Gaz dips his toe in the Linux pool...

[Simplex3]

Xandros is nice, but Suse has better support for commercial Unix apps. The Suse config tool is called "YaST" and is basically the Windows Control Panel. There is very, very little you can't do with it (and most of that is stuff you shouldn't be doing). As long as you use KDE as your window manager Windows users should feel right at home.

As for OSX, the core is FreeBSD 3.something. I actually run FreeBSD on all of my servers now, it's amazingly stable. I've never had a FreeBSD box crash on me, not once. Never had an app running on a FreeBSD box crash, not once. It's rock solid. The OSX user interface is also very nice. The price should be coming down soon enough with the move from IBM CPU's to Intel.

[Gaz]

Originally Posted by Simplex3

...There is very, very little you can't do with it (and most of that is stuff you shouldn't be doing)...

At this point that is exactly what I do NOT want. I am not interested in poking around in the guts of the OS. As I get more familiar with linux [provided we can find linux replacements for the critical Windows stuff], I might eventually be intrigued by the command line. Right now, though, it is simply an attractive nuisance and an invitation to disaster. Linspire and XandrOS appear to be perfect distros for an old Windows dog to learn a new linux trick.

I did consider a Mac [I had one at work many years ago and loved it], but it is very pricy. There is no “dipping a toe” in the Mac pool. Even a casual test-run [like we are conducting with linux] racks up beaucoup bucks. Since this activity is due to my paranoia about Windows, I do not see Mrs. Gaz eating the expense of a Mac, particularly since she thinks I am a bit fanatic about Windows [“Sweetheart, you ran a deep scan for viruses an hour ago…give it a rest”].

xoxo~
Gaz
Not ready to give up just yet.