A Look At Today's Operating Systems: Part 0 - Introduction

The way we use computers these days is changing quite a bit as tablet computing increases in popularity, and as such, desktop operating systems are radically changing to keep up with it. Personally, I find myself more productive with a mouse and keyboard, but for those who generally just need to check their emails and stocks and stuff like that, tablet devices would be a good fit for them. In this series, I'm going to show off the latest Windows and Mac desktop operating systems, as well as some others.

Now, in this introductory part, let's just take a quick look at some traditional desktops, whether it's the latest release of the respective operating system, or one that's not too far behind.

Windows 7. It's been officially released for about two and a half years, and nearly everyone uses Windows anyway, so I don't think there's much that I need to say about it. For the most part, it looks and feels much like Windows did since Windows 95.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (also known as Mac OS X v10.6). This isn't the latest release of Mac OS X, but it was launched about two and a half years ago. It wasn't much different from Mac OS X Leopard (v10.5) before it, bringing performance improvements and slight tweaks here and there. An App Store was added a year and a half after its release. But in the end, it was still a very traditional operating system and all of the applications looked and felt like they were designed for desktop computing.

Ubuntu 10.04, the previous Long Term Support release of Ubuntu from April 2010. The next LTS release goes final in April 2012.

Ubuntu up to 10.10 (GNOME desktop). For a while, Ubuntu used the GNOME Desktop environment. Linux distributions offer many desktop options, but I'm not going to get into that right now. The GNOME 2.x desktop that Ubuntu used to use was pretty standard and fairly customizable, and simple enough to navigate. But GNOME decided to change their desktop to something so radically different, so in response, the Ubuntu developers designed their own desktop that is... radically different.

Some bonus stuff

Windows 3.1 (1992) - I grew up on this, but coming back to try it years later, it's just terrible. It's pretty bad at multitasking because there's no taskbar. It's complicated to change or even choose the correct system settings, as it's all done manually, and there's pretty few options as it is. But at least it comes with Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Found from http://scacom.bplaced.net/Collection/wben.php via a Google Image search.

Amiga Workbench 1.3 (1988?) - An important part of my childhood, proving that an operating system can fit on and run from a 3.5" floppy disk (remember those?!), complete with slowness and noisy floppy drives. Oh, and a speech synthesizer that sounds really, really terrible.