Windows or Mac

[Murderous]

Originally Posted by RamCharger

That all goes back to the simple question: what do you want to do with your system? As the FAQ that I quoted said "people work with applications not operating systems." If you are looking to do something other than games then requiring Windows is not a mandatory thing. Most of the major free OS' run on a myriad of underlying hardware arcitectures, but compile and run software just the same regardless (yes, linux will run on a Mac instead of using MacOS). That can be a huge benefit in a company with a heterogenous hardware buying scheme (a mixture SPARC and i386 based servers for instance). However, it all boils down to one thing: what applications do you want to run on a regular basis?

One of the bonus' of running a free OS (Linux, *BSD, whatever) is the sheer volume of free software available that can be used. Commercial stuff is nice for someone that wants to get something running fast. However, the payoff with the free stuff (GIMP, Apache, PHP, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc) is that upgrades are free, compatibility with newer versions of your free OS is pretty much always (dependencies are the only real gotchas and that's resolveable), and none of that nasty licensing nightmare which is core to commercial stuff. You can always used Wine to emulate windows if you need to use a windows to do some of your business with a windows app.

I agree with all of that... even as a simple family PC, I would much rather be on my mac... and virtualPC is good enough for what little bit of windows gear I run.

Murderous