Which operating system is the best one? I get asked this a lot and the answer is it depends on what you want to do. Are you going to be doing a lot of number crunching like an accountant or financial advisor? Will you be doing multi-media editing such as movies and audio files? How about just surfing the web doing shopping, e-mail, and writing the occasional document? These are all the main basic uses that over 90% of users fall into. You need to identify which one fits you the best.

Lets look at these in more detail.

Lets look at the most basic user fist.

This user spends the majority of time on the internet using social media sites, e-mail and on-line shopping. This is the vast majority of people out there.  So which operating system it the best for this user? It does not matter for this user. If price is an issue then go with Microsoft Windows or Linux as the operating system. These systems cost a lot less than Apple Mac OS. The PC prices can start as low as $200 for a refurbished one up to a few thousand. It all depends on the age and what is in the computer. For the most basic user, the recommendation is a PC wit at least 4 GB or RAM, 500 GB Hard Drive and a network card of some sort. This type of computer will run both Windows or Linux.\r\n

The basic budding photographer/cinematographer.

This user takes a lot of photos and creates some basic videos that need some touch-up work. These users generally need a little bit more processing power and memory to have the computer respond faster so that they are not waiting so much. This is where the Apple devices come into play as well. The PC is still cheaper than the MAC. The PC minimum requirements for this type of user is 6 GB RAM and 500 GB hard drive. A quad-core processor is also recommended. The entry level MAC computers are a good fit for this type of user as well. Software for photo and video editing can be quite different on the each platform.

For Windows and and MAC you have the grandfather of graphic programs, Adobe Create Cloud Suite. This suite has all the graphic editing you will need to do. On Linux you will have to choose from the free alternatives. Linux graphic editing programs are Gimp, Inkscape, Krita and Scribus. These free alternatives do work on Windows and MAC as well.\r\n\r\nAs for video editing. The same thing applies. The more RAM and Processing speed you have the faster you will be able to edit the videos. For basic video editing on the MAC use iMovie Maker. On Linux there is two good ones called KdenLive and OpenShot. Openshot works on Windows and MAC but Kdenlive does not. On Windows you can use OpenShot which is free or Microsoft Movie Maker or search for one of the many others ones out there.\r\n

Summary

As you can see there is always a way to get thing accomplished on the computer. You just need to decide what you want to do and which applications will work best. You have to look at a lot of various things. I will go over the requirements for the business users in another article.