Choosing an OS for an office computer?

Question

Software and Internet Services

The essence of the problem is that the budgetary organization built a local network with Internet access on its own. Internet access is limited, so one of the workstations had to make a semblance of a server. Advise the OS for organizing access and control on the Internet while the computer will be used as a workstation (office, graphics editor, database (for now access)). Computer parameters: RAM 2 GB, NDD 320, video built-in NVIDIA GF730, Opteron 140 processor. There is no way to change hardware to a newer one or to allocate a computer for a server.

Answer 1

If this is a server machine, as described above - try CentOS
If a workstation - depending on the power, you can limit yourself to the usual Ubuntu or Xubuntu if the resources are rather weak.
Office - libreoffice
graphics - gimp [+ inkscape]
DB - libreoffice base, Oracle Database Express Edition, MySQL and PostgreSQL, etc. of all sorts, under Linux it is convenient to manage them

Answer 2

The tasks you describe are easily solved on Windows (any version), GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. I myself would choose GNU / Linux (at least not to worry about viruses and other such misfortunes), but I don’t see any problems with Windows either. And there and there there are several relatively simple ways to implement the plan. If you fundamentally need to use MS Access databases and work with MS Office documents (no matter what they say, compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice is very far from ideal) - MS Office 2007 (I tried it personally, and theoretically probably already 2010) and older work fine on Linux via Wine. The only problem under Linux is running up-to-date versions of specialized software packages like Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator, VisualStudio, etc.,
By the way, for a server distributing the Internet, Opteron is not needed at all, absolutely any x86 processor will do, starting with Pentium-II (and the first one, too, if you want), I have a Celeron 333 with FreeBSD distributed a network of computers for 20 several years non-stop without question until the power supply blew up during a thunderstorm.