Your experiences with other OSes...

[xequence]

I think one topic about peoples experiences with other OSes and other linux distros is well needed. So I posted it. Post your experiences, good or bad. What you would and wouldent recomend.

First of all, ill start it out...

Windows ME - As everyone knows, crashes all the time. Bad ;)

Windows XP - This is much better then ME to me though it is definitally not worth 130$. For me often it wont start up, almost gets there then restarts. Sometimes I make it all the way, sometimes it takes me 6 trys.

SimplyMepis - Ok, this was an odd one. I made a 6gb partition today and installed it... The first install didnt work. I tried it again and it worked but it didnt show ubuntu or XP with the mepis grub. The ubuntu grub shows XP and ubuntu but to mepis. Very odd. Well, to the OS... It is not nearly as cool looking as ubuntu but its not bad. It didnt detect my monitor/graphics very well as it only got to 800*600 but aysiu said that it can be easily fixed. Into the OS, I did very much like how I could click on a .deb and it would install. I finally got cedega installed well. Mepis seemed to have a nice set of programs but I didnt like the fact it used KDE. I dont much like KDE. KDE normally has many programs for one job as in mepis had 3 text editors. As with all linux versions its bad at anything under 1024*768. I accually didnt use it long enough to recommend it or not as I deleted it and installed ubuntus grub again so I could see ubuntu and XP.

Please post your experiences with any OS you have ever used :)

[qalimas]

I've got a little list going, so I won't post much detail ;)

DOS - Yuckie
Win 3.1 - WTF?
Win 95 - Was ok (for it's time)
Win 98 - A bit better than 95
Win 2k - The best Win yet, and is still so
Win ME - The opposite of 2k
Win XP - PoS

Linux no GUI - You would be amazed if you ran a system without a GUI, it would make you realize the true power the terminal has to offer.
Red Hat - Nice product, got me into most of this
Mandrake (Mandriva) - Helped me more once I was done with Red Hat
SuSE - My first disro on my personal computer, dual booted with 2k
Fedora - My first GNOME distro, pretty nice I'll admit
Kubuntu - Nice, probably my favorite KDE distro
Ubuntu - Love <3
------Note: I'm still with Ubuntu, the procedding were all tested on other computers (these are in no order)
Linspire 5 - Well... it's gonna get my dad to move (most likely), so it's ok in my book!
Debian Sarge - <3, it's setup to dual boot my Ubuntu in case I feel like a change from nice and easy to getting down and dirty
Knoppix - Still keep it around, very nice CD to keep!
DSLinux - No, just no, I liek hteir idea, but God, come on, it's interface SUCKS
Slax - This is a good one too
LLAMPIX - It's ok... I need to figure out why it doesn't work right for me though
Mepis - s'alright
Xandros/Lycoris - I don't really care for either
Slackware - It's ok as well, nothign special to me

That's barely even beginnign all I've tried, but it's it's all I can actually rememebr seeing XD

I like to stick towards Debian Desktops ;)

[aysiu]

Okay. I'll try to be as succinct as possible.

Windows XP I know there's a tendency sometimes in Linux communities to bash anything Microsoft puts out, but I think Windows XP is an amazing OS for the most part. It's stable. Control-alt-delete almost always solves any program crashing problems. It's fast.

What I don't like about XP are its default settings. First of all, when I install it, right away there's nothing on the screen except a recycling bin. I've seen a number of Windows users get confused by that and wonder "Where are My Documents? Where's Internet Explorer?" Even the quicklaunch toolbar isn't enabled by default. So, after an installation, I usually have to spend many hours changing the defaults (this also involves turning off the search doggie and the Office clipboard thing and all the other animated "Can I help you?" annoyances). And, of course, I have to be a lot more security-conscious with XP, but once I got the hang of the whole avoiding spyware and such thing, it was good. What pushed me over to Linux was actually the lack of easy customization (if only Windowblinds were free without nagware...).

Mac OS X I like the general feel of Mac. First of all, everything is crisp, not just the fonts. The icons aren't pixelated. Animation is smooth. Even with some pretty darn good Gnome or KDE themes that are Mac-like, I've never found anything that can successfully mimic the smooth interface of the Mac OS X desktop. I also like (even though at first I found this counterintuitive) the fact that applications can be uninstalled simply by deleting the application's folder.

That said, I find the actual use of the interface annoying. Finder shouldn't be a program, and when you switch to it, it should show the desktop, not just the controls for Finder. When you switch to minimized windows, they should restore themselves. Windows should maximize if you want them maximized. I don't buy all that crap about how a window filling the whole screen defeats the point of multi-tasking. Otherwise, what's the point of cmd-tab or alt-tab? I don't need another app peering in the background. I'll switch to it if I want the other app. And it's very difficult to switch between windows within an app. I've also found Mac to just be extremely slow. My wife's Powerbook was a top-of-the-line G4 when we bought it, and we got 1 GB of RAM for it, too, but launching programs takes forever, booting up takes forever (even longer than Mepis), and the sleep function doesn't always work.

Mepis Mepis is what got me into Linux. Even though I'm a Ubuntu fan through and through now, if it weren't for Mepis, I'd be back on my XP now, and I wouldn't be typing this. For Windows users, Mepis is a boon. It's all point-and-click, and they don't charge you to download software (the way Linspire does). Some people don't like the bloat of Mepis, but at first it seemed great--I had all these programs. Okay, okay, I do uninstall the annoying KWeather thing almost right away, but most of the other programs are useful. I particularly like that there's a browse as super-user button in the menu (what we would have to create manually as the command gksudo nautilus in Ubuntu). In fact, for day-to-day use, there's not much I can fault Mepis for. When people complain about "Linux needs this or Linux needs that," they're usually referring to a feature Mepis already has (double-clicking a .deb to install it, reinstalling Grub graphically, having a graphical partitioning tool, including proprietary multimedia codecs, etc.).

I will say that Mepis is damn slow. It takes a minute and a half to boot (longer than Ubuntu's 56 seconds or XP's 27 seconds on the same computer). Applications take quite a long time to launch. The Grub menu and the bootsplash screens are extremely ugly and not easily customizable (they are customizable, just not easily so). The community is also lacking. They're well-intentioned, but sometimes it feels like the blind leading the blind. Ubuntu's documentation and support is much better.

Blag This was my first real distro, and I have to say it's quite good. I'm not that big a fan of Fedora (and it's Fedora-based), so it's not my OS of choice, but I do like it. It comes with just about everything you need, and the anaconda installer lets you customize your installation to be as frugal or bloated as you want. It also has Synaptic Package Manager, despite being an RPM-based distro.

What's lacking in Blag is support, even moreso than Mepis. Their forums are basically dead.

Ubuntu Obviously, I think Ubuntu's great. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. I like it's no-frills approach. It's fully functional but not bloated. It's totally free but constantly updated. Its documentation and community are amazing. It's just the right amount of user-friendly for a few-months-old newbie like me--command-line for configuration, GUI for general use.

What I don't like about Ubuntu is that it's often touted as being a great newbie distro without the qualification that the configuration of Ubuntu is command-line heavy. Sure, copying and pasting commands is quite easy, when you think about it, but most newbies from Windows usually don't think about it, so we should warn them ahead of time, and direct them to Mepis right away if they start complaining about "Ubuntu needs this, Ubuntu needs that."

Ok. I'll shut up now. Long post.

[Brunellus]

MS-DOS 3.0 - 6.2: "640 kb should be enough for anyone." no multi-tasking. A lot of hardware-support angst. And memory management! I remember having to have several boot disks handy for each of my games, since each would run with slightly different autoexec.bat and config.sys settings....But, once you got to learn how things worked, it wasn't bad.

Windows 3.0, 3.11: shells on top of DOS. nothing to write home about. It was about at this point where I started using MS Word instead of WordPerfect, so I guess that was the start of my GUIdom.

Win95: It broke a lot of my DOS games. I was sad about this. Proliferation of wizards. I was alienated from my beloved cc\ prompt.

Win 98, ME: Awful. just. Awful. BSOD city....

Win XP: an improvement. Felt sluggish, though. And I really didn't have the slightest idea about what it was doing.

SuSe 9.1 Personal: A lifesaver--but RPM hell drove me out of the SuSE camp quickly.

DamnSmallLinux: A functional OS and applications in less than 50 MB--probably the neatest party trick devised.

Knoppix: Tried it to see what the fuss was about. One polished-looking liveCD, but, like SuSe's and Ubuntu's, not really all that snappy.

SLAX: The nicest, live CD I've used, all around...even if it is KDE.

[hkl8324]

Win 98-Good at that time, sometime BSOD

Win ME-CRAP, always BSOD (the worse OS i have ever used)

Win 2000- Good, responsive, use little memory compare to XP (Best OS i have ever used, i am still "dual" booting this with Debian Etch and Ubuntu Hoary.)

Win XP-So so, it is a memory hog compared to 2000, and yet no big improvement over 2000, IMO, it is just a GUI upgrade (or downgrade) to 2000.

Debian Sarge/Etch, Good, fast, use little memory, but you have to do some tweak before you can actually use it.

Ubuntu, same as Debian, but more user friendly, i can even use my wireless network
just after install( in debian, i have to compile some kernel modules first...)

[Ampersand]

Windows XP - quite stable, but has its own idea of what you want to do. I find it has less useful features than Gnome/KDE.

Windows 95/98 - I hardly ever saw the words 'it is now safe to turn off your computer'... Defragmenting was great fun.

Suse 9.0/9.1 - Quite easy to use, Yast/SaX covered most things. Required quite a bit of compiling from source and searching for random rpms, although packman provided most of them.

Debian testing (now stable) - Usually required manual configuration of xfree86 following installation, good sized repositories, used webmin for most of the configuration.

Irix - some similarities with Linux in terms of file system layout, most of the configuration I did was guesswork. I've not managed to install anything new, but I'd need to do a clean install to get a complete impression of it.

[WildTangent]

1995-1998-DOS: the only thing i knew for quite a while. it was on the school computers. i r0x0red the b0x0rs in word perfect, and my hands danced on the keyboard as i typed CLI commands. unfortunately i forgot it all when i started using a GUI

1997-Windows 3.1: put on the school computers at some point, didnt use it much, because it was launched from DOS and didnt have many programs.

1997-windows 95: the very first OS on my very first computer. oh how i loved it, so easy to use. got replaced when we got our first virus, about 2 years after the initial purchase. kept pretty clean didnt i?

1999-windows 98: the OS i used for many many years, and still do, at school. wasnt really into computers at this point, or really before this time either.

2003-windows XP: came with our first new computer in 7 years. i had used it before at friends houses, and i loved it. i still do, although its a PITA to get it setup just how i like it. my current computer is highly customized, with a replacement GUI, new icons etc... i have alot of experience and knowledge with XP, and this is what i work with most when im fixing various windows related problems that ignorant users get. i have yet to get a virus on MY computers. my parents got one on the shared computer, which i fixed, but its been clean ever since.

2002-Mac OS ?: my geography teacher has some ancient apple computers he made us use word on...it was horrible >_<

2004-windows 2000: managed to get a copy from work, and installed it on one of my lesser computers. great for a well featured windows install, on an older computer

2004-2005: the linux odyssey begins :D
first distro was Ubuntu, and ive tried many since, but none have impressed me as much as Ubuntu. distros ive tried include: fedora, knoppix, mepis, gentoo, debian, PC Linux OS, beatrix. maybe some others...cant rememeber

2004-Mac OS X: used it on the media arts lab computers a few times...dont really have any experience with it at all, just used em for web browsing when my normal lunchtime hangout was closed.

2005-solaris: its probably a great OS, if you know how to set it up, which i dont. however, the community SUCKS. i was banned from the IRC channel, for what reason i dont know. all i asked for was help, i explained i have a background in linux, so im familiar with some of its concepts, and the CLI interface, and i was told to "go back to fedora or whatever crappy linux you use". the whole experience has soured me on solaris completely.

2005-windows server 2003 enterprise edition: got a free trial, and with the tools at my disposal, i set about disabling the timebomb. great OS, very secure. i used it as a desktop OS for a while, but now its only on my server. rock steady, hasnt had a crash at all

2005-windows codename longhorn (windows vista): tried a couple alpha builds, and wasnt particularily impressed, especially since i knew most of the new features would be made available for XP as a download. vista bet 1 was a definate improvement over the stability of the previous builds, but thats really the only step forward microsoft took.

anyway, thats my experiences with different OSes. fairly comprehensive so far

-Wild

[xequence]

Oh, and I forgot... My old school used macs.

