Open operating systems The Verdict
This is an interesting Roundup to rate. Visopsys brings up the rear, but it doesn’t lose out in the traditional sense of the word. The OS is in fact in a league of its own and has no peers. Instead of looking at it as an alternative OS which you can use productively, think of Visopsys as a computer science project on steroids. If you need to wrap your head around the inner workings of a multi-threaded, fully preemptive multitasking OS, there is no better option than Visopsys.
While Reactos’s default desktop doesn’t offer much, you can quickly turn the vanilla installation into a productive one thanks to its software repository. Unfortunately, fleshing out the OS with useful apps doesn’t automatically make it usable. The alpha nature of the OS and its limited hardware support means that it will continue to operate in the confines of a virtual environment for the time being.
Kolibrios makes it to the podium, but in last place. Straight out of the box, it offers all of the apps you’ll need on a desktop for everyday use. Unfortunately, however, several crucial ones – such as the web browser – are quite rudimentary, and you’ll be testing their limits in no time. But as we’ve said before, Kolibrios makes a wonderful option for anyone into retro gaming.
If an AI (that’s exactly what an AI would say!–ed) was doing this Roundup, it would have awarded the win to Openindiana, as it scores highly on all the parameters except one. It’s the only OS in this Roundup that looks and feels like any other Linux distro featuring the MATE desktop. Complementing the familiarlooking desktop are commonly used productivity apps for everyday use. The weakest point of the OS is the lack of a graphical package manager, which might make new users hesitant about venturing into this OS.
Ironically, it’s precisely that lack of an alien feeling that keeps Openindiana from claiming the top spot on the podium: it looks too familiar to be considered as an alternative OS. All things considered, Haiku has the right mix; it looks like an alternative OS, behaves like one too and yet enables us to be productive enough to use it as a daily desktop.