The OS decision!

This is going to one of the more controversial decisions I'll make so I decided to shunt all possible responsibility away from myself. I asked a /prog/graming message board that I frequent what OS would be best for my project (or is runtime differences so minuscule that I shouldn't care).

I got a wide variety of responses so I decided it would be worth spending a day or so looking into them.

Plan9 -> Inferno
This one grabbed my interest pretty quickly. A distributed OS created by Bell labs you say? One of it's main goals seems to be to to provide client machines as work places. It has GCC, gossip has that it'll run Java. Sounds good, too good. The one issue here is the lack of virtual environments for working with.

And being UNIX based everything is going to be an uphill battle to get working.

Solaris
This seem an unusual system to pick but I thought I'd look into it anyway. "Solaris is very Windows NT" was the first phrase my search turned up. Temped to write it off after just reading that, but no, I am too professional to walk away. Has all the compilers. But the main virtual environments I plan to use don't seem to able to run on it, or at least haven't been properly tested yet. (I realise now I haven't talked about my intended Virtual Environments yet, I'll fix that soon)

I can't see any reason why I would leave Windows for Solaris.

MINIX (For some unknown reason)
I figure this was thrown in as a joke. The one reason I'm mentioning it is because of the man, no, the LEGEND who made it, Andrew S. Tanenbaum. People who know of him know what I mean. People who don't need to read more.

And no, the OS doesn't have what I need.

Windows
What do I need to say here. I was raised in a DOS environment. For all it's flaws, It's were I'm most comfortable.

Tho I do kinda want to experiment.

Ubuntu/Mint (Or some other filthy linux swapout)
This is one of the better options. It'll have the compilers and platforms I need and the support I'll want. I'll also need to do a bit of research into WINE to see what it is possible to call and use. Definitely possible.



While a the professionals disagreed on the OS they all agreed that the structure of my distribution and the programs efficiency was far more important that niggling little differences between runtimes.

So the plan from here is:
Do some more research into Plan9
Once I decide that's a bust look a bit harder into Ubuntu

I'm not going to seal myself into an OS just yet. Deadline for that is September 14th.

Expect a post soon regarding my plan virtual environment test cases.