They had new computers with OS9 on them for some reason! Everyone thought macs were horrible because, frankly, OS9 crashed alot. We also had 7 and 8. Quite horrible... While the teachers got nice new OSX On 3000$ macs.

Ive always wanted to try OSX...

[darkmatter]

Win98SE-Decent OS

Win2000-Excellent, the only NT platform I like

WinXP-Don't go there... ;-)

SuSE-A rock solid distro, one of my favorites - minus KDE.

Mandrake-I hate it because it hates me.

Linspire 5-0-Would get a decent grade in my book just for giving the average Joe a starting point with Linux, if it wasn't for that root thing...

FC4-Very good marks in my book, even if there are more than a few bugs that need to be squashed.

Gentoo-Awesomeness. Unfortunately, installing from source takes to damn long.

LFS-I'm still sweating...

QNX 6.3-Absolutely amazing. Wicked fast. But the lack of any real multimedia (CD burning, etc.) makes it a neanderthal on the desktop.

BeOS-What can I say, I love cute little yellow tabs... :smile:

[Orunitia]

DOS/Windows 3.1 - Introduced me to computers, was too young to really do anything on it.

Windows 95 - Better than 3.1.

Windows 98 - Better than 95, I think this is around the time I started using the Internet.

Windows XP - Much much better than 98. It's a good OS. Not as good as Ubuntu though. ;)

Mandrake - I forget what version it was, but it was my first Linux install because I heard it was the easiest at the time. This got me hating Linux for a while because my install went so bad. I accidentally formatted XP which I did NOT want to do, then for a week I couldn't figure out how to get XP back on because my restore disk wouldn't work. Eventually got XP back on and stuck with it for a while. After a long time I went back and gave Mandrake another try after doing some research beforehand, and dual booted for a while.

I think I went back to XP only for a while after that.

Red Hat 9 - I liked it a little better than mandrake.

Suse - Forget what version. Wasn't much different to me than Mandrake or Red Hat.

Slackware 9 and 10 - This became my favorite distro for quite a while. After I figured out how to get everything working.

Debian - Started using this, and loved apt.

Fedora Core 1 and 2 - Okay, but after Debian, it's hard to go without apt.

After a while I finally found Ubuntu and have stuck with it. I don't see myself switching distros anytime soon.

Oh and at various times I switched between all those distros a couple times, while mostly dual booting with XP, until recently when I got Ubuntu. At some point when I get another Desktop computer (on a laptop now, and don't feel like messing with gentoo on a laptop), I wanna try Gentoo.

[bin]

CP/M - yay for reverse syntax
DOS
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11(WfW)
Windows 95
OS/2 2.11, Warp 3.0, Warp 4.0 - still one of the best OS's in the world apart from the evil TCP/IP stack.
Windows NT 3.5
MAC OS 7.1
Windows 98
Windows ME - yurk
BEOS
WIndows NT 4.0
Windows 2000
MAC OS 9, OS X
Win XP
and of course Linux from SUSE 5.2 to present. (IMHO SUSE is the vilest most sluggish pile of poo on the face of this lovely planet - but that's just my opinion.

and you know what - despite the fact that the first PC I used had an awesome 512k of RAM, no hard disk and a mono screen - and my present PC would have been unimagineable then - I still can't type any faster LOL

in light

bin

[matthew]

1980-1989 played around with whatever the Commodore Vic-20 and later the Commodore 64 booted into at my friend's house

1981-1988 on a TRS-80 Color Computer I used the Basic compiler that was built in and that the computer automatically booted to.

1985-1988 Whatever the Apple II booted into in my programming classes in high school and at another friend's house

1987-1992 Used the IBM PC-DOS computers in the lab at the university as well as the Mac lab and even Unix on the vax in the engineering lab before I changed majors.

1993 to 1995 The Microsoft era.
I have used MS-Dos 5.0, 6.0, 6.22, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98se, ME and XP. Out of those I still prefer DOS because of the command line control, but I couldn't multi-task. Started using gui-based stuff just before Win3.1 came out with whatever version of WordPerfect for dos came out in the early 1990's that was gui-based. I comlained about Windows from the start and was told, "Get used to it, it is what most people are using and you need to be compatible." Thankfully, I can now be compatible using another platform. I do like the gui thing, but am pleased as punch to have a real command line again...I was lost in the MS world when that became less and less accessible or favored.

Only been using linux in 2005. In April I tried Knoppix, Mepis, Yoper, and looked carefully at Fedora/Red Hat and SUSE before settling on Ubuntu. Plan to stay with Ubuntu on my main computer long term as I like the philosophy, the update/development schedule and the community. I will probably find an old computer to recycle as a testing/learning platform and try a Gentoo and maybe later a Linux-from-scratch install just to learn about the inner workings.

[npaladin2000]

Ok, this is gonna take me a while....I've been in the computer "game" a LONG time...I'm only gonna cover desktop OSes here, and all the Linuxes are going to be summarized.

* C-64 DOS: One of the most stable OSes I ever used.
* C-64 GEOS: Amazing GUI based operating environment, especially considering it operated completely without a hard drive

* PC/MS-DOS - Stable, fiarly intuitive for a CLI, but not very flexible. Poor driver support. ;)

* Windows 1: Version 1 of anything tends to suck
* Windows 386 (Windows 2): Getting better, makes a decent graphical DOS shell, but that's about it.
** Trivia sideline: I once took an InstallShield installer for Win32 and tried it out under Windows 386 and it was able to get to the initial install "press next" screen. Windows XP still has code lying around in it from Windows 386 ;)
* Windows 3.0/3,1 - Huge improvement, Windows has achieved the level that GEOS reached many years before. Too bad Microsoft was the last one to get there.

* Windows 95 - "Start Me Up" It reallt was a revolution in the way we handle GUI computing (Different from the X-Windows revolution, but one nonetheless). However, I don't like false advertising: it was a GUI pasted over a modified DOS 6 kernel, no matter what they said.

* Windows NT4 - Now HERE was the real revolution, when the fledgling NT kernel had Windows 95's GUI pasted on it. Stable as anything, especially since it did NOT have PnP support, which was still buggy.

* Windows 98 - Proof that PnP was still buggy in Microsoft implementations; it crashed on Gatesy during a public demonstration. Still, was a heavy refinement of Windows 95, hence it was a great improvement over Win95 in areas of performance and stability, and likely Microsoft's best DOS-based OS. Proved Microsoft IS actually able to learn and improve.

* Windows ME - Forced us to doubt the previous assertion about learning and imrpoving; this OS wasn't worth the CD is was burned on, and I confinced my shop to skip it and stick with Windows 98. As ME was an abortion which over-modified Win98 to take the place of a cancelled home-version of Windows 2000, it was to be expected that it would suck, as it was a stopgap rather than a serious product with a full development cycle. And it showed.

* Windows 2000 - Despite compatibility problems with some home-user programs and games, THIS is the OS that really took off and succeeded, rather than Windows ME. With an actual STABLE implementation fo PnP and general stability that even put Windows98 to shame, it's still the OS of choice for the discerning Microsoft user.

* Windows XP - The first official attempt to bring the NT kernel home, it proved Microsoft listened to the success of Windows 2000, and the complaints. However, the way they addressed those complaints is suspect, as their tweaks to make the boot sequence "faster" garnered even more complaints. The new-look GUI recieved praise in some circles, and scorn in others; fortunately Microsoft left in the older-style GUI and Start Menu as options. However, the default behavior when sharing files (insecurely) and inability to be an effective part of the increasingly popular home networks cropping up everywhere meant most people skipped XP Home for XP Pro.

* Windows Vista - Only time will tell

* Linux - OSes based on the Linux kernel tend toward even more stability, at the expense of performance and Windows compatibility (which in many cases is NOT a bad thing). The modular nature of both the Linux kernel and it's associated applications and interfaces makes for a very flexible easy to repair implementation.

However, the biggest thing that is spoiling Linux is the inability for the more extreme elements to compromise with other elements of the software industry, instead attempting to exert pressure to force all sofware to be open (which is as wrong as forcing all software to be closed). This bothers commercial companies that have trade secrets and real hardware design patents to protect, limiting the ability of third parties to effectively support Linux (Despite thier increasing willingness to do so, they find themselves rebuffed unless they open ALL source code). Until Linux communities seeks some compromise in this area, further growth will bbe limited, and may even stagnate. Some communities do so, however, others are extremely inflexible, operating with the attitude of "my way or the highway" much like the company many despise, Microsoft.

Some linux distros of note that I have experience with:

- Mandrake: too candy-coated, stability issues
- Knoppix: great tollbox CD
- SUSE: More useful as a test platform for eventual Novell OES tecnology; not as great a desktop, but reasonable. Big plus that they offer MP3 codecs from their own update servers.
- Debian: Monserous distro but very very stable and very very flexible. Intimidating for some, but revolutionized package management and net-based installs.
- Slackware: used to be the major bragging-rights distro, but has been supersceeded by Gentoo. Hard to use, hard to install, minimal increase in stability not usually worth it.
- Gentoo: The new "I'm a script-kiddie" bragging-rights distro; excellent educational tool for really learning how Linux is built. Excellent documentation of the install process really assists in this more than anything else.
- Ubuntu: One of the better desktop-style distros, however, software compatibility is sometimes an issue as it diverges a bit from standard Debian. Lack of common (MP3) codecs an issue, as it is for most no-cost distros, but no way to solve that issue at this time.
- Blag: Great desktop version of Fedora Core, but it's short office apps (OpenOffice). Having APT instead helps, as does built-in MP3 supprt, but Blag is based on Fedora 3, and is falling behind. However, it is 100% binary-compatible with it's parent Fedora 3 distro.
- Fedora Core: Excellent all-around distro. Package management better than many, also has network/internet installation. Excellent GUI selection and design; feels very tight. Lack of GUI frontends for YUM an issue. Inability to support most WiFi cards out of the box a problem as they refuse to include required firmware files due to them not being open-sourced (currently illegal in most localities due to communications laws).

[KiwiNZ]

Okay this had me thinking so here goes, and I am not going to attempt to put dates to all this .

Amiga Workbeanch - For its time the best
Windows 3.1/3.11 - yeah Ok considering its time . Stable and performed well
Windows 95 - A good solid OS
Windows 98 - OK but really just a 95 upgrade
Windows 98 SE- What 98 should have been , a good well performing OS
Windows NT 4 -A solid product
Windows ME - what a bloody joke , everyone who purchased this abomination should have recieved a refund.
Windows 2000- In my opinion the best MS product.
Windows XP - A strong well featured product ,resource hungry and too expensive.

Redhat 5 through to Rhel 2 - This has been the one to watch and follow, sadly not anymore ,it has lost its way.
Mandrake/ Mandriva 8 to current - good OS Mandrake is a favourite of mine , it simply has it all
Suse - Fantastic OS and Novell have made it better, 9.3 Pro is a great OS
Fedora - Good to play with but not on a production machine.
Yoper - Hails from my homeland, fast but dated.
Xandros - Fantastic OS for Windows users
Lycoris - As above
Gentoo- OK I know its the holy grail , but sheesh I cannot be bothered with all that work .
Debian- to old
Linspire - the same as Xandros and Lycoris, its a good OS
Ubuntu - still to have its first birthday this is an amazing OS I dont use it on my main machine but Ubuntu and Kubuntu are very solid OS's and second only to Suse

Thats about all I have used , I am sure I am missing some .

[Ubunted]

Windows 3.11: Exit to DOS, cd/doom, doom. Pretty much all I used it for. Don't remember too much really.

95: Was my OS for a looooong time. Right up to summer 2001 in fact (holy hell, I just realized how LONG that was!), when I finally replaced the dinosaur P200.

ME: The one that came with the P200's replacement. In my 6-8 hours of use a day I would have to reboot at least once every 45-60 minutes. Not fun. I had my first pokings into Linux around 2002, which mainly consisted of me being scared off.

XP Home: Big improvement, got it 2 years after running the same install of ME. It was truly a breath of fresh air and complemented my new Athlon XP 2500+ upgrade nicely. Good times were had.

2K Pro: Summer of 2003 I went to IT school and discovered 2k Pro - all the power, none of the bloat. Actually bought myself a copy - it's the first full copy of Windows I've ever owned, not counting Upgrade editions.

Red Hat 9: Used this at IT school. Thanks to the scratched-to-hell discs, it never worked and was a great source of pain. Nevertheless I moved on to...

Mandrake 10: The first Linux distro to ever touch my precious hard drive. I never used it much, just booted into it once in a while when I was bored. Finally had the nerve to wipe my new laptop and use it there, with good results. It stayed for a few months before...

