Miss Windows XP or 7? Then I have a free, open-source alternative for you

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• ReactOS is a free, open-source Windows alternative.
• This OS has merged the Live and Boot ISOs for easier installation.
• The changes will arrive in the next release.

I recently wrote about ReactOS in "My 5 favorite open-source operating systems that aren't Linux." One of those OSes is ReactOS, which aims to look and feel just like Windows, but has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Although ReactOS is really easy to use, installing it has been, well, less so. When you go to download an ISO image for installation, you'll notice there's a live version and a boot version. The boot version is what you would use to install ReactOS, and when you go to do so, you'll find that it's an old-school, text-based ...