Best computer operating system software

Lubuntu Complete Operating System that ships the essential apps and services for daily use: office apps, PDF reader, image editor, music and video players. Kubuntu Kubuntu is an operating system built by a worldwide community of developers, testers, supporters and translators.

Apple macOS Security Update Apple constantly improve the security of macOS operating system. Keep your version up to date and sleep at ease. Zorin OS Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure, and privacy-respecting.

Fedora 34 Workstation. Fedora is a Linux-based operating system, a suite of software that makes your computer run. Rufus 3. One of the best tools to create bootable USB drives, the easy way.

ProcessKO 5. Parallels Desktop for Mac It will help you in your journey of discovery with Linux. ScummVM 2. Acronis True Image. EaseUS Todo Backup. Macrium Reflect. Paragon Hard Disk Manager. While you can use backup software to save your work, this will only save your files and folders. If you also want to back up your applications and your computer registry, in order to restore a complete and working version of your operating system, you will need to use disk cloning software.

The ideal disk cloning software will allow you to easily copy your entire hard drive , regardless as to whether it's a traditional SATA or more recent SSD, and make a full and faithful copy of it. That way, in the event that the original hard drive fails you can swap it out for the clone. This helps avoid the need to completely reinstall system software and copy across all data, allowing you to continue to work much more quickly.

A backup drive could be set up and cloned within your existing PC chassis, or you could set it up as an external drive to allow you to store it off-premises as needed.

It can also be useful when simply looking to upgrade your hard drive, such as to one with a higher capacity, or to a different type entirely such as from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive SSD.

Either way, cloning software has its place, but to make regularly backups you'll need an application that is reliable and trustworthy and likely to preserve data integrity without leaving any gaps. Here are the best disk cloning software options currently available. Acronis True Image is a full featured backup solution that offers a variety of data and cyber protection features for users. It allows active disk imaging for Windows and Mac systems as well as offers world-class cloning and backup, plus new cyber protection features including vulnerability assessments and on-demand antivirus scans.

The software simultaneously sends data to both a local drive and a cloud solution. Acronis True Image has an anti-ransomware feature that detects, and can even reverse the unauthorized encryption of a hard drive to keep data safe from this increasingly prevalent type of attack.

It also offers support for mobile device backup. The downside is that all this backing up does use some system resources, and can even lengthen boot times. A one-year subscription offers ransomware protection built in. For cloud-backups, you'll need to upgrade to the Advanced plan.

A Premium plan offers 5TB of storage and electronic signatures. EaseUS Todo Backup is a disk cloning program, that offers a great array of services- even on the free tier. For disk cloning it enables a wide range of cloning activities, including system cloning, hard drive cloning, and partition cloning. It's worth playing with just for the cleanness of its desktop, and there are working web browsers and media players, although it's still rather experimental and many of the features of BeOS haven't quite been fully realized as yet.

Linux, as you may know, is a ground-up reinterpretation of UNIX. It's completely open source, uses no proprietary Windows code, yet ReactOS is designed to be and in some cases actually is compatible with Windows drivers and applications. Your mileage may vary — it's certainly not going to play nice with high-end games or software, and ReactOS isn't quite up to the Windows 10 level yet. It's currently aiming at full compatibility with Windows Server So it's clearly a bit behind the times, but ReactOS does have its uses.

Incorporating parts of noted Windows emulator Wine, it runs LibreOffice, Firefox, Opera and more quite happily, and can even manage some earlier versions of popular commercial applications like Adobe Photoshop. Furthermore, ReactOS now natively supports more file systems than all Windows versions combined. Given that it's free, it's certainly worth a test to see if any of your older business-critical applications are compatible — setting up workstations without Windows licensing is a tempting prospect, although we can't vouch for its resistance to attacks.

As its name suggests, FreeDOS is a fully-compatible but completely free and open source remake of DOS that can handle just about everything its proprietary counterpart can. That does, of course, mean no multitasking, no protected mode, no GUI, but it'll run your games and can even manage Windows 3. As you might expect, it's not a static recreation of the final commercial DOS release in , and indeed hasn't been static since it first emerged in In fact, FreeDOS remains in active development, and features a number of integrated improvements compared to its rather archaic ancestor.

Instead of a traditional installation, the distro is designed to be installed in bootable USB flash drives. Wayne OS is available in two versions -- Free and Paid. The Free version is meant for all kinds of end-users. To install it, simply download its compressed installer and then extract the executable installer from the archive and fire it up.

This will bring up the Wayne OS installer. Select the version you want to install and then point the installer to the USB disk you want to install it on. Wait for the installer to download and copy the necessary files to the USB disk. Its list of supported hardware widened as it grew, and in Sun released the source code in the form of OpenSolaris, leading to advanced community development.

And then Oracle purchased Sun, renamed the OS once more to Oracle Solaris, and decided to cease source releases, effectively closing the source once again.

It also offers good security features, efficient memory management and ability to deal with heavy loads, making it a good choice for advanced networking and internet and intranet services. Apple typically offers major updates to the iOS operating system every year via iTunes and over the air too for versions iOS 5 and the ones after it. As of March , this number has grown to more than two million apps. The key features of iOS include a home screen rendered by app SpringBoard, Helvetica Neue as the system font, multitasking, notification center, accessibility features to help users with vision and hearing disabilities, folders option, application switching and task completion.

Also worth a mention are Siri, the intelligent personal assistant integrated into iOS; and Game Center, the online multiplayer social gaming network released by Apple. It comprises software distributed under various free and open-source licenses.

Its key features include pre-installed software such as LibreOffice and Firefox and the Red Hat Package Manager package management system. Fedora has a rather short life cycle, where each version is typically supported for 13 months, where a particular version is supported until 1 month after the next version is released and with around 6 months between most versions. The latest release, 33, was out in October It is known for focusing on innovation, integrating new technologies early on and working closely with upstream Linux communities.

After the release of Fedora 21, three different editions are available: Workstation that focuses on the personal computer, Server for servers and Atomic that works on cloud computing.

As of February , Fedora is said to have around 1. But interestingly, macOS is the second major series of Macintosh operating systems. The first - colloquially called the classic Mac OS was introduced in , and its final version was Mac OS 9, that was released in The first desktop version, Mac OS X The update has a system-wide dark mode and many new apps lifted from iOS, such as Apple News.

One of the key features of macOS is the addition of Aqua, a graphical user interface with water-like elements, in the first major release of Mac OS X. Every window element, text, graphic, or widget has been drawn on-screen using spatial anti-aliasing technology. The appearance and design of macOS has undergone several changes, particularly the menu bar and the appearance of windows. Apple rolled out its Mac models with high-resolution Retina displays in ; macOS and its APIs have extensive support for resolution-independent development on supporting high-resolution displays.

A computer operating system created specially for the Raspberry Pi series of small single-board computers, this OS, earlier called Raspbian, is based on Debian, the Unix-like operating system consisting entirely of free software. There are several versions, including Stretch, Jessie and Buster. Earlier versions were 32bit and based on Raspbian core, taking the name Raspbian, but with recent 64bit versions not using the Raspbian core, the name has been changed to Raspberry Pi OS for both 64bit and 32bit versions.