Ubuntu 5.04. Was tired of multi-CD distros with nothing but bloat, found Ubuntu and well, it's my primary desktop now. I await Breezy so I may nuke XP from my tower's hard drive forever.

Unfortunately the arrival of a wireless NIC forced my return to 2K Pro on the laptop, so until someone coughs up drivers for the D-Link DWL-650 series, with 2K I will stay.

[npaladin2000]

Unfortunately the arrival of a wireless NIC forced my return to 2K Pro on the laptop, so until someone coughs up drivers for the D-Link DWL-650 series, with 2K I will stay.

Not that 3k is a bad thing, but I recommend checking out the madwifi setup (it's in restricted-modules). AFAIK, most D-Link cards use Aethros chips.

[GeneralZod]

Not that 3k is a bad thing, but I recommend checking out the madwifi setup (it's in restricted-modules). AFAIK, most D-Link cards use Aethros chips.

According to what I like to call The Linux Wireless Bible (http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_alles.php?SHOWALL=), some of the 650 series have open-source drivers, although it depends strongly on the exact card version. I'm surprised it doesn't work with ndiswrapper, though....

[egon spengler]

The three OSes that I have used a lot:

Atari st - Never really did much with it. Played games til the joystick/mouseport broke (a pretty common occurance apparently). It became nothing but a dust magnet for a while then I started using it for sequencing

XP - Never really had a problem with it in use. I know some hate the way it looks but for me with any combination of hacked uxthemes, custom marletts, 3dCC schemes and Litestep & BBlean I could make it look really nice. In fact other than a date created view in the file explorer the things I miss most about XP are Litestep and BBlean. BBlean is a LOT better than fluxbox imo and as far as I am aware there isn't anything for Linux like Litestep (I know it's based on Afterstep but it has long surpassed that) although recently I've seen some interesting things done with FVWM

Ubuntu - Installed it on one pc where it worked flawless. Installed it on mine and had problems with the ethernet card and with the sound. Only through luck did I get the ethernet fixed but over than that everything has been very easy. Had used Unix via a telnet connection quite a bit and so the cli was no real hurdle for me. Not as customisable in looks as I was used to in Windows but I prefer it in almost every other way

[Teroedni]

Been a die hard Amiga user from first time i saw it in 1987 .We had an A500 which was very popular(Giana Sisters:)
Then i got Amiga 1200 in 1994.
i think and had it until 1998 when i bought a used A4000. The A4000 had Zorro ports and i was looking forward to get a real graphics card so i could have more than 256colors(Aga). But the A4000 died and i then had enough of faulty hardware.so i bought myself a cheap pc 3000kr and used xp on it.Thats was great i could finnally play games and see more than 256 colors burt i missed the Magic of my Amiga.
Then i have upgraded and clocked my machines a bit:)
But The xp operating system was bad. It was to unstable to my liking ,and all was so looked down. You couldnt change much . I also wanted to program but it was difficult on xp.I wasent going to spend $$$$ on software just to be able to program:(
I tried to install Debian via netinstall over Isdn in fall 2004. Diden t work good :(
i did something wrong and i gave it up. I then tried to fixed various thing in my Xp and tried to learn abou the registry. After a while i get a bit bored by looking trough millions of entry just to be able to uninstall a simple program.

So then in Januar 2005 i got Adsl and i accidently found out about Ubuntu:)
I installed it and all without sound worked great:) The system had also big simmilarity to Amiga
Like Amiga it was Stable Had more Chose Easier To use and lastly a great community:)

Now i lslowly learning more and more about linux and have begun to Programming Html using Bluefish:)

[Nu-Buntu]

My 2 cents worth:

TI 99/4A - Cool little computer & OS for its day.
Commodore 64 - Again, nice for the times.
Amiga OS - Way ahead of its time. In another world it could have given Microsoft a run for its money.
Apple II - Fun to play with
Original TRS-80 OS - Actually got work done with it.
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 2.0-6.22 - Loved it, knew it, made it sing!
GeoWorks - Sensational GUI over DOS, beat Windows to the punch with scaleable fonts, long filenames, multitasking and more. Interface was a little boring, but it was ahead of Windows as a DOS GUI at the time.
Original Mac OS - Clean, intuitive, and a predecessor of all things GUI
Windows 286/386 - Used it to run Excel 2.0. Had to drop out to DOS more than it was used. Remember the MS-DOS Executive?
Windows 3.0 - First really usable Windows. Dropped out to DOS less. Program Manager was a bit clunky.
Windows 3.1 - Smooth fonts, some improvements. MS promised no more "General Protection Fault" crashes. They were right. They renamed them to "Unrecoverable Application Error" crashes!
Microsoft Bob! - Stupid GUI for Windows that left us with the dog "assistant" in Office.
Windows 95 - Start me up! Best Windows at the time
OS/2 - Very nice.
Windows NT - The beginning of the idea that Windows could be divorced from DOS and have a bit of stability.
MAC OS 9 - Nice, but long in the tooth.
Windows 98 - OK upgrade, but not worth the price. Should have been a Win95 Service Pack.
Windows ME - No thanks! No CLI. No stability. Just a cash play by MS.
BEOS - Very capable, very nice, but died an early death.
Windows 2000 - Finally, a Windows Mr. Gates could be proud of.
OS X - Apple innovates again!
Win XP - Stable and capable. Great for running Google Earth, Photoshop & SimCity 4!
Mandrake 7-10 - Loved 'em at the time.
SuSE 9.2 - Problems, along with the dependency hell I had with Mandrake
Knoppix - Great emergency or Linux demo disk.
Ubuntu - Best OS ever. Still would like to see more up-to-date programs in the repositories.

[floppy]

I'm not going to list the mainframe and minicomputer OS I've used; those were in the 1970s and 80s. Most folks here probably never heard of any of them :)

For that matter, I'm not going to comment on Apple II, Radio Shack, Commodore, or Atari ST either...

CP/M -- very nice
DOS, pre 3.1 -- very primitive, but functional
DR-DOS -- better, but so-so support
MSDOS 3.11 -- excellent for the times
MSDOS upto 5 -- just ok
MSDOS 5+ -- very good
Original Macintosh O/S -- very good, but slow
Windows pre 3.1 -- lousy
Windows 3.1 -- still lousy
Windows 95 -- getting there, useable for business
Windows 98 -- ok
Windows 98SE -- very good
Caldera Linux -- not quite useable
Windows ME -- a waste of time
Windows XP -- very good
SuSE 9.3 -- good install, KDE control center crashes
Mandriva 10.3 -- failed on installing networking
Ubuntu 5.4 -- ok install, difficulties with video and networking
Linux in general -- very good, but still takes a lot of fiddling to get working.

perhaps my overall impression of Ubuntu and Linux will change, if/when things work right :)

[blueturtl]

MS-DOS 5.0 & Windows 3.1
Started my computing on a brand spanking 386sx with 4 megs of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard-disk. This system propably has my best memories on it. It just worked. The hardware was solid, I could trust my boot sequence to go by the millisecond. Of course DOS was very limited, but it allowed great freedom for tweaking and customization. Windows was just a shell that was for whenever graphical applications had to be run. I soon replaced Program Manager with Calmira II which to day is awesome proof that usability does not require (too much) more horsepower!

Windows 95 / 95 B
This was the OS on the family's new Compaq Presario home computer. It was prettier and the multimedia features of a Pentium class machine had me dazed. It very rarely crashed, but then again it was never much toyed with. As an OS Windows 95 I think is the most underrated of Microsoft's products. Agreed, the initial release was a rush-job, but OSR 2 was quite mature. It had very good usability (with proper drivers and stability) and it wasn't plagued by Evil MS tactics as much as their later operating systems. I also liked the backward compatibility.

Windows 98 / 98 SE
I initially liked this system. It had some neat improvements over 95. Then everything started to go horribly wrong. A mainstream user I first used IE but then found it quite lacking in stability and features. Although Mr. Gates claimed an increase in speed, the Pentium and it's 32 megs of RAM that once seemed a lot were all of a sudden a bottleneck. Everytime Internet Explorer broke I ended up reinstalling the system because there was no way to fix it. In fact I had to install this OS time and time again to keep things running smoothly. It's at this point I discovered how MS had ruined a potentially good product with unncessary product integration. After I found Mozilla I was starting to get rather ticked that I could not remove IE even if I wanted to. The freedom of Windows 95 was gone, the era of evil corporate assimilation had begun.

Windows 2000
I had to use this at school. Although the system in itself was stable, broken IE still kept interfearing with things. It was also obviously slower than it's predecessors. Although a lot of my power-user friends kept telling me good things about it I could see it was somehow a forced way of thinking. There were a lot of things going on in the background I did not like as I am used to being in control of my computer and not the other way around. Also evil integration was taking silent steps forward.

Windows XP
I personally made a vow never to try this system after I heard of all the crap that was going to be a part of it including full integration of Messenger, Outlook, Media Player and of course IE. The activation scheme would have been enough, but it was also a derivant of Win2K. The default interface is butt-ugly in my opinion and there are no usability improvements whatsoever (unless you think a talking dog helping you out on your search requests is one)! A lot of experts announced this OS the death of Mac and Linux and declared unparalleled security and stability. Well, I've seen it and by today everyone knows how just installing this OS with a network wire plugged can cause it to be completely hosed. The security is a joke, so shall we take a look at stability? Yeah.. ok it is stable, but after a long days use it has to be booted to regain the speed that belongs to the owners of modern hardware. Multitasking is very primitive (if it can actually do that), running multiple heavy or resouce intense tasks at the same time will result in at least one of those tasks failing. After hardware support went bad on older systems I was naturally forced to break my vow, although I paid no money for this OS. It was on part of the firm I worked for at time that I currently have an install of this OS on my HD. I only boot it to play HL2. /rant

Mandrake Linux 10.0
Being a total n00b of a Linux user I figured I should try this because it was touted the most user-friendly Linux and I thought if I really wanted to make the switch painless I wouldn't want to spend countless hours getting my mouse scroll to work (this is a Slackware joke on the part of my friends). It was easy to setup and use, but there is just something flimsy about the system. For instance, the included programs would sometimes crash unexpectedly which didn't help create trust over the new and supposedly superior environment. Also after some time Mandrake's own update tool managed to break the system! Needless to say I went back to Windows.

Ubuntu 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog"
I only heard Ubuntu mentioned on a forum someplace I can't remember. It was being heartily recommended by someone so I thought "what the heck, I'll try it". Turns out this distro saved my current hardware from being sold and replaced by an Apple computer. Initially what I liked about Ubuntu was the fact it just worked. It didn't try to overdo things in the same annoying way that Mandrake does. After a while of studying I became comfortable with the command line and started to find out if this system could indeed replace my WIndows install as the main OS. Since then I've become more and more accustomed to it, replacing a bit of Windows functionality here and there. One thing is for sure: I'm never going back to the hell that was Windows. Ubuntu stands in my mind all those things people always tout about Linux. I also like the ideology behind the name: ubuntu. The author of my Linux system administrator's book claimed happily "there's nothing Linux can't do better than WIndows". I didn't quite believe this until Ubuntu.

Mac OS
Very intuitive and functional. If I had to pick a system for the average user, this would be it. More advanced users may require more room for personalization, but those who just want to do things and just want things to work, there is no better way to go. Nowadays Mac OS is even based around Unix so I daresay it offers the advantages of one, combined with elegance and ease of use often (mistakenly) associated with Windows. If one happens to own PC hardware already, then I would suggest either Linux or Windows according to one's needs (gamers and Photoshoppers stay with Windows) ;-)

[SilentCacophony]

Interesting thread.

Commodore 64 - pretty much a modified basic interpreter for an os, but it's what got me hooked into computers. It was pretty easy to learn Basic and Assembly language programming on it, and I was programming my own text-based ui on it near the end of my use of it. Great in it's simplicity.

AmigaDos/Workbench 1.3 - I moved on to an Amiga 500 when I first saw it in 1988, and was amazed at it's abilities. Great graphics/sound and multitasking. I spent a lot of time in the shell on this, but it had a good GUI as well. I thought that the fastfilesystem which became standard for storage was quite fast and efficient. The OS was mostly contained in the ROM, with some of Dos on disk, and it was quite fast and stable. My first introduction to emacs and two-pane file managers was on this. AmigaBasic soon became an irritant to me (go figure... Micro-Soft had written it,) so I started to learn assembly on it, which was a bit daunting on that system.

