I have been working with computers for 29 years and I have probably worked with every Operating System ever created for Personal Computers. I have always been disatisfied with both Windows and Macintosh and even Linux for that matter. Windows as we all know is highly vulnerable to malware. The cost of ownership for Windows, in both Licensing and maintenance is excessive, however the largest detractor is the time and resources one must commit to scanning and removing malware. Macintosh is for the most part immune to Malware due to its relatively small market share, (the people who would sell you anti malware software haven't seen fit to create large amounts of viruses and Malware for Macintosh YET). The biggest negative for Macintosh is the cost of equipment and licensing.... I have worked over the past 10 years with various forms of Linux and they all have one fairly significant shortcoming. You can't depend on any particular Version of Linux to "Just Work" out of the box, so to speak. I recently purchased an HP Media Center PC with all the bells and whistles for an experiment. Without even getting to the Vista Welcome Screen I booted from a Sun Microsystems SOLARIS (Unix) CD and installed Solaris. The installation took about 40 minutes and when completed EVERYTHING WORKED, 30" High Res Monitor, Brother Laser Printers, HP Laser Printers, HP Scanner, Firefox Browser came up with Java and Flash enabled and working. After Installing Open Office, (easy as installing it on Windows) I had a fully functional workstation. Next Test; Bring up ARMLS and run it through the paces. As near as I can tell all functions performed perfectly. Next I tried a couple of the web sites that I need routinely, County Assessor Sites, LS Web App. LS is the only site I found that some function didn't work. I'm guessing that since LS's Web App is programmed with Active Server Pages (Microsoft) it is not completely an open standards Web Application.

The long and short of this post is this: If you need a stable reliable and Malware Proof Workstation and don't want to spend a fortune on equipment and licensing, check out SOLARIS from Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ It is Free and it has a track record as one of the most stable and durable Unix Operating Systems in the world. Sun introduced the Solaris Operating System in 1992 on Uix platforms replacing Sun OS and beating Microsoft to the Complete GUI by 3 years. It is not Linux but it is Unix and Unix is the granddaddy of both Windows and Macintosh.