10.0, all which have b
Power companies everywhere (Score:2)
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Rejoice, power companies! Your crappy old OS/2 systems can be supported again!
What do you mean, again? The place I worked dropped OS/2 because didn't get any support even back when it was still a mainstream product.
Unless it's open source... (Score:2)
I used OS/2 for a few years, from 1995 to around 2001, it was a lot of fun. A lot of the technologies were interesting, but now antiquated. If it was open source, it could be something fun to run in a VM and tinker with.
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I was able to run OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 from retail copies I had just fine in VMWare Fusion.
Installing this from 36 floppies sure brought back memories.
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VirtualBox was actually written to run OS/2 and ended up being the killer OS/2 app that everyone had to have, just backwards as it ran OS/2 rather then ran under OS/2. And of course, as OS/2 used parts of the x86 system that other OSes didn't, any virtual machine that can run OS/2 can run any x86 OS
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I believe that you're thinking of Virtual PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC), which I think VirtualBox may be descended from (?)
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The AC has it right. First there was a Russian company (forget the name) contracted to write a virtual machine to run OS/2. Eventually that became Parallels for OSX. Then Innotek partnered with Connectivx to add OS/2 support to Virtual PC and port Virtual PC to OS/2. No sooner then they did this, that MS bought Connectivx and killed the OS/2 port. Then Innotek wrote VirtualBox, based partially on QEMU and released it as GPL (probably had to as it used GPL source) with propriety additions for things like USB
Leasons learned (Score:2)
Started my career with OS/2, and IBM's C++ compiler. Worked on some really nice systems in the 90s that used OS/2: automated trains, banking systems, robotics. But I was burned by IBM: first when they killed OS/2, then when they killed off OCL and their C++ suite for both Windows and OS/2. Jumped to linux in 2001 and haven't looked back since. But lesson learned: I'd have a hard time trusting an IBM OS or compiler suite.
What does bringing back OS/2 do today? Nothing. It would need something really innova
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OS/2 uses GCC mostly now, current version is 4.9.2 along with a pretty good libc, sort of between mingw and cygwin in capabilities. Package manager uses RPMs though Linux (and some Windows using Odin, sort of like WINE) binaries need to be recompiled.
It'll never be 64 bit (unless IBM open sources OS/2 for PPC) and can't handle memory above 3.5 GBs except as a RAM disk.
Just imagine ... (Score:2)
Just imagine, if you could get OS/2 running on an Amiga and call it BeOS, all the "positivism" that would ensue.
OS2 had Windows 3.1 (Score:2)
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Then there was some sort of falling out. Most people poin
The ill-fated history of IBM's OS/2 Warp .. (Score:4, Insightful)
'The demos of OS/2 were excellent, crashing the system had the intended effect -- to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often suprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows.' ref [gotthefacts.org]
Arca Noae Formal Announcement about Blue Lion (Score:3)
editing, -1 (Score:2)
OK this is a little off topic, but what the funk is "...with positivism..."?
Maybe you meant "happily" or "is pleased"?
Is editor just a synonym here for 'monkey trained to cut, paste, and hit 'post to page'"?
Can it run Win32 apps? (Score:2)
If yes, this could potentially be interesting. Microsoft has thoroughly turdified Windows since Windows 8.0. Windows 10 is a huge putrid bag of Don't Want.
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OK, I'll bite. It looked like the audience from a gun show, crammed into a hotel that Murph and the Magic Tones might consider turning down. What did you see?
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>> where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?
I thought that was Ubuntu. Remember the "Nongendered Noncontinental Nubian" release (v11.31)?
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I've always said, where is the OS for the Transgendered African-American-Polynesian Differently-abled community?
I think that's a Linux distro.
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In Soviet Russia, Amiga, er, Amiga sticks to, um...well, you play a shit-ton of Tetris on it anyway!
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Lemmings Thankyouverymuch!
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I'm with you.
I was a Novell guy - it was hard to let go when an inferior product ran it out of business, but it happened. I've since become a Linux guy.
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Ditto. Working systems are not enough. You need marketing and penetration. Or something like that.
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Yeah, I'm not sure what the point of OS/2 would be at this time. It's straight from the days of Windows 3.1 and maybe Win95.
If you want an alternative to Windows 10, we already have many Linux distros. OS/2 was nice in its day, but it's not going to provide support for modern hardware, or a reasonably modern user interface.
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OS/2 (actually eCS+Arca Noae latest) will install and run on some modern hardware. Being 1990's tech it does have limits, needs to see a BIOS and only supports up to 2TB drives (plan is to split larger drives into virtual drives), no video acceleration, no USB3 currently, shitty wireless support, sound supported by an Alsa port, printing limited to CUPs, any memory over 3.5GBs only usable as a RAM disk, limit of 64 cores (only licensed for one physical CPU)
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Does OS/2 even have a 64 bit kernel? It was great in its day because it was the only major x86 operating system to operate in real mode, but that was over 20 years ago, and hardware has come a very long way in that time.
I booted Warp 4 in a VM guest about five years ago for fun, but I can't think of many practical applications now, or any particular reason to even create a modern variant.
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Re:Editing? (Score:4, Funny)
I think that's exactly how they upload their stories.
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Even OS X has become bloated in the last few updates. I think the last true great one was Snow Leopard, maybe Mountain Lion.
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What about BeOS/Haiku?
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Re:As a Linux refugee, I'd seriously consider OS/2 (Score:5, Informative)
. I don't have that much time to spend just getting my system working.
Try switching to Linux Mint. I recommend the KDE version, but if you don't like that, there's 3 other variants: Xcfe, MATE, and Cinnamon.
There's a lot more distros out there than just Debian and Gentoo.
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You'll be wanting PC-BSD, then. It's FreeBSD with tweaks for desktop use, a different installer, and some extra utilities. It's more of an add on to FreeBSD than a separate project like Ubuntu is to Debian.
If you're used to Debian, bear in mind that updating FreeBSD isn't as streamlined as running apt and walking away. It's not difficult, but it's not as automated as Debian.
My advice: stay away from ports unless you need specific options for a piece of software. The way ports interacts with the package
Re:OS/2 is dead, get over it. (Score:4, Informative)
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The rumor is, the rights for OS/2 are partially owned by Microsoft, and they won't agree to make it open source. Unless something changes, projects like this one make no sense.
That's not really a rumor. It was originally a joint project, until there was a disagreement and a splitting of ways. IBM continued on with a release as OS/2 and Microsoft released the "New Technology" NT kernel. There's likely joint ownership on a lot of the original kernel code.