AmigaDos/Workbench 2.0 - 3.1 - Prettier GUI, and a lot more ability and function in general, athough having to swap out the cpu chip to upgrade was a bit unfriendly. By this time there were robust applications which could run just fine with 512K to 1M of ram. For whatever reason, AmigaBasic was dropped, but by that time ARexx and C programming were easy to get into. It was relatively easy to extend AmigaDos with scripts and/or ARexx or even make your own programs in C. I had an A1200 from around '92 until 2000, largely because there were so many programmers in it's user base who continued to write quality software long after the demise of Commodore.

Windows 98 - I grudgingly moved on to this out of desire to get commercial programs that my friends had. It was a hard adjustment. I shortly began to hate the fact that Dos was hidden away, and the way it tried to obscure the inner workings from the user. The fat filesystem was a disappointment. I soon was introduced to regular 'defragment' operations. I found that crashes were quite an annoyance, and the needed occasional reformatting/installing was annoying. I eventually learned how to delve into the registry, system files, and hidden functionality to keep my system running well, but it wasn't an easy task.

Ubuntu Linux - I only recently took a serious look at linux, thanks largely to Firefox. I had some common misconceptions about it before that, and was quite suprised when I started researching and soon found myself nostalgic about my Amiga (which I occasionally dust off and fire up :-) .) I recognised a lot of the things I loved about my Amiga days, so I made the plunge. I decided Ubuntu would be a good starting point, and it installed without a hitch, and booted up a nice, usable system. After some windows un-learning, I find myself getting back to the fun of making my system MY OWN again! It's a great feeling for me. I've still a lot to learn to get to the proficiency I want to be at, but I'm having fun getting there, and that counts quite a lot for me.

Overall, I would probably still use an Amiga, if it hadn't been thrown into the limbo that it is still in, but LINUX fits the bill quite nicely for me now, and I won't look back. I'm currently running Ubuntu and Debian Sarge, dual boot. I've also become inspired to get back into programming again, so that I can one day contribute toward some project.

[XDevHald]

Hmm, very interesting thread, but I'll keep mine short. Ubuntu is uber and the rest have nothing that can beat this OS.

Fast, Clean, Simple, Ubuntu

[weasel fierce]

Ah yeah, the Amiga. MIne had the 3.0/3.1 set that came with the Amiga 1200. AGA chipsets and excellent sound in the days when PC's had 16 colours and made ugly bleeps

[KingBahamut]

It bears mentioning that at one time , on my 30+ computer architecture I had two boxes that on the weekend I just played around with based on what I was willing to install at the time. Long road here, I hope you all like coffee.

Ubuntu - Admiration and Love.

Mandriva - I never liked mandrake, or any other RPM based distro really, but Mandrake because of its crappy urpmi updater crap thing...Too difficult to figure out.

Fedora - Its Red hat what more can be said.

SUSE - I bought 9.2 Pro for christmas , I usually pick up a retail copy of something once a year just to say I did. Not a fan of KDE so it didnt do much for me. The Multimedia issues were enough for me not to use it. Id never heard of Kaffeine before I used the 9.2 build, and I could very easily forget it. My first Coffee Coaster set.

MEPIS - Great as a live CD, and thats about it.

KNOPPIX - My first Live CD experience, I still keep a copy handy.

Debian - The base for which many now exist because of it.

Damn Small Linux, Feather Linux, and Puppy Linux - good for emergencies. I keep a copy of DSL in my wallet.

Gentoo - God I hated that install.

Slackare , Vector, CollegeLinux, Slax - its all the same, Slackware. Though I did installs of each, I felt quite honestly, what was the purpose, Just install current version of slackware.

Xandros, Libranet, Linspire - Xandros was an easy install, I hated that its Deb unsupported Repo had nothing desireable on it that I wanted. Libranet was much the same way until I added the proper debian repos. Adminmenu was counterintuitive in my opinion. Linspire - eeewwwwww. 4 click install, that cant be good and it wasnt.

PCLinuxOS - Live CD Mandrake....utterly useless, still because of PClinuxOS I got to play Tuxkart for the first time....was kinda fun.

CentOS, Whitebox, TaoLinux - If youve done a redhat install youve done these as well. There is really no difference, save Graphical representation. TaoLinux ended up being my office Coffee Coaster set.

VidaLinux - Gentoo install for idiots. I was one before I sat down and did a Gentoo install. Portage was broken, and I could never get eth0 to play right, ergo another coffee coaster was born.

OneBase, Lunar, SourceMage, Sorcerer - the Triad of Source installs. Onebase Gamer was ok, got an ISO from a friend, but still wasnt a fun install. SourceMage I couldnt figure out, nother coffee coaster, Sorcerer I burned and then forgot about it. Lunar I installed on a test box , ran for a day, hate it, walked away. Thank God, I now had coffee coasters for 8 people by this time.

ClarkConnect, monoWall, Astaro, Smoothwall - Fought it out between these three for my Firewall for a while. Clark connect was very counter intuitive I didnt like it. Monowall never worked the way it was supposed to. Astaro was pretty solid and was my firewall for a long time, that box died a few months back so hes lost. NEVER SAY SMOOTHWALL IN MY PRESENCE.

TinySofa and Trustix - Stripped down Redhat based install of linux. IE server with no Gui. Had real issues with patching on both of these. 2 more Coffee coasters.

[tseliot]

Workbench -- I used it on my Amiga 500 PLUS, something like Windows and I loved Deluxe Paint 4 (I don't remeber the exact name) and it was not compatible with some Amiga 500 games (it was a matter of memory). It wasn't very fast as the software ran from floppy disks. (I used it when I was 7)

Windows 3.11 -- stable (on my father's 386), but I was 7 or 8 so I can't remember every detail

Windows 95 -- Good but my dial-up connection (28.kbps) didn't work after 2 months (of EVERY installation of Windows) so I had to reinstall it every 2 months (I had a US ROBOTICS 33.6kbps modem)

Windows 98 -- ok, but it was a pain with Voodoo Graphics 1 (4mb) drivers and Nvidia (Riva TNT 1) ones) but I hadn't any connection problem any more. Windows found 2 monitors and 4 soundcards (soundblaster) and some hubs (of course I only had 1 per kind of peripheral)

Windows 98SE -- I didn't notice any difference (maybe I was too noob)

Windows ME -- The Blue (or Green?) screen of death spawned up even when I wasn't doing anything (with no apps running!). I had to switch back to Win98

Windows XP -- very good. I hadn't to install the nvidia drivers (for non gaming experiences) any more or any other drivers for my standard hardware. I had several problems when I tried to set up a LAN (2 PCs) and I had to reinstall the system of one of the 2 computers in order to make the LAN work. Then sometimes (many times and today on my father's 2 PCs) the LAN goes crazy and I have to restart the computers. Sometimes the connection dies (it never happens for me in Ubuntu).
Installing my bluetooth dongle was A REAL PAIN in WINDOWS (5 installations and 5 different errors!!!). This is only a little part of the problems it gave me. I won't use Windows any more, I promise.

Linspire 5.0 Live and Install CD -- It was my 1st distro. It left me breathless: the ADSL connection worked OUT OF THE BOX (as it does in every other distro but Windows DOESN't DO IT YET) the LAN was EASY to set up. KDE (3.3?) was so eyecandy but it crashed sometimes. The system didn't was much faster than Windows though. Iinstalled my 1st synaptic did a smart upgrade and screwd the system 2 times.

Ubuntu -- it just worked on my laptop and it gave it new life. It was better than Linspire, faster and stable (Kubuntu wasn't because of KDE 3.4.0 but now the problem's gone in 3.4.2). I had to learn how to use GNOME as I didn't know it. It was a pain to make it work on my ex-desktop computer because it had a crappy motherboard (MSI RS480 which isn't supported by Linux in general) and the system locked up randomly and had many other problems. THIS DOESN'T COUNT, it's a Linux problem in general and it's not directly related to Ubuntu
It JUST WORKS on my new desktop computer (and I love it!).

PCLinuxOS -- Everything worked out of the box on my 2 desktop computers (of course it locked up AGAIN on the bad one). But its repositories are not as rich as the Ubuntu ones. But it's my 2nd favourite distro.

Knoppix 4.0 LinuxTag and Final -- a great Livecd distro. If you install it something might not work

Simply Mepis 3.3.1 -- it just works (on my new PC) but I find the sound not to be as good as the one in the other distros (I've only used the LIVECD and I have never installed it). It'a nice distro.

I've also tried Mandriva, Fedora, etc ONLY on my ex-desktop computer, so this doesn't count as nothing worked on that computer.

[jyank]

DOS - my time with DOS was somewhat limited because I was too young really to get into it, and we didn't have a computer anyways so most of what I got out of it was at school. I remember playing some games and typing some things but that's really all I ever did

Windows 3.1- I still didn't have a computer at my house so I was pretty much clueless. My friend had a Gateway 2000 with windows 3.1 on it and it was awesome. I would go over there every day and we would just mess around with stuff, not really getting too much into the system because again I was sitll pretty young, but enough to set the base that I enjoyed working with computers

Windows 95- We finally got our own computer in our house. An IBM Aptiva which I still have up and running, suprisingly. It came with 200mhz pentium and 64 mb of ram. My mom ate up all the time on the PC so I rarely got time to go on, but slowly I started getting on and going on AOL back in the 2.0-2.5 days and started messing around in chat rooms, where I learned about programs and visual basic. I somehow got a pirated version of VB and started my coding with AOL chatroom hacks which were pretty stupid, but oh well. Overall the system was pretty stable and rarely ever crashed. Never had a virus problem on it either.

Windows 98 SE- I didn't use this on my home computer at first because 95 was so stable and we really didn't want to buy anything else. But I used it enough at other places to notice that it was a nicer version of 95, and again somehow got a pirated version of it and put it on my PC. Not much else to say, never had virus problems or stability problems.

Windows 2000- Up until this point, I did not have a computer of my own. I was stuck trying to squeeze in time when someone else in the family wasn't on the other one. Well, I got fed up and took out money from my savings and built a computer. A friend of mine worked at a computer store and gave me a 2000 disc for free. 2000 to this day is the version of Windows I still prefer. Much more stable than previous versions, not that bad on the memory hogging, and again I really didn't have a virus/spyware problem. So, overall I was pretty happy.

Debian Woody/Sarge- At this point lots of my friends were trying out different distros, and my friend finally convinced me to try Debian. I totally screwed up my installation and installed it over 2000. I used it for a while, and although I enjoyed it, I got the feeling "what's the point of using this? I'm not doing anything I couldn't be doing on windows" I still use Debian, though, in the other room on that IBM Aptiva 200mhz 64mb RAM PC. It runs suprisingly well :)

Windows XP- After screwing up my 2000 install I installed XP. My mom had bought a new Dell PC recently which came with the XP disc, which I used to install on my PC. I really hated and still do, the layout of XP. It just bugged me. Windows messenger was a huge annoyance until I realized how to turn it off. Once I installed XP, is when I finally got some spyware. i was always pretty cautious of what I downloaded/click and always used Mozilla, but no matter what I'd still run Adaware/spybot and i'd have spyware. It became such an annoyance that I decided I wanted to try linux again.

Ubuntu-I heard about Ubuntu really from a friend who has dial up. He has wanted to try linux forever but doesn't have the time to download the image, so he said something like "ubuntu will send you CDs for free" So, I browsed around and found out the basics of Ubuntu being debian based etc and decided to try it out. My installation went perfect except for GRUB wouldnt show XP and Ubuntu. I didn't know so I wiped my XP partition and put 2000 back on there. I've been pretty happy since. Still dual booting 2000 and Ubuntu (except now im on Breezy) I've had the urge to try other distros, but I really dont see the need.

Thats about it, was a nice warm up for me because now I have to get working on an actual paper :)

[xequence]

One more experience... By me:

Debian Sarge - I thought, debian. What linux user hasnt heard of it? I must try it out! I downloaded CD1. Installed it. I cant resize ex3 partitions, so I deleted my ubuntu partition. Debian installed, it has no GUI. You have to apt-get gnome and X and everything! Or download another of the 14 CDs e.e

If ubuntu can put a full GUI in one CD so should debian. Bad first impression e.e

[npaladin2000]

If ubuntu can put a full GUI in one CD so should debian. Bad first impression e.e

Remember, Ubuntu is a desktop OS. Debian is more of a server distro....Server OSes(non-Windows anyway) don't need a GUI, and server admins tend not to care about the GUI. Unless they're Windows server admins, anyway.

