I'd go with Linux, specifically Puppy Linux. It's a tremendous little distribution- 130 MB or so- and even once I fill it up with all kinds of crap- like KDE, several office suites, a/v editors and players, several web browsers, CAD, etc.- I still only have a system totaling maybe 4.25 GB, tops. (From memory, when I used to setup Windows XP with a similar set of applications, it took up something like 20 to 30 GB, depending on how I installed the OS updates. The much-vaunted Ubuntu (8.04) took up about 14 GB- still comparatively steep.)

Quote Originally Posted by Aizmov View Post
As much as I want to believe it, Wine is not a replacement for Windows. That's why I dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows on my workstation. I actually do some serious work and not games, and for certain applications you must use Windows.
Yeah, WINE isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's best left to running a handful of utilities and curiosities if you're running some kind of a unix system, not huge complex programs. And of course, there are still companies and other outfits that stubbornly refuse to use anything but MS file formats, and while it's usually no problem I know it can screw up my day without warning, and force me to launch my XP VM.

ReactOS looks interesting, though, assuming they ever get beyond alpha releases sometime before we all die of old age.