What do you guys prefer and why? Windows, Mac or Linux?

Minix

Linux because I cannot afford a macbook or a system robust enough to deal with the windows bullshit AND I need to run multiple dev compilers simultaneously.

Linux for servers and macOS for everything else. Linux is great for servers because it has many capabilities for this. But why macOS for everything else? Currently, I use macOS for private things and Windows at work (because I have to). My subjective feeling is just that macOS is nicer. I can't give you objective reasons; it's just my subjective opinion.

I use linux wherever I can, macos is next on my list and I despise Windows for development

Windows - because Macs can't play porn, and Linux only gay porn without sound.

@alcatraz627 Idk why people says that windows is shit. I never had problems with it.

@Fast-Nop I need the sound honestly

@leocast Have you tried ubuntu/debian/popos/mint before?

@alexbrooklyn Yeah I really hate it when the porn clip gets to the end with chainsaw or nail gun and you see the terrified faces, but don't hear any screams and begging. Takes out a lot of fun.

@alexbrooklyn Yeah, I've worked with Ubuntu and Debian.

Linux initially, but after I tried Mac OS for the first time it was harder and harder to defend Linux and after some critical thinking all my hopes about Linux was crushed and I finally switched. Never missed Linux since.

Windows? If it wasn’t for games it would be dead by now just like windows phone

@uyouthe But that's my point, why everyone says that? What make windows so bad for you?

@leocast Perhaps you have hardware good enough that a lot of the issues just slip by?

I can easily run npm on my Linux installation but when I had to do it on windows, even the simplest of operations would cause such massive disk r/w lag spikes that the whole system would freeze.

And if that's not enough, windows has to, for some fucking reason, run so many disk heavy processes in the background that massacre my HDD.

Even a windows install with minimal applications installed is a headache to get working on my system.

@leocast I was responsible for servicing more than 80 windows workspaces on my first job. I serviced windows servers and workspaces in the military. I personally assembled and used a dozen of windows pc.

Windows never, I repeat, NEVER worked as intended and it only got more problems as time passed.

I’m no dumbass so I always managed rights correctly and installed no garbage apps

@alcatraz627 Oh, maybe is that. I mean, I have an i7 7000 3.6 Ghz, 32 GB ram and the SO is in a NVMe. After that I never had lag or freeze.

But before that, I ussualy had the problems you mentioned, but that was because I had an HDD. When I switched to NVMe everyting started to running faster.

My conclusion is that you can't have windows in an HDD. But, in the other hand I had the same problems with linux with an HDD.

@leocast I have nvme, ryzen and a shit ton of ram on my latest gaming build and windows 10 lags there sometimes

@uyouthe So, Windows for gaming, Linux for servers and Mac for productivity and work.

Well, VMS..

But then that morphed into Windows NT

Which became Windows, so I guess Windows.

But I do use Linux from time to time.

@Fast-Nop Linux works for meeee

tl;dr
I enjoy being able to customize and extend my OS, so I'm quite happy with linux.

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With linux, I can make it look and behave exactly like I want. I'm also savvy enough that I can fix anything that might come up, or extend it however I need. (To be fair, I can fix anything on Windows, too, and lots of tricks to make it behave how I want/need.)

Macs are definitely nice with a good overall user experience, but they're not very customizable. There's also often very little you can do to troubleshoot them when something comes up. For example: the auto light/darkmode rarely works on my work macbook pro, and when it does, it's inverted. There is apparently no fix other than reinstalling the os. so, dark mode all the time it is.

In contrast to the above two, I find Windows clunky and an overall grating experience. The nicest thing it has going for it is driver installation; that's usually smooth and easy. Gaming is going everywhere, thanks to Vulkan and Valve. I also loathe Microsoft's anti-consumer-privacy behavior. Google's, too, if this question also extends to ChromeOS.

@Root Funny, I had the opposite experience. I found when I tried using Linux as my day to day OS, I spent all my time fiddling with it, which was fun, but meant my productivity went out of the window.

With Windows, there is little to fiddle with, so I find I'm more productive.

Well, I was, until I found Devrant…

But I also have a full native Ubuntu shell running on my Windows desktop for when I get bored.

Windows for gaming, Linux for anything else.

Linux, of course

I like Linux

Linux for work
Windows for games
Mac for ranting

Linux as much as possible. I like to actually own my machine and not be held hostage to windows updates or macs software

Linux everywhere; I'd be a lot less dissatisfied if I had the patience to script it to my liking though. But ALSA is fucking complex, JACK takes time, and RandR is beyond complex. Not the APIs, theyre nice. It's the problems that are complex.

@leocast For me it's stability (or, was, I don't use it anymore).

Windows was always so fucking unstable. I haven't properly used it in 10 years but have to use it sporadically (and possibly work related but I signed a heavy NDA so can't talk about that if it'd be the case) and it still fails me big time.

Linux, easy one.

Stable as fuck (for me), customizable to whatever extent I want, fast updates (and very fast when they're zero day vulnerability patching, that shit is unmatched), I can control everything I want (good for both privacy and security) and its publicly reviewable and thus the chance of (spy agency) backdoors is very tiny (and can be discovered since its publicly reviewable).

Edit; I also use Linux for gaming. Through (thanks, steam!) Proton I can run nearly all titles I want :)

It depends of what you do with your machine what is the use for