[jyank]

One more experience... By me:

Debian Sarge - I thought, debian. What linux user hasnt heard of it? I must try it out! I downloaded CD1. Installed it. I cant resize ex3 partitions, so I deleted my ubuntu partition. Debian installed, it has no GUI. You have to apt-get gnome and X and everything! Or download another of the 14 CDs e.e

If ubuntu can put a full GUI in one CD so should debian. Bad first impression e.e

That's why I really prefer Debians net installer. It's about a 100MB iso. You burn it, run it, select which packages you want, then go do something else for a while :)

[gflores]

Windows 95: Pretty good. Installed with the purchase of the computer. Easy in using the UI and installing programs was quick and simple. B

Windows XP: Computer came with XP. More of the same of 95 except it was very pretty and customizable, which I like. Themes are available online for quick and easy install and relatively fast with themes. Lots of programs with unified theme support. A lot of tweaks which are simple (just edit something in the registry or install this program and check this box, etc). Lots of software with easy installation. Prone to viruses and keyloggers and got a porn dialer or something (grr..). IE sucks. B+

Mandrake 10.1: First time using Linux. Setting up the partitions to install was difficult and there weren't straight forward answers for how many, how big the partitions, etc. I kinda winged it and the installation was quick and easy. GRUB was set up w/out ruining my XP installation. Failry similar to XP. I had some trouble with copying and pasting. There were too many items in the menu and control panel seemed cluttered (although I do like having access to configurations). Used an old version of KDE which made me dislike KDE initially so it wasn't very attractive. Took a while to figure out that I could have access to more packages if I changed the sources.lst. However, I had trouble with installing some of the updated packages (which weren't exactly bleeding edge). Could not manage to upgrade KDE. B-

(K)Ubuntu Hoary 5.04: Installation was difficult. My cpu could not find ntldr. I don't remember what I did to fix it. After gnome appeared, (first time using Gnome), I played around with it and liked its cleanness, but found it to be too bare after about a week or two. Pleasantly surprised to try out Kubuntu (which was simple to install). It was the latest KDE version and it looked much much better than the last time I tried it. Had trouble making changes to the GUI (changing themes, icons, etc). Had some weird dependency problems with Synaptic. Could not get UT2004 to run. However, I still learned a lot of new things. B

Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 Colony 3: Could not get it to install. Borked my XP installation. Note to self... do not attempt to install alpha/beta operating systems.

Next OS --- Suse 10.0 and/or Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 Final...

[Brunellus]

Windows 95: Pretty good. Installed with the purchase of the computer. Easy in using the UI and installing programs was quick and simple. B

Windows XP: Computer came with XP. More of the same of 95 except it was very pretty and customizable, which I like. Themes are available online for quick and easy install and relatively fast with themes. Lots of programs with unified theme support. A lot of tweaks which are simple (just edit something in the registry or install this program and check this box, etc). Lots of software with easy installation. Prone to viruses and keyloggers and got a porn dialer or something (grr..). IE sucks. B+

Mandrake 10.1: First time using Linux. Setting up the partitions to install was difficult and there weren't straight forward answers for how many, how big the partitions, etc. I kinda winged it and the installation was quick and easy. GRUB was set up w/out ruining my XP installation. Failry similar to XP. I had some trouble with copying and pasting. There were too many items in the menu and control panel seemed cluttered (although I do like having access to configurations). Used an old version of KDE which made me dislike KDE initially so it wasn't very attractive. Took a while to figure out that I could have access to more packages if I changed the sources.lst. However, I had trouble with installing some of the updated packages (which weren't exactly bleeding edge). Could not manage to upgrade KDE. B-

(K)Ubuntu Hoary 5.04: Installation was difficult. My cpu could not find ntldr. I don't remember what I did to fix it. After gnome appeared, (first time using Gnome), I played around with it and liked its cleanness, but found it to be too bare after about a week or two. Pleasantly surprised to try out Kubuntu (which was simple to install). It was the latest KDE version and it looked much much better than the last time I tried it. Had trouble making changes to the GUI (changing themes, icons, etc). Had some weird dependency problems with Synaptic. Could not get UT2004 to run. However, I still learned a lot of new things. B

Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 Colony 3: Could not get it to install. Borked my XP installation. Note to self... do not attempt to install alpha/beta operating systems.

Next OS --- Suse 10.0 and/or Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 Final...
Jeez. I must be an idiot or something, because I haven't figured out how to customize a WinXP desktop yet...not nearly to the level that I can my Gnome desktop.

[godzero]

I was born in '70, so My history went back before many of yours.

My first Experience with computers was in the late '70s, about '79 I think. My mom took us kids to a friend of her's house (who worked at the local univerity) and he had a TTY. You know, '60's style electric typewriter with a paper tape for mass storage (complete with actual bit bucket) hooked up to an acoustic coupler. He Saw how interested I was in it, turned it on, picked up the phone, dialed a number, dropped the handset on the coupler, typed some stuff and sat me down. I read a line like"... there is a mailbox here...". It was Zork (or adventure as it was named at the time I think). I played that for about an hour.

I asked him what else it could do. He explaned the computer at the other end was a mini (prolly a pdp-11) running unix. He showed me around a bit.

From that day on Unix was the only true OS for me.

About '80 or so I had my first run in with the Apple II, and several PETs. I progamed silly little count up and down loops.. stuff like that. My friend had a VIC-20 that we played with shortly after that intro. I learned a little more basic.

I got a c=64 for learning almost instantly after they came out, but didn't have a disk drive, just tape.

From that experience I got my first job: I wrote a text editor (on a tandy model III I think It was) with a routine that altered the output to the paper tape from ascii to whatever deprecated standard the CNCs used in that shop.

I got payed about $300. I went to look for a diskdrive, and found a store that had commodore sx=64s for sale at $300 a pop (they were about $1000 at the time). Hadda get me one of them.

Learned basic, assembly (and game cracking) on that thing. Good times.

Later I got a pc-xt clone with 8088/10mhz (turbo button!), 640K, 40MB HDD, CGA. Hated the hardware, hated MS-DOS. Liked, no loved, the hard drive. Other than that it turned me off to all things x86 for over 10 years. The ibm-pc and it's children were uninspired slapped together crap.

About that same time I learned Pascal on the very first model of Mac in highschool computer class (for an easy A+). First experience with 3.5 inch floppies. Not my first gui.

I got a Amiga 500 back in '90. Holly cr*p! What an OS! Amazing hardware. Awesome community! One can never say toomany good things about the Amiga. 8 years of fun, 'till it died of heat stroke (many daughterbords with ram, etc. Had to hook up 2 power supplies to keep it from crashing). Still have piles of floppies from it with many programs & music I've written for it waiting to be saved.

Got a 486 with windows 3.11 around '93. Bad. Bad. Bad.
I hated the OS so much, I never used it for anything but solitare. I still feel icky thinking about it.
(10 mins later, I still feel yucky)


I used many flavors of windows, including 286, 3.1, 3.11, 3.51, nt 4.0, all 95--me flavors, 2000s and xp for work. Never was impressed. Dos with a gui, pretending to be unix.

Finally bought the machine I'm typing on now in January '04 with XP home pre installed. Had a little fin with XP for about a month, but it left me wanting more, plus I hated all the usual windows problems.

I decided to give Linux a try. I heard way back it was a Unix clone, with a Amiga-like community, and cost nothing to get started, and the souce code aws free for all the software (one of my alltime biggest pet peeves about typical software, especially when I ran into a simple bug that could be fixed in 5 minutes). Plus I used it on a robot or two from time to time (that's my line of work.) It was a no-brainner. My first attempt to download redhat went wrong back a year and a half ago, didn't try again for about 6 months. Since then (about a year ago) I tried about 1/2 of the major free distros. Mandrake was my one constant for about a half a year, till kubuntu.

(I first heard of linux back around 94, but I was happy with my unix-ish amiga at the time.)

Most ppl say kde is for windows fans, but I like it because of many Amiga like qualities.

I used or owned many, many other (lesser) computers. Especially in the '80s, including every computer sold in the usa except for the coleco adam that I know of; even the apple lisa (school) and intellevision aquarius (owned). I've also owned every console in the 80s + 90s except the coleco, neo-geo, and that vector based one from about '81.

Wow, what a long post. Sorry for eating your screen.

[davidmigl]

May I be allowed to dissent from the typical views here? I've had a few more problems than most people here.

Windows 98: Unstable, especially when paired with a 433 mhz processor and 128 mb RAM. Adding more RAM helped, but still an outdated, unstable OS. Don't see why anyone would need to use it, except for legacy applications

Windows 2000: Very nice and polished; an incremental increase in stability over 98. It occasionally has some issues, such as not liking a CD-ROM drive change and not being able to update itself/unzip when the primary hard drive has logical partitions. Other than that, I have found it to be very stable and un-bloated. Since it was made for businesses, it doesn't have useless junk such as the notorious animated dog. Not too big on show - it's function over form.

Windows XP - very stable, especially when paired with good hardware and antivirus+antispyware. It has considerable more "flash" than 2000, and some things, such as the retracting system tray and transparent icons, are quite useful. It has a wide range of drivers available, and detects almost anything generic the first time. It has many more drivers for network cards, cd drives, and USB sticks than 2000. When I first switched from 2000 to xp, I was aware that there was a whole new level of user-friendliness present. Compared to other OS's, it's very easy and intuitive to use (especially when doing things such as setting up dual monitors). I use XP daily and have found it rock solid for all my needs.

Ubuntu: Different stories. 1st was on an ancient 233 mhz Hp computer. The install went great, and after tweaking settings with the monitor, it was running much faster than win2k that was installed. It was a little slow at times, but that's because of the machine and not ubuntu. Very impressed. Next was on my primary machine; I added another hard drive and let it install. Being on an a64 3400+, I was very impressed at the install time - 20 mins compared to about 3 hrs on the HP. I'd love to get to use ubuntu - absolutely love it, but there were a few killer features that turned the tide. The first was dual monitors. No matter how many config files I fiddled around with, I couldn't get dual monitors to work. Broke xorg a few times, but I was glad I made a backup of xorg.conf. Tried KDE, that was a no go as well. Next was cool and quiet - processor underclocking on A64 processors. The computer generates enormous amounts of heat with this off. And yet, I couldn't find a way to enable it. Same goes with fan control software - I haven't found a way to get hardware fan control, so the OS has to take charge, and I couldn't find any - my cpu fan got LOUD running at 100% 100% of the time. Lastly were the issues with my ATI radeon 9600XT - I sometimes got the drivers installed, but they were very fickle, sometimes disbling themselves if I made the slightest changes to xorg.conf. I couldn't adjust settings like AA and AF, either. Third chance it got was on another "retired" computer - the Dell that I had previously had 98, 2000, and XP on. Installation froze when compiling packages, so I reinstalled Xp, and it worked.

Beatrix - Nice slim distro, but I could never get it to install. On my HP, random sequences of colored squares invaded the screen, and on the Dell, it wouldn't even boot (I'm inclined to think this is a hardware misconfiguration, but even if it is, XP still installed fine.)

Knoppix - Awesome KDE distro with lots of installed software. I'd look into trying to install it on a hard drive if I had the will to.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, my experiences differ from those of other peoples. I've found XP to be stable and have a large support for hardware. All other linux distros have had one or two glaring problems that kept me from using them.

Perhaps someone could PM me guides for the following so I could give linux another shot?

Cool and quiet on Linux
Fan control in Linux, or how to enable hardware fan control and an MSI K8N Neo Platinum (754)
Dual monitors with ATi drivers
How to adjust AA, AF, VPU recover, etc with ATI drivers

[Brunellus]

May I be allowed to dissent from the typical views here? I've had a few more problems than most people here.

Windows 98: Unstable, especially when paired with a 433 mhz processor and 128 mb RAM. Adding more RAM helped, but still an outdated, unstable OS. Don't see why anyone would need to use it, except for legacy applications

Windows 2000: Very nice and polished; an incremental increase in stability over 98. It occasionally has some issues, such as not liking a CD-ROM drive change and not being able to update itself/unzip when the primary hard drive has logical partitions. Other than that, I have found it to be very stable and un-bloated. Since it was made for businesses, it doesn't have useless junk such as the notorious animated dog. Not too big on show - it's function over form.

Windows XP - very stable, especially when paired with good hardware and antivirus+antispyware. It has considerable more "flash" than 2000, and some things, such as the retracting system tray and transparent icons, are quite useful. It has a wide range of drivers available, and detects almost anything generic the first time. It has many more drivers for network cards, cd drives, and USB sticks than 2000. When I first switched from 2000 to xp, I was aware that there was a whole new level of user-friendliness present. Compared to other OS's, it's very easy and intuitive to use (especially when doing things such as setting up dual monitors). I use XP daily and have found it rock solid for all my needs.

Ubuntu: Different stories. 1st was on an ancient 233 mhz Hp computer. The install went great, and after tweaking settings with the monitor, it was running much faster than win2k that was installed. It was a little slow at times, but that's because of the machine and not ubuntu. Very impressed. Next was on my primary machine; I added another hard drive and let it install. Being on an a64 3400+, I was very impressed at the install time - 20 mins compared to about 3 hrs on the HP. I'd love to get to use ubuntu - absolutely love it, but there were a few killer features that turned the tide. The first was dual monitors. No matter how many config files I fiddled around with, I couldn't get dual monitors to work. Broke xorg a few times, but I was glad I made a backup of xorg.conf. Tried KDE, that was a no go as well. Next was cool and quiet - processor underclocking on A64 processors. The computer generates enormous amounts of heat with this off. And yet, I couldn't find a way to enable it. Same goes with fan control software - I haven't found a way to get hardware fan control, so the OS has to take charge, and I couldn't find any - my cpu fan got LOUD running at 100% 100% of the time. Lastly were the issues with my ATI radeon 9600XT - I sometimes got the drivers installed, but they were very fickle, sometimes disbling themselves if I made the slightest changes to xorg.conf. I couldn't adjust settings like AA and AF, either. Third chance it got was on another "retired" computer - the Dell that I had previously had 98, 2000, and XP on. Installation froze when compiling packages, so I reinstalled Xp, and it worked.

Beatrix - Nice slim distro, but I could never get it to install. On my HP, random sequences of colored squares invaded the screen, and on the Dell, it wouldn't even boot (I'm inclined to think this is a hardware misconfiguration, but even if it is, XP still installed fine.)

Knoppix - Awesome KDE distro with lots of installed software. I'd look into trying to install it on a hard drive if I had the will to.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, my experiences differ from those of other peoples. I've found XP to be stable and have a large support for hardware. All other linux distros have had one or two glaring problems that kept me from using them.

Perhaps someone could PM me guides for the following so I could give linux another shot?

Cool and quiet on Linux
Fan control in Linux, or how to enable hardware fan control and an MSI K8N Neo Platinum (754)
Dual monitors with ATi drivers
How to adjust AA, AF, VPU recover, etc with ATI drivers
Your sceondary machine reflects, more or less perfectly, the sort of machine Ubuntu does exceptionally well with: standard components, nothing exotic.

Your primary machine, however, is another story. The quirkiness of its hardware makes things difficult from the outset. As it wasn't built ground-up with hardware known to work with the distributions you chose, you were bound to run into trouble.

Of course, you had no way of knowing that on the way in, unless you investigated each bit of hardware ahead of time.

If you need XP, well, by all means use XP. I have chosen to select all my future hardware to work with my OS of choice: I encourage you to do the same.

[bored2k]

My point of view given when I gave those a shot, not nowadays (would be unjust).

MS/DOS: I was too young to remember anything than some key commands.

Windows 3.11: Pretty drastic difference. My keyboard had one of those attached trackballs that looked like those of a deodorant stick. Pretty cool.

Windows 95: And out come the wolves. I was young enough to hardly notice any differences between this and 98 so I'm skipping this one.

Windows 98(SE): Awsome. It felt a gazillion times easier and *gasp*, my brothers would let me use it without the fear of me screwing the box up ! (although shortly after, I became _the_ tech man of the house :D. It's pretty much a staple. Hardware detection was a pain in the neck, but besides that and it screwing up easier than easy with Back Orifice, Egg Drop and the numerous hack apps at the time, it was Ok.

Windows 2000: I could have liked this a lot more if it didn't have the same Hardware detection issues 98 had (a bit reduced) and if it wasn't a lot slower and took like half an hour to boot up (an hyperbole people).

Windows XP: Although slower than a squirrel on a hot steamy day in the Swiss Alps (...), after removing the new ugly interface and going back to 95's/2000 themeing, it was an ok distribution (comparing it to the other Windows boxes that is). Slowly I started developping dislikeness towards it until I gave Linux a try.

Mac OS X: Tried if for like 5 minutes last December at a Mac Store in Florida. I can't say anything more than the fact that I probably opened like 60 Safari browser windows because I couldn't maximize what I had minimized. Go me.

Nokia Symbian OS: Pretty straight forward.

Windows Mobile or whatever the OS that Motorola MPX200 cell phones have: The second I saw a Windows Explorer window I panicked. Not good.

Ubuntu: It works.

[Brunellus]

Wow, what a long post. Sorry for eating your screen.

Screen, hell. Now I'm out of paper!

[godzero]

Screen, hell. Now I'm out of paper!

I hope you're not still using paper tape.
I actually left gobs out because I saw how long it was getting.

[The Mekon]

I hope you're not still using paper tape.
I actually left gobs out because I saw how long it was getting.

I actually started programming computers back in the 1960s using punched cards - one for each line of code! God help you if you dropped a stack of cards. This was using the Uni computer.

At work we had a teletype connection to an HP server over telephone lines. Patience was the name of the game.

My real history with computers starts with the AN/UYK-3, a military computer, which after you had entered the bootstrap code using switches, would boot up using paper tape.

Next was the ROLM 1603 a military version of the Nova computers of the 1970s - bootstrapping and paper tape.

In 1978 I got my first home computer (pre PC), an Exidy Sorcerer using Exidy's own operating system, a modified B&W TV and Audio Tape recorder and 16K. of memory. This was upgraded to a floppy disk system plus another 48K of memory and actually ran CPM. I enjoyed this machine as I was programming using Z80 code and actually produced some nice programs.

Mid 1980's a PC clone and MSDOS using freeware as much as possible.

This was followed by folowed by a series of PC upgrades through Windows 3.1 which I quite liked.

In the 1990's Win95 which was my empoyer's operating system in parallel with Unix running on Sun and Silicon Graphics Workstations for the Weapons Simulation Centre which I managed at the time.

In retirement since 1998 I upgraded (???) to ME which I hated and now have XP Home and XP Professional on my windows machines. These are fairly robust behind a good firewall and using an uptodate virus checker and spyware detection system. I still use these as I can't get my Canon Scanner to work on Linux and my wife is used to Windows (after 47 years of marriage I don't like to cross her :grin: ).

For the last two years I have been playing with Linux starting with Red Hat which was a pain to set up - more recently FC4 which was is very good but still a pain to set up, Mepis which I like very much but for the life of me could not get running on my old HP pavilion using integtrated Intel 810 graphics and finally on both machines Ubuntu which is now my preferred operating system for email, browsing and playing with software development using C++.

[KingBahamut]

I hope you're not still using paper tape.
I actually left gobs out because I saw how long it was getting.

Based on my experiences GZ, Ive got plenty of Coffee coasters I can give away so you can drink all the coffee you need to read the whole thread.

[najames]

Wow, I read about someone using punch cards, I think I did that once, and only once - thank god.

Commadore Vic20
Apple
Mainframe CMS
DEC stuff
OS/2 at work for a year once, nice
DOS 3-5 (?)
Win 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, XtraPainful, XtraPainful 64
MVS
AIX

Work now - Sun Solaris 5.9, Mainframe z/OS, XtraPainful
Home now - WinXP (migrating OUT!), Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mepis, Suse10

I have installed and looked at most major distros of Linux recently. Some not so major too.

Mainframes will make you wretch and appreciate everything else. I have had at least 4 meetings to try to get "them" to put ONE program into production, another meeting was rescheduled for next week. In Linux it would be a 5 minute job (or less) with Cron. JCL, YUCK!! How would you like to issue unintuitive commands like =3.4 and paths to look at programs, and =s.h to look at the output logs from the programs, wait for 2-4 DAYS for a program to run on the first day of the month. I thank the computing gods for that V440 Sun server and allowing me to migrate 99% of my stuff off the mainframe!!

[godzero]

I never used punch cards, we used the "fill in the box with the charactor with a #2 pencil" cards. I think the were about 16 charactors per card, but a huge improvement over punchcards.

[desertViking]

I've got about 30 years of experience going back to IBM3x0 mainframe computers that I programmed with punch cards.

I've been moving towards smaller operating systems ever since. I won't bore you with the myriad of platforms in between. In the last two months, I've been on a journey to learn about Linux, and it's been a blast. I was pleased to finally, and consistently, be able to start my wireless card with Ubuntu which allows me to write this note.

I've installed or run about 9 distributions in the last two months. Remember, although I am familiar with PCs and Unix type OS (spent a couple of years on Apollo and Sun workstations), this was my first attempt.

1) Fedora 4 - Installed OK, but I thought the package management was not it's strong suit. Strange since it's one of the systems with strongest apparent backing. Did not immediately recognize my wireless card.

2) SuSE 9.3 - Had *everything* in it. Not only two kitchen sinks but a couple of extra gaskets to stop the drain just in case. An eternity to install, but once it was going, pretty complete. Did not immediately recognize my wireless card. One of the better at SMB support for mounting printers.

3) Mepis 3.3.1 - Really nice distribution. I liked installing from the live CD. It's just a button click from the desktop to install. Pretty much a straight Debian distribution, the customizations for easy of use are thoughtful. This was the only distribution which immediately and consistently recognized my wireless card; best hardware recognition I experienced. Uses apt-get. Cool.

4) Knoppix - various distributions. It did not recognize my wireless card (I know, recurring theme but hey, it's my PC, why shouldn't it be recognized :-) I like the completeness of the distribution, but since it doesn't install to the hard drive, I couldn't easily configure the network. Keep a copy around for special needs.

5) Xandros (I think) 3.3 - Very slick and very safe for a beginner. It wasn't too hard to strip away all of the ad space from the desktop and the package manager, if found it quite reasonable. It was the only other distribution to of recognize my wireless card. I think, knowing what I know now, I could get it to reliably use it as well. This is a good distribution for your folks if you want to install a system for them.

6) Ubuntu 5.4 and 5.10 - I am drawn to this release. I enjoy the spirit of the community. The distribution is very stable, even the Breezy preview. I did have to do two out of three falls with the wireless card (the distribution installation incorrectly identified it as an earlier version which provided a red herring for me), but I'm pleased to say it's going well now! Interested to see what's going on with the backports.

7) Libranet - Did I install that? Must have, there's a disk here.

8 Slackware - I learned the most from this distribution. I learned enough installing this distribution to configure all the others. It gave me the clues about the drivers on Ubuntu for example. Unfortunately, it's just not quite worth the work. Very stable release. If I was writing compilers instead of e'mails, it's probably might be what I use.

9) Mandriva - I was hopeful, but this release didn't do much for me either. It was as "complete" as Suse, but without the same flair for execution.

10) I downloaded ARK but discovered that it really wanted to take over my hard drive, and I was unwilling to give it up.

At the end of my journey, I've got Ubuntu loaded on my PC, Mepis on the alternate drive, and Knoppix on a CD in case I need to do something to the hard drives and recover.

My wife uses XP ;-)

[papangul]

With that kind of experience , you'd find gentoo also interesting, though you have to manually install drivers for your wireless card.

[chimera]

Windows 95:It was OK I guess...
Windows 98:I had to reinstall this piece of s*** atleast once a month
Windows XP:Kinda better than 98,still not perfect but atleast it could last about 6 months before I had to format&reinstall
Ubuntu liveCD:Better than any of the OSes mentioned in this post so far
Ubuntu 5.04:Same as above

[Goober]

Windows 3.1 - Actually, this has been my best Windows installation yet. Virus-free, stable, it worked quite nicely. Of course, it was very simply, and I had this when I was like 7.

Windows 95 - Improvement over 3.1 graphically, didn't do much for everything else.

Windows 98 - Terrible. Horrible. Awful. But better then ME.

Windows ME - BSODBSODBSODBSOD - need I say more? In fact, i remember a BSOD every half an hour before we went back to '98 on my parents old computer.

Skipped 2000, went from ME back to 98, since my dad was pissed at having to spend good money on ME, only for it to be crap.

Windows XP - Much better then ME, but man does it hog the memory. I started with 256M RAM, and it was VERY slow. I added 512 RAM, and it got better. After I added my final and current 512 of RAM, it runs nice. It runs slower the longer you have it in, and gets viruses very easy. XP is pretty snappy for me, but I have nothing but games on it, and I have 1.3 Gb of RAM. And its a fresh install, rarely used. The install that I had for 2.5 years was getting VERY sluggish.

