I’ve got a pile of dead hardware that I’m going to be surplussing soon here at work and much of it won’t be able to handle Microsoft Operating Systems, either because the system lacks a restore partition or lacks a Microsoft licensing sticker to make the install of Windows XP work properly. So we’ll have to live without Windows, which means some other operating system. There are four that I’m looking at currently:

• PC-BSD
• Linux Mint 17
• ElementaryOS
• CentOS

Generally I think none of these are really ready for prime-time consumer use, but maybe I’ll be surprised.