From windows to Linux. Was there a choice?

“Around the time of windows 3.x there were a few competing
operating systems, or more specifically, windowing systems
operating on top of DOS. GEOS is one that I can remember, OS/2 was
another. These were commercial offerings and ran on the same
hardware platform as windows. These offerings didn’t capture the
masses imagination and fell by the wayside.

“When graphical operating systems began they were hardware
based. If you wanted to use a different operating system you had to
use different hardware. Amiga had their own operating system, Apple
computers had their own, Unix was on different hardware again. The
multitude of computers, the x86 pc, had windows”

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