Ubuntu 4.10 - A dream come true. Finally, a stable OS, no damn BSODs, easy to use, install, simply awesome. Ok, the Name is, well, odd, and the default graphics are blah, but it is awesome in terms of functionability, well, compared to Windoze. My only grip is I can't play games, and my old printer didn't work with it. The price is also right, IMO. Actually, this is an OS I would gladly have paid CAD160 for, rather then XP. Don't get any ideas, Canonical . . . but it is odd that you pay CAD160 for XP, which is big, slow, and just generally not very good.

Ubuntu 5.04 - See 4.10, but better. MUCH better.

Mac OS - Nothing special, works better then Windoze, but can't play games, and its quite difficult to use when you've used nothing but Windows. Also is much pricier then Windoze.

[desertViking]

With that kind of experience , you'd find gentoo also interesting, though you have to manually install drivers for your wireless card.
I'll probably try Gentoo, perhaps over the holidays. I understand that it takes awhile to comple the kernel and so forth, so can't be done in an evening.

Kind regards,

desertViking

[KingBahamut]

I'll probably try Gentoo, perhaps over the holidays. I understand that it takes awhile to comple the kernel and so forth, so can't be done in an evening.

Kind regards,

desertViking
If your going to do that on anything less than a 1ghz and do a stage3 , prepare for a few days of machine time. =)

[papangul]

If your going to do that on anything less than a 1ghz and do a stage3 , prepare for a few days of machine time. =)
There is no need to do a stage-1 install , you may just extract a tarball(and compile the kernel) to get the most highly optimised and most stable system: http://jackass.homelinux.org/

[YourSurrogateGod]

XP became a decent OS once I figured out how to use it.

Suse was fun, but KDE was getting on my nerves.

Fedora Core 2 was pretty good, but I couldn't stand the fact that if something broke, it would be a pain to fix it.

Ubuntu, good stuff. The only thing that I could possible think of improving it is having a way to install .deb files through synap.

[migo]

Mac OS 7.5.5 - Good for its time, I actually had it figured out quite well, although I can't remember how to do much with it.
Windows 95 - I never really used it except at school, at the time I was a Mac Zealot so I wasn't terribly fond of it.
Windows 98 - Served me quite well, I think I used it for about 6 years, I never had any serious problems with it.
RedHat 6.2 - Never really got to use it, the drivers available at the time weren't compatible with my video card, I couldn't get anything better than 320x200 resolution and in X I had a 1600x1200 virtual desktop.
Caldera 2.3 - For a while, the only Linux distro for which I could make my SB16ISA work. Unfortunately it had the same video problems as RedHat.
Mandrake 7.1 - Still no luck with my video card.
BeOS 5 Personal - I never really got into it, I spent most of my time playing the RPG they included with it.
Mac OS 8.1 - Never got much chance to use it, had some interface improvements that were definitely handy.
Windows Me - I'm probably the only person who never had it crash once in over a year of use.
Mac OS 9.2.2 - Initially I didn't mind it, after using it for several months it made me want to throw my Wallstreet out the window.
Windows 2000 - I absolutely loved it, perhaps more than it deserves, since I had Virtual PC on OS 9.2.2 and was running Windows 2000 through it, 2000 was more stable in the emulator than OS 9.2.2 was on its own.
SuSE 9.2 - Never made it past the install, it kept hanging every damn time.
Mac OS X - I've never used it extensively, but it was paradise compared to Classic. It has a lot of handy features, some better, some worse than Windows. I'd rate it pretty close to Windows XP if it weren't for the sparse software library.
Windows XP Tablet Edition - The Tablet functionality blows any other OS I've tried out of the water, although it's seen less use lately since I haven't had any Linguistics or Chinese courses recently. Has some minor interface quirks that get annoying after a while, but nothing that really gets into the way of useability.
Ubuntu 5.04 - I got it since someone at TabletPCBuzz mentioned that they had gotten it to work (tablet functionality too!) with my Tablet model, unfortunately the method used doesn't seem to work (apt-get package not found error).
Knoppix 3.7/Slax Kill Bill Edition - I tried using these two along with the Ubuntu live CD when I managed to kill XP running the Longhorn transformation pack and was trying to recover, unfortunately I wasn't successful since I couldn't write to NTFS with any of them.

[Iandefor]

I've used a 1001 diff. OS's, it seems. Here are the highlights.

MS-DOS: -_-... A disaster in programming if there ever was one. Only advantage was not having to type ./ in front of an executable if it wasn't in /usr/bin.

Windows 3.1: DOS but uglier and more prone to crashing.

Windows 9.x: The 2nd worst of them all. Ugly, slow, and crashed more than an airplane without wings. When they tried to add a little eyecandy ("Themes") it worked about as well as a leper putting on lipstick. Especially Windows ME.

Windows XP: The absolute worst of all the OS's I've tried... ugly, slow, insecure, and ubiquitous... urrgle

Mac OS 9: Errrm... I'd always wondered why Mac users always raved about how nice Mac OS looked, and this OS didn't help at all...

Mac OS X: A little sleeker-looking, but terribly inefficient. I didn't like the UI much. I wish they'd get some design sense... haven't they heard, Brown is the new Black :)!

Xandros: Nice-looking, but fairly rough around the edges.

Ubuntu Hoary: I'm pleased as punch with Ubuntu Hoary; when the UI hasn't been screwed with like mine has (XFCE4 is ugly to my eyes. I would run GNOME were it not for the horrible oldness of my computer) it looks simple and beautiful and works well. Again, a little rough around the edges, but only if you go in and hack it; it's fine for everyday use.

Ubuntu Breezy:This one's on par with Hoary, but is a little more in-your-face when it comes to technical issues, it seems.

[katiad]

Hehe. I'll give my turn:

MacOS 7.0 - Loved it, when I was like... 11. Had a 150mb hard drive filled to the brim, knew loads of customization tips, learned snippets of interrupt button secrets and codes to type in to unfreeze a frozen computer... all forgotten now, of course.

DOS - Hated it. But then, I didn't use it until I was a little mini-mac guru. The idea of a console-based system didn't appeal.

Win95 - Hated it, but I needed to use it for various schoolwork and programs, eventually bought my own 95 computer, which got heavy use. I didn't wreck it too badly....

WinME - Really hated it. It didn't last a year.

Win2k - It's fine. Stable, solid. Nothing special in my eyes.

WinXP - Everyone bashes it, but I've never had a single problem on my own computer. I've heavily modded it... never had a virus, rarely had spyware problems, and not one in the last year. It scarcely crashes, has great uptime, is solid and stable. But then... I didn't pay for it, either. I think Vista will be nice, too, but I'm not interested in paying a couple hundred dollars for it. No thanks. So.... the real linux hunt was on...

[edited to add]
MacOS 9 & X - Not bad... but too pricey for me to own one long enough to really play around with it.

Briefly checked out several distros over the last 5 years: Tried Mandrake - it was ok, but I had lots of issues, hardware problems, etc. Same with Redhat. Tried Mepis - couldn't install. Tried Knoppix - still have a disk lying about for recovery.

Ubuntu - The linux I've been waiting for. Installed it, ran it, loved it instantly. I'm not as well versed in it as I am Windows. (And I'm rather application-dependent. I love photoshop. I love Itunes. I love the 2-3 games I have. I love Dreamweaver. Love Money. So I use those apps on my now-secondary windows machine... recognizing that when I have the money to pay for whichever emulator works best for Dreamweaver and Photoshop, I'll buy it... but heck, I've got a couple computers, why limit myself?)

But Ubuntu has become my first-choice desktop. I love the eye-candy. Love the linux concept. I'd already firefoxed/t-bird'd myself, so no app-dependent moping for me! Love how everything on my computer, from my printer to my camera, just /worked/. Installing my printer was hell with windows. Love it. It's about to be installed on my third computer, my brother's computer, and possibly my grandmother's early next year... because I'm real tired of cleaning up her spyware messes. *lol*

So my fave OS's are XP (but not for people like... my grandmother, and my mother, and my brother who can't keep a system working for more than a month for various reasons) and Ubuntu.

[earth_walker]

My first computer was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k. I loved it - so many preteen hours spent typing in the latest code from various games mags, waiting eagerly for the latest tape to load. The UI was a command line running Sinclair Basic, which auto-completed commands for you based on the context. Fantastic, and the only time the computer world felt limitless to me, although there were so many times I'd try to save hours of coding only to find the tape was corrupt...

I have been through and agree with the concensus on the windows timeline - 2k is the best and ME the worst, although I have to add that Win98 SE can be made into a lean, mean, few BSOD performance machine with a bit of work and knowledge.

My linux experience has been a little narrower - I played around with Mandrake 8.1, 9.2 and now have a Mandriva 2006 partition upgraded from 2005. The earlier two I found to be fun to play with, but took so much fiddling to get very basic things to work that they never stayed up for long before I'd reboot into 2k.

Mandriva 2005 and 2006 have been much better, and certainly don't suffer from the dependency hell I experienced in the earlier versions, but in general I find it to be unstable, slow, and inconsistent.

Especially now compared with the Ubuntu Breezy I have dual-booted at my work, which has in a matter of months taken over the XP partition in up-time. It's fast, stable, and easy to use, albeit a bit homely. And the community is fantastic!

In fact, I like it so much, I find myself working on it through FreeNX whenever I'm away from it, and will soon be replacing the Mandriva partition on my home computer...

[frobroj]

Here is my list...

APPLE IIc - MMmmmmm loved taxman and artillery!!
Windows 3.1 - Netwhating? Learned alot here...
Windows 95/98 - Good Gaming OS followed by an improved Gaming OS!
Windows 2000 - Solid OS! Uptime shattered all the 95/98 records. You only had to reboot it once a month or so. ;)
Windows XP - Everything you didnt want and more. Life on the internet with this OS was like sailing into a naval battle in a paper boat.
Redhat 7.3 - This was a learning experience. My first linux OS. Worked past the gui and began to enjoy it.
Redhat 8/9 - Smoothed thier gui getting ready for primetime. What was up with 8's quick transition to 9?
Debian - Loved it! Debian showed me what stability really meant!
Sun Solaris - Its Rock Solid. Its Purple.
Java Desktop - Purple linux with Java preinstalled. pretty smooth.
Mandrake - Flashy but flaky.
SUSE - Eh good but I dont care for KDE and hated having last years os..
Linspire - Linux is free right? Yeah maybe not with these folks...
Fedora x.x - Liked all the fedoras but the current versions were always a bit flaky for my taste. Dont know if it was because of the overbloated install or just the experimental nature of the os.
Ubuntu - Wow now this is a distro a person could love! Kept the install simple and made it more functional than any other distro... Its the cats pajamas.. Its the bees knees.. Its just plain GREAT!!!

jm

[23meg]

Not necessarily in chronological order..

C64 BASIC - (I consider it an OS; you may not) My first ever, and it's what taught me the very basics (pun?) of computing.
AmigaOS - The OS I still feel the greatest emotional / personal tie to.
PC-DOS - An unworkable mess.
MS-DOS - Was cool in its time, but not quite strong enough
Windows 3.1 - A more eye candy version of a DOS file manager; not a true OS.
Windows 95 - Bad memories. I won't elaborate.
Windows 98 - Bad memories. I won't elaborate.
Windows ME - *giggles*
Windows 2000 - Best MS OS I ever used. Very stable, very workable, except the famous permanent BSOD that occured in specific cases when you switched IDE devices from one channel to the other, which made the OS unusable and required a reinstall.
Windows XP - Terrible looks, bad usability, horrible security; a step back from 2000.
SimplyMEPIS - Would be good if it used Gnome and detected hardware a bit better.
Red Hat 6.2 - First Linux I ever used. Very good memories, except for rpm hell.
Fedora Core 3 - 2.5 minutes to boot? Thank you.
Debian - My second favorite distro.
AGNULA - Unimpressed, in spite of the great package selection, due to overall unstability and lack of streamlining.
Dyne:bolic - Great idea, great software selection, great implementation, very valid reason of existence, and "ideologically correct". I still use it.
Ubuntu Warty - Well thought out, but buggy; a rough ride.
Ubuntu Hoary - A good friend when customized.
Ubuntu Breezy - L O V E

[endersshadow]

Apple IIc - Oregon Trail=awesome. No home computer...just school's.
Windows 95 - Our first computer. Got it the week 95 came out. Oh the memories
Windows 98 - Felt just like Windows 95. In fact, I can't even tell you the difference.
Windows ME - For as many complaints as I've heard, I didn't really have any with this. It worked just like 98 for me, but newer. On the first computer I ever built.
Windows XP - Hated Luna, but I switched it back to Classic. Learned a lot about Windows and was definitely a "power user"
Fedora - About a year or so ago, I found myself in charge of a Fedora server and I knew nothing about Fedora. What I've learned: Fedora server=good. Fedora desktop=bad.
Mandriva/Symphony/Slackware - Started experimenting with different distros. None of them were particularly suited to me.
Ubuntu - Joined up a few weeks before Breezy hit the shelves. At first, it was only on my second computer, but after a couple of weeks, my laptop was wiped clean of XP, and now I'm all Breezy :KS

[CPUFreak91]

I think one topic about peoples experiences with other OSes and other linux distros is well needed. So I posted it. Post your experiences, good or bad. What you would and wouldent recomend.

