Windows 2003 is a great Workstation 12239

TJB replied

A lot has changed in Linux threading in the last few years.

The shuttle rarely blew up too, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have design flaws. The single threaded OS-2 desktop, in particular, the Window manager, was a serious design flaw.

It happened to me a lot. I used to love to make sure that windows don't overlap so that if you are using IPMD and debugging a mulbreasthreaded GUI app under OS-2 you won't hang the desktop. Warp couldn't even detect a desktop deadlock and safely restart itself - you had to reboot the whole machine. Awful.

Oh my, and, what would happen if you dared to send a message to a window across a thread boundary under OS-2?

And while we're at it, let's bring up all the other good old OS-2 memories, like,

LAZY WRITER screwed up messages during installations. Even slackware at the time was not as bad and back in those days Linux was a rough ride. This is a real shame too as if OS-2 would have had a decent installer, it might have made more inroads.

blown extended attributes and having to run some goofy rebuild my desktop utility. I would get all of my folders fonted and bitmapped and color coded again. Then something would happen, I'd have to run that utility, and all my work would be trashed. Way to go OS-2.

And, how about, not trapping the CTRL-ATL-DEL keys so that it just immediate rebooted your machine as back in the days of DOS.

I really did like the design of Workplace shell and the way the taskbar worked under Warp though. Just the implementation was weak.

Yeah, you know me. I've been writing mulbreasthreaded applications since OS-2 2.0. I gave up on OS-2 after Warp and switched to a mix of W95 and WNT. Functionally, there's not too much difference between OS-2 threads and Windows NT threads, except that Windows NT and subsequent threads are better. I think in some ways Windows threads are better than Linux threads, but, Linux processes are much, much, better than Windows processes. There's no concept of a parent or child process under Windows.

Obviously your friends have never used BeOS. There has never been as good a threaded platform as BeOS. Your friends that think OS-2 threads rule should have built some even simple examples of BeOS applications. They might have happily discovered that the window event queue is itself mulbreasthreaded so that a window can receive messages concurrently on different threads.