I have been an advocate for open source software for a number of years. Until I bought a MacBook Pro four years ago I used Ubuntu as my primary platform. Ubuntu and other Linux distributions provide a reasonable alternative desktop. The library I’ve been volunteering in the past couple of months has aging Dell Optiplex 755 desktop computers that struggle a bit to run Windows 7 with 4 gigabytes of  RAM. I know these same units using a Ubuntu desktop would still be quite responsive. I have an older Dell Vostro laptop that came with Windows XP Professional on it four years ago. With the end of support for XP I’m tempted to install Ubuntu on it. I could put more memory in the computer and run Windows 7 on it but that’s going to cost about two-hundred dollars. In addition to that I’m going to have to install sometime of antivirus client. With Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution I need none of that and I get a host of other free software programs to install on this older laptop. Open source operating systems like Fedora or Ubuntu provide reasonable alternatives to Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh platform.