Freedom Creations

Which Operating System (OS) do you go with? Well, I am not going to argue which is best. Each one has its advantages. Our main concern is web design, so I am just going to focus on the features that each OS has to offer in that respect.

Windows 2000/XP/Vista – With Windows you can pretty much run any of the web development tools that are out there; free and non-free. All the major browsers are supported on Windows, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and lately Safari. Also all the cross-platform plug-ins are supported, like Flash, Java, and now Silverlight. Although you can run Apache/MySQL/PHP on a Windows machine, it is not the greatest experience. So when it comes to developing Content Management Services (CMS), I do not recommend doing it on Windows.

MAC OS – On the MAC you can pretty much run a lot of free web design tools and it supports all the major retail applications. All the major browsers are supported except for Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. There is an IE version for the MAC but it only goes up to version 5.2.3 and it is a horrible browser. I do not recommend installing on a MAC as a matter of fact I would remove it if you have it. There is an open source project called IES4OSX (requires WINE) that will allow you to run more recent versions of IE on your MAC but it’s not 100% full-proof. MAC supports all multimedia and programming platforms including Silverlight. MAC has also good support for Apache/MySQL/PHP; therefore a good platform for CMS development.

Ubuntu (Linux) – On Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions (distros) there are a few web applications and they are all free. The major retail applications are not supported. Flash development is not supported. Not all major browsers are supported natively, like IE and Safari. As with the MAC there is also a project to run IE on Ubuntu called IEs 4 Linux (requires WINE) which works very well. When it comes to cross-platform plug-ins, Java and Flash are supported but Silverlight and AIR are not supported. CMS programming running on Linux Apache MySQL and PHP (LAMP) is best supported on Ubuntu. So, when it comes to CMS, Ubuntu is my choice of OS.

So as you can see to design and develop for the web effectively it is good to have a minimum of two Os’s. On the next post I will go over the different setups you can have on your computer.

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