There are powerful, efficient, heavily tested, secure software
systems that run on standard Wintel hardware and support probably
the most advanced and powerful set of programming tools developed
so far. There are several different versions, and the people who
develop them not only want you to have them for free, they want
you to share this software and your knowledge of it with your
friends. (The people who develop this software generally make their
livings supporting, customizing, and documenting the software, so
you might have to buy a few books.) These systems rarely get
mentioned in the commercial computer rags, because there is no
incentive for the developers of these systems to buy advertising.
Fortunately, almost everyone on this list should have access to
the web by now, so without further ado:
http://www.gnu.org/
http://www.debian.org/
http://www.linux.org/
http://www.caldera.com/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.linuxmall.com/
http://www.redhat.com/
http://www.cygnus.com/
http://www.ora.com/
http://ariel.cobite.com/abf/abf/linuxad.html
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/linux/
Notice that many of the above are commercial businesses that
sell support contracts, documentation, proprietary applications
that run on non-proprietary operating systems, etc. Free
software is a profitable business!
In the hopes that I have left this discussion as something
slightly more than the ten-millionth Mac vs. PC war on the
net... (Which reminds me: you can run Linux on Macs too.)
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pobox.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd