These days, most desktop or laptop users expect Microsoft Windows or macOS as their operating system, depending on the brand of their device. They may have even heard of this “Linux thing.” But there are a wide variety of free operating systems available, and many of them are just as good or better than Windows or macOS. Here is a list of some of the best free operating systems for your PC.

Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distribution for "average" users, especially if you consider all its derivatives. But Ubuntu itself is also derived from Debian. We can say that the following are advantages of most distributions using the .DEB package format, since the popularity of Ubuntu makes most developers release their applications in this format.

But depending on who you ask (especially if that person works in corporate IT), Red Hat's Linux distribution is still the best; CentOS is a leader for server deployments, while Fedora is the community version of the enterprise OS. It features newer changes and faster releases than the more conservative enterprise version. Either way, Linux is your best bet for productivity and entertainment among alternative OSes.

While Linux has been around for a while, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) has been around for even longer. What started as a project to implement a free operating system based on proprietary Unix is now a family (often called *BSD) of operating systems. If you want to try one, try FreeBSD, as it is a generalist operating system suitable for both desktop and server use.