Nicest of the Damned One reason these systems can be so inexpensive is that (with the Lindows box) the manufacturer is providing a modified free OS or (with the white-box system) no OS at all. If I had wanted to buy Windows XP Home with my parents’ system, it would have added $89, almost 25 percent of the system cost. And I would love to see the average non-technical person use the Windows installer on a bare system and get their reaction to the blue screen with the ASCII/DOS-esque display. As technical as a Linux install is, RedHat at least provides a really nice GUI installer. Apple’s is what you’d expect: opaque and non-frightening. FreeBSD and NetBSD make up in speed and efficiency what they lack in aesthetics: like RedHat, you can get the job done with a couple of floppies and a net connection. I have yet to make a second attempt at XP: I may not bother, since Holbrook tells me I’ll regret it.