A great alternative to Windows is something called Mac OS X. It’s actually short for Macintosh Operating System 10. And we just saw another major release, 10.5, titled Leopard. I’m still running Tiger on my iMac that I bought last fall. (I don’t believe in early adoption of commercial software. It always ends in tears; just look at Vista users.)

For those of us who are afraid to venture into the uncharted and possibly confusing (but what I believe to be ultimately educational) waters of Linux/UNIX, one can always find, for the fee of one Apple Inc. product, a true UNIX core operating system. The recent Mac operating systems have been nothing short of amazing, from Panther through Leopard, they have all been superior (in my opinion and in thousands of fellow tech columnists’ opinions as well) to Windows Vista, even Windows XP (that’s right, because I’m sorry to say that if you’re running Vista, you should probably think about upgrading to Windows XP; hilarious, no?).

And what’s true of Linux as far as viruses and security is also true of UNIX. There are no viruses for Mac unless, of course, you consider the various Microsoft products available for Macs, like Office. Of course most people buy Apple products for all the wrong reasons, but they can rest assured, by myself that is, that they have bought something good. That’s right, as in holy.

Mutual benefits of both Linux and Mac OS X are that neither have to run anti-virus software, which means that you as a user of OSS don’t have to buy or even use said anti-virus software. Strange, I know. It also means that you’ll get a lot of free time back to your life (unless, of course, you’re busy modding the crap out of your Linux installation because you want the the Windows to match this cool wallpaper you found. Yes, I have a problem).

One thing (and perhaps the worst thing) about living in a Windows world is that it’s almost impossible to find new games for any OS other than Windows (and none really run well under Vista, so you’re really stuck with XP still). That’s the biggest drawback and why I still have a partition on my Mac set aside for XP so I can play a handful of computer games. It’s simply something that Mac users are still struggling with, and Linux users will be struggling with for a long time to come.

For those of you who are students, Microsoft does make Office for Macs and Linux has, in my opinion, a superior, free alternative to Microsoft Office called OpenOffice.org. Some people wonder how can Linux and all this software be any good. Well, that’s like asking someone who cooks their own dinner how the food they eat can be any good if they weren’t paid to cook it. Open-source developers, who are also utilized widely by Apple for help with its own software development, are all professionals doing this work because it is their passion, not because they get paid the big bucks by our friendly neighborhood evil empire.