“Just when it looked like Microsoft had crushed all comers,
Linux and others are fighting for your desktop. But the question
is, can they win?“
“As most of you know, the past year has seen a formidable
challenger enter the fray. Yes, Linux, the freely distributed Unix
spin-off, has been around for years, but only recently did
companies like Caldera and Red Hat put a user-friendly interface on
it to give it mass appeal. And later this year, software
heavyweight Corel will release its own flavor of Linux.”
“To a lesser extent, the upstart BeOS, which previously courted
multimedia authors, has begun making noise too. Back in February,
Be’s CEO went so far as to offer the BeOS free to any computer
company that installed it as the default OS. (To date, just a few
companies, including AST, IDot, and Microworkz, have agreed to load
BeOS.)”
[This article has a large section on Linux, that part of the
article starts
here.]