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dukebound85

macrumors Core
Original poster
Jul 17, 2005
19,218
4,342
5045 feet above sea level
Maybe I am ignorant but are there really any mainstream os's in the world outside of windows, osx, linux and maybe solaris for the desktop user?

are there any that arent like US based?
 
I guess it would depend on what you mean by "mainstream" but basically the answer is "not really." There are several flavors of UNIX outside of what you mentioned, but those aren't really mainstream outside of server environs for the most part.
 
I'm sure MS-DOS is still popular in one or more of the -stans…

Pffft. I can't speak for the others, but Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, it's Win2k/XP/03 mostly on laptops with the occasional rare 98 on a desktop machine. Generally.

In the bigger capital cities with lots of expats (Kabul, Islamabad, etc) you actually see a lot of glowing apple logos because a lot of people take their own personal computers. There's a guy in Kabul who sells/stocks some Apple stuff like batteries and power supplies at roughly 2-3x sticker price.

I wouldn't really count Solaris/SunOS as a mainstream desktop OS. Yeah, you can do it, but no one does. More people run *BSDs than Solaris.

I predict in about 5 posts, there will be some Brit hopping in with talk of RISCOS.
 
When I was a kid everyone and their dog (around here) had an Amiga with Workbench. Most of us still do they're just locked up in attics.
 
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