Here is my tidbit on alternate Operating Systems. I have installed configured and ran many Linux, BSD, and other OS's. Here is a quick summary of what you should check out for different reasons:
- BSD: look at the BSD's if you want to run a "Back Office" application. They jhandle TCP/IP very well and have good security, and stability. Open BSD is a popular option id you want to run a Web/Proxy/Firewall server, it is very difficult to manage but absolutely secure out of the box. BSD is FREE!
- Linux: Boy there are a lot of distributions of Linux. It is very versatile can be difficult to customize, but has lots of support and history. For beginners that want to quickly be able to do neat stuff with Linux I suggest Caldera. It costs money but it's cheap, easy to setup and use, and has an integrated web based admin program. It is packaged with the most popular distributions of Linux software.
- QNX: QNX is awesome! It installs quickly and easily, It has all the BASIC desktop needs built in, it's FREE! and it runs on old crappy systems really well. The downfall of QNX, is it's support. You will not find the support for this as you will for Linux or BSD. I only suggest it for people who want to turn an old 486 or pentium into a web browser.
- BeOS: I sure was excited about BeOS when 4.x was released. Unfortuneatly they haven't done much since. They have little support and a really strong core. I am a graphics and multimedia person and for that I was really impressed with this OS. If you are also a graphics person I recommend trying it, but not switching your main OS to it since it may die completely.
I hope this has peaked someones interest in other OS's. There are so many options besides Windows, although I think Windows is great, it gets boring after a while.
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