MS alternatives

Hey all,
Just wondering something here. I've read some articles on www.fuckmicrosoft.com and i've always heard things about spyware etc, and it's obvious that MS is just one big monopoly. My question is, how would one go about severing ALL ties to microsoft, and still be able to use games and the internet and word processing and music and stuff?

I've heard of unix and linux operating systems, how do these works, are they freeware or no? What would one use for music and web and email?

Oh, i've been using hotmail for a while and now i'm paranoid about it all.. are there any good free web-based email providers out there?

Thanks for any help!

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Nenar

Unix is a commercial grade, server side OS running on proprietary hardware. The absolute cheapest hardware/OS combo will set you back around $3-4000. You might get a cheaper SUN Sparcstation on E-bay though. It is nothing like MS and requires you to know a serious amount about how computers really work. It's usually only used by sad techies like me who have borrowed machines from ork to play on. If you are not happy creating swap partitions, setting up mnttab yourself and the differences between i-nodes and mountpoints, don't go their.

Linux is the PC based, user friendly version of Unix. It is not freeware per se. A distribution CD is a modest 60-70 $MONETARY_UNITS. But you can install it on as many machines as you want, legally. As I say, it is based on Unix but does all the clever things for you. The good thing is, to me, is that if you want to be clever, you can, whereas MS does not allow this.

You can get just about any app for Linux that you want. MP3 burners/players, DVD software, E-Mail, web browsers, the whole thing. But, most modern games are devloped to MS' DirectX standard and that has not been ported to Linux yet. And probably never will as it's copyrighted to hell and back. Which means Linux will not do commercial PC games. You can get an MS emulator for Linix, called Wine, but I haven't heard of it being used to play MS based games with. Anyone know better?

One problem with Linix is that you will need new drivers, possibly, for your hardware. Depending on the distribution you may need to install these yourself. Are you happy editing kernel files by hand and recompiling them? If you get Linux make sure you know what you are getting into.

 

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