for ignoring the most powerful, secure, and easy-to-use OS in the world: Apple Macintosh OS X.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/

It takes the best of Linux with the speed, stability, and security of a Unix subsystem (in this case a variant of *BSD Unix), and merges it with the most beautiful, graceful and easy-to-use GUI that two decades of innovation can afford.

People who use OS X on the desktop are more productive. Everything just works better. All of the problems people have with Windows don't happen under OS X.

It runs all Mac programs (aka Cocoa), and it's a non-secret that MS Office OS X is superior technology to the PC version (www.mactopia.com). It runs all Unix programs (command line, X11, KDE, etc.), so you can also run all of the open office programs, Apache, PHP, perl, etc. It runs all PC programs (emulated), often almost as fast as a similar speed PCs (it helps that emulator is now programmed by Microsoft). All of Norm's software runs great.

To be fair, however, people who use OS X also end a lot poorer than your hardcore Linux user. Which is why we run all of our servers under Linux. The Unix that OS X is built on is open source (called the Darwin Project), but to get the full Mac OS you need to purchase Panther, which will you around $150, and of course Macs are the most expensive PCs on the market. It'll be $2K to get the entry level G5.

However, your return on investment as a desktop machine is well beyond any PC. When you buy a PC, you also buying hundreds of hours of frustration of the life of the machine. The time you spend either protecting your machine, or fighting the damage that ensures when worm or virus slips through, makes PCs far more expensive.

If you're at all open to change, look at an Apple before Linux. It's like running a Mac, Linux, and PC on the exact same machine.

Good Cards,

V

p.s. For the sake of the technical purists out there, it should be noted that Linux and Unix work and look very similar, but are different. Linux is an open source initiative to replicate a free *nix OS, while Unix proper is derived from a Bell Labs project from the 60s (I think, I may be off), and usually comes with various license restrictions, except for the few projects out there with open source versions of Unix proper.