Open Source OS's

[leonardmp92]

Hello,

Are there any good open source, stable, free OS's that are similar to Windows?

Thanks.

Moderator Edit: This was moved from the windows area to the Linux area. 20/04/08

 

[Kharn]

Well there are all the Flavors of linux out there, FreeBSD an BeOS i think.

There is a Linux distro called Linspire it tries to make it's self recovering windows user friendly by emulating it (still can't run windows programs without wine though) What is it you are looking for in particular?

Oh an this should have been posted in the Linux section.

 

[Jorsoft]

Linspire is probably the closest thing to M$ Windows you'll be able to find.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

ReactOS is an open source Windows clone, supposed to be perfectly compatible with Windows drivers and software, but it's currently in Alpha development and doesn't work that well.

Ubuntu is a good alternative, looks different than Windows but is very stable and can run some Windows programs using Wine. Ubuntu uses Linux for it's core and the Gnome window manager. It's well supported and documented online, so you won't have any problems using it (unless you have unsupported hardware, like ATi graphics).

 

[Kharn]

Calc reactOS is a new one on me where did you find out about it?

 

[Snake91839]

Linspire is your best bet if you want something close to Windows. But I think that you might like Ubuntu a bit better. And with wine you should be able to run most of your existing programs.

 

[KSoD]

I have heard of ReactOS from several places. Only issue is the Driver support is very limited.

 

[Kharn]

From what I have been reading it looks like it will take windows drivers as standard.

 

[KSoD]

Unless they changed the setup they were writing their own drivers for use with the OS. It ws based off of the Windows drivers but they were having issues with getting some of them working. I know that they had only 1 peice of my hardware supported when i looked at their driver list last time.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

It says it's designed to achieve full binary compatibility with the NT kernel (Windows NT at least, probably also 2000 and maybe XP). It's only in alpha stage, but it seems to work OK (only ran it in VMWare though). It doesn't look like it has many features yet, but usually they write a nice GUI and stuff after the basic core functions are implemented. I think the ReactOS project looks very promising, but in its current state it's definitely not ready for average use.

I use both Windows and Linux a lot, I think ReactOS would make a good free upgrade for some of my older Windows 98 PC's or as a way out of buying Windows for a new build when I'm going to primarily run Ubuntu anyways.