Alternative operating systems, anyone?

[Dan]

(Trying to generate a bit more traffic here)

Just wondering ... are there any planners that have tinkered with alternative operating systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, or BeOS? What distro do you us? Does anyone use Linux for day-to-day surfing, e-mail and word processing on the desktop?

I've played around with Linux quite a bit, particularly the Red Hat distros. My opinion: stable, but not quite ready for the desktop.

* The directory hierarchy is intended to be convenient for programmers, not end users.
* Often, when you change hardware, the system refuses to boot. If it does, X (the GUI) won't operate. I can't just swap one video card and replace it with another without recompiling the kernel.
* GUI based program interfaces are very inconsistent; each seems to use a different set of widgets (buttons, scroll bars, etc).
* Program installation varies from distro to distro. Sometimes you use a package manager, sometimes you compile the program yourself ... there are few Windows or Mac-like installation programs.

I love BeOS, but unfortunately the company went bust before it reached critical mass.

 

[Repo Man]

I use Mandrake Linux for my file server (and soon for a web server). I don't have a terrible amount of experience with it as I had a computer savvy friend help me out with it.

 

[Dan]

I'm thinking about checking out the new distro of Mandrake .. 9.1, I believe. I've also heard good things about Gentoo.

My secondary box, Zeitgeist (the bling-blingy experimental computer), boots into five operating systems:

* Windows XP Pro
* Red Hat Lonux 9
* BeOS 5
* FreeBSD 5.1
* QNX

I was thinking about adding another HD I have floating around, and adding Gentoo or Mandrake. When OpenBSD releases their graphic installation program, I'll probably replace the FreeBSD partition.

I also have a NeXTStation Turbo Color, but the original monitor went bad, I shold get it replaced; it's really a great old workstation to play around with.

 

[Chris Steins]

LAMP...

PLANetizen, and most of Urban Insight's clients run on servers running Red Hat using what seems to be referred to as the LAMP platform -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl.

We've had a good deal of success using these platforms. They're amazingly robust and customizable.

Chris