Choosing a UNIX Variant

As you have seen, there are a multitude of UNIX variants. Picking a variant that meets your needs depends on how you plan to use UNIX. For example, you may want to run UNIX on your desktop or your laptop computer. If you want to use UNIX this way, you have many choices. You can buy a computer with a UNIX variant already installed, such as a Macintosh computer with Mac OS X or a computer with Linux, FreeBSD, or some other UNIX variant already preinstalled. If you are a more experienced user and would like to configure your own machine, you can select a free or low-cost UNIX variant from the many available choices, including a large collection of different Linux distributions, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and many other UNIX variants. Although you can get many of these variants free via Internet download, you may prefer to purchase a supported version of one of these variants. Instead of downloading such a variant, you will be provided with media containing the operating system. Before selecting a UNIX variant, you should examine how well each of these variants meets your particular computing needs. You should also research how easy it is to install each variant on the hardware platform you have. Many people relate their experiences and problems installing and running different UNIX variants on web sites that you can find using a search engine. You also need to consider the software you want to run on your machine on top of your UNIX variant. For each UNIX variant, there are thousands of software programs that have been ported to run on it. However, you should make sure that the particular software programs you would like to run have been ported to the variant of UNIX you are considering, or that they are already included in your distribution.

Choosing a UNIX variant to run a low-end server, such as a web server, involves some of the same considerations as choosing a UNIX variant to run on the desktop. If you want to run Linux on your server, you should select a Linux variant that includes a full suite of system administration capabilities and strong support for security, such as Red Hat, Slackware, or Debian. Among the most common BSD variants, many people consider FreeBSD to be an excellent choice for running a variety of server applications, including a web server, a file server, or a mail server. OpenBSD is considered to be the best choice for security applications, including running a firewall or an authentication server. NetBSD is considered the best choice for running servers on unusual machines, such as computers salvaged from other uses.

Different considerations apply when choosing a UNIX variant for running a high-end server, an enterprise or mission-critical application, or computing-intensive applications. For such uses, you could examine supported UNIX variants that include additional capabilities to ensure reliability and availability, excellent performance, scalability, supportability, interoperability, adequate security, and other features important for this type of computing. You should examine the proprietary UNIX variants that major computer companies such as HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems offer, as well as their supported Linux distributions, which include add-ons needed for enterprise applications.