March 11, 2012, 8:58 AM —
As free and open source software continues to become more powerful and more prevalent, there's less and less need to choose anything else.
It's not at all surprising, for example, to see the recent growth in usage of desktop Linux, or similar trends in software like Firefox and LibreOffice.
Even if you're generally humming along happily on a Linux desktop with most every application need covered, though, there may still occasionally be a piece of software that you just can't live without, but that still runs only on Windows.
What to do? One option is Wine, a compatibility layer designed to let you run Windows apps on Linux or other operating systems, including also BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.