DOS> Not enough to like it
Windows 3.1 > Too old but more stable than any windows I've seen yet
Windows 95 > The best windows microsoft ever made
Windows ME > Wort Microsoft ever made
Windows Vista > Not planning on buying it
Windows XP> Not too bad but only for games that don't work in cedega/wine

Red Hat 9 > First linux distro I ever used, too old but not bad
Slackware 10.0 > I just switched, again too old.
Gentoo 2004 and 2005 > too much configuration
DSL > Tiny, love it!
Ubuntu > Best i've tried yet. Giving copies to anyone in my neighborhood who brings a disk. Very cross language too.

[Kelpie]

Win 3.11: was fun because it had games that the other windows didnt, even though it only supported a limited amount of colors
Win 98: it was ok, as long as you played games that didnt require alot of stuff and as long as you didnt run azerues at night it was ok
Win 98 SE: pain in the rear if youre not using dialup, slows down the computer performance even if you apply the patch for this problem, everytime ive reformatted with this one problem goes away and another problem comes up
Example: last reformat i had problems with The GIMP, this format i dont, but this format i have problems with Xchat crashing and some of MSG plus's features crashing, last format i didnt
WinME: tried for a week, it was ok the first day but then things went downhill faster then win98se made things go downhill, it ended up not letting me even redo the desktop or get on IRC without things screwing up, i used to go to a school that used winME for 4 years, then on the year i was gunna leave they switched to WinXP... of all things... and they had problems with WinME causing errors every startup
WinXP: on the systems i tried it on, it was horrible, course all these computers werent maintained well either, but thats besides the point

WinLinux 2003: got as far as installing it on, then rebooting to go into it and getting a kernel error i didnt know what it was talking about, i emailed the email for help and never even got a response back

i would have tried other distros but i dont even have a burner, my aunt had a burner but she had her computer plugged in a power strip that had a short and one day her power supply blew and i dont have a phillips head big enough to get her burner out so i can put it in mine to use

[crispingatiesa]

Amiga Workbeanch - For its time the best
.


Amiga Workbench kick ***! Actually the whole package soft+hard. It's a shame Commodore went bellyup.

[gabhla]

I'll spare everyone the details of early adventures into operating systems....those days are long gone, and forgotten. In the recent past, I used Windows (of course) and have the same complaints already detailed by others. But, overall I like Windows, because it works and I felt comfortable using it.

Ah, but about five or so years I got on a tangent of wanting to try something different. I installed Suse (version 5 point something). It took about a week before actually having a useable system. I was impressed. But not for long. Suddenly it wouldn't boot, and I gave up. To heck with it, so I promptly went back to XP, never looking back.

Last summer I again got on a tangent and tried Vector, after reading a review somewhere. Never got to find out how wonderful Vector is because it wouldn't recognize most of my hardware - we all know the drill...no sound, weird screen resolution and no internet (on and on). There were just too many "issues".

From Vector I went to Ubuntu Hoary - and boom! Only issue with Hoary was no sound, which I eventually was able to correct, then upgraded to Breezy and have never regretted it. To me, Breezy is the ultimate and Windows is long gone.

I've also tried, on my other pc, Kubutu, which I didn't like. Replaced Kubuntu with Xandros, primarily to try out KDE, and it's been great - in use every day, (my wife uses it but for her very limited requirements...email, ebay, etc.). May just load Ubuntu on it anyway.

[new2linux]

I have used windows 3.1-server '03 (wasn't subjected to Millenium Edition thankfully)

Windows 3.1 = It ran tetris so i was happy.
windows 95=boring
Windows 98=evil, especially on the networking
Windows NT4=nice but a pain in the rear to install drivers
Windows 2000=all time favorite windows
Windows XP = nice for networking and usability, crashes and restarts way too much.
Server 2003 = this is the only server I have worked on, and it seems to work well.

Linux Distros
Fedora Core 3 = looked very nice when I installed it, but was a bit bloated
Knoppix = excellent live cd
Ubuntu = Incredible!!!,

I was a solid windows user until a friend handed me a ubuntu cd (Warty 4.10) at school. I tried the live cd and was wow'ed by how cool it was. Installed the operating system permanently and now all my computers are running it (haven't convinced my parents to switch, but that is one of those losing battles, the farther away I am from their computer the better ;) )

I'm not rabidly anti-windows, but I think that what is being done in the open source community is incredible.

I just built a computer and am really excited about have 5.10 on a computer with a decent video card and a gig of ram. (probably up to 4 gigs in the next 1.5-2 years)

[djheadley]

Well, let's see.......

TI99-4A - don't make me dig it out for the specs
HP 3000 Minicomputer (COBOL)
C/PM
MSDOS from 2.0 to 6.22
Win 1.0
Win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11
Win 95, 98, ME, XP
Ubuntu is the only Linux that I have kept on my computer for more than a couple of days but I have looked at a few others and keep looking at them for various reasons although Ubuntu will probably always be my choice for my machines.

I was beginning to feel quite old, reading through the posts, until I came across the posts that started where (or before) I did.

djheadley

[jamyskis]

The ZX Spectrum BIOS - even included a free calculator!
C64 BASIC
MS-DOS - The appeal of this has grown on me over time.
Amiga Workbench 1.3 - Part of the reason why the Amiga failed to make a real impression in the desktop market.
Amiga Workbench 3.0 - Very underrated, suffered from 1.3's legacy. An excellent OS.
Apricot DOS - don't ask.
Windows 3.1 - Glorified file manager.
Windows 95 - Was fine if you didn't move the mouse, touch the keyboard or breathe on it.
Windows 98 - Same as above, although you could perhaps breathe a bit more.
Windows ME - Gulp.
Windows 2000 - Double gulp.
Windows XP - An improvement over the above, but still horribly unstable, bloated and unusable.
Go! Linux - Obscure German distribution that I picked up for 3 marks from a bargain bin. My first distro.
Red Hat Linux 9 - My first proper "working distro". Had problems with sound config, but was otherwise a good learning experience.
Fedora Core 1 - The continued sound problems tended to start putting me off Red Hat's stuff.
Mandrake 9.1 - The first distro I really fell in love with.
SuSE 9.1 Pro - The second distro, and possibly the one I used for longest with the exception of Ubuntu (ten months)
Gentoo - Short, sweet and destructive. Never again.
Mandrake 2005 - Minor improvements over 9.1, but nothing major. Liked it, but went on to try other stuff.
Ubuntu 5.04 - Loved it, although it had serious problems with my printer. Still I stuck with it, and eventually got my printer/scanner to work on it.
Ubuntu 5.10 - The mutt's nuts :) Recognised everything at first beep, runs beautifully fast, has everything I need.

Haven't looked back since.

[garyng]

It is interesting to see that many people find linux better than Windows. I just played around with dapper flight 4 on a relatively old machine(P3 733/64M), none of the three destop environment(KDE, GNOME, XFCE4) is usable on this machine and I am not running X on it, just VNC into it.

I remember I can run 98 on a less capable machine quite happily. Also, my experience with Windows was pretty good(except ME), even 98 was very stable and I have been running XP for months between reboot and runs colinux on the same machine for over a year using just suspend/resume/hiberate.

linux workstation is not bad(slowly approaching windows) but seems that it requires more resource than Windows and much less polished as in Windows.

[Lovechild]

Of the ones I've used recently:

Gentoo: Time consuming, constantly broken in small ways, interesting plaything though.
Ubuntu: Poor security choices, idiotic user management but at least it somewhat works - except on my laptop.
Fedora: Excellent security choices, good user management, works even on my laptop - downside would be the speed at which applications are put in Extras.

[midwinter]

Recently..

Ubuntu: Good first distro, too bulky for me though, oldish packages, I prefer config files to GUI, not really my thing overall. Good forums though :)
Gentoo: Interesting, i'll perhaps use it in future for something or other, the install is an experience, I could do with spending some more time with it.
Arch: Amazing distro, fast, lightweight & simple. A little unstable recently though, but it happens. I'll definitely stick with it because I love it and it's almost perfect for me (need x86_64..), but i'm tempted to try Slackware.

[lovebyte]

Amstrad64: must have been in the early 80's :neutral:
MSDOS: 1986-88 :???:
MACOS: 1988-1994: Easy, nice, many crashes :neutral:
VMS: On a VAX 1990-1991: I still have nightmares about the VMS CLI :evil:
IRIX: 1991-2002: Unix! Yeah! Love at first sight. Amazing graphics capabilities in the early 90's especially. :D
Linux: 1996-now: Redhat at first, then Mandrake, now Ubuntu at home, Fedora at work. :D
Tru64:2005-now: At work. Pretty nice.:)

For me, Windows is something other people use. I only use it for presentations with PowerPoint (because I don't have a choice).

[joflow]

I've used MS DOS 6 and windows 3.1 but not extensively. I also had a c64 but was too young to really dig into it.

Windows 95: Its easy to look back on it now and say it was bad but for the time it was really amazing. Native 32-bit operating system that had a "next gen" look and feel compared to 3.1. It was the first MS OS that tried to make computing easy and user friendly.

Windows 98 SE: Was instable for me and didn't really add anything great over 95. But this era is when computing really started to take off. DVD drives, CD writers, USB, MP3s, Napster.

Windows ME: Sucks...nuff said.

Windows XP: Wonderful. Very stable compared to old versions of windows. SP2 stops alot of the worms that plagued XP. Its a decent OS. Can't really say anything bad about it.

Mandrake 9.1: Sucked. I had all types of weird issues...sometimes KDE would just break (for no apparent reason..this happened to me twice). The software repos were configured by default, for a newbie this meant I had no idea how to install software. I attempted to install everything from source and failed 99.9% of the time.

Mandrake 9.2: figured out how to set-up repos and the experience got better but KDE would still break from time to time (had to use some command from the cli to fix it).

Ubuntu 5.10: Saw it on distrowatch and thought "what the hell". Now I dualboot Ubuntu and XP.

[TrendyDark]

Tried a few versions of Linux, looked around, saw what i liked, some things i didn't understand (gentoo). I've also tried a few versions of BSD, hard to get BSD actually working. The most popular BSD release (FreeBSD) is weird, it doesn't load the GUI at first, you have to tell it to. The GUI Installer-including BSD distros don't work worth a crap (PCBSD/DesktopBSD).

Windows, well. . . Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP Home/Pro. . . all good OSs that we love to hate.

[LordBug]

Roughly in order that I've used, quite often having multiple machines going at once:

Commodore 64 - 64k goodness. Hours and hours spent typing in programs.

MS-DOS - Memory management got to be such a chore. Multiple boot setups were all but required.

Windows 3.x - Pure crap.

OS/2 - Good system, shame it didn't knock over Windows.

AmigaOS - Dekstop management can be a little frustrating.

Win95 - *crash* *crash* *crash* *crash*

WinNT 3.51 - Stable enough, too bad it looks like Win3.x

Slackware Linux - took me 2 weeks to get X working, once I found out it existed... tvm was not pretty

Win98 - *crash* *crash* *crash* (we're improving!)

WinNT 4 - Nice combination of UI and security, for Microsoft anyway

Win2k - best UI and management they've done so far.

Suse/Redhat/Debian Linux - None lasted long, though I couldn't tell you why I liked/disliked any one of them anymore.

WinXP - Default UI is horrible. Even "classic" leaves a lot to be desired.

Gentoo Linux - first foray into source based distro. Level of control was interesting, but I had a habit of blowing it up. That meant 3-5 days of re-install (re-compile) time. Yuck.

Ubuntu Linux - Well, we all know about this one, right? :)

MacOS 9 - Just recently picked up a re-built G3 desktop. MacOS reminds a lot of AmigaOS.

(soon)Mac OS X - it'll be an older version to run on the G3.

[jpkotta]

I could talk about a lot of OSs, but I'll just talk about 2.

My last MS OS: I got my shiny new desktop, with this brand new OS, WinXP. I thought it was ugly, but that was easy enough to fix. Then I tried copying files from the old family computer, it failed. I tried running old DOS programs, it failed. So I said screw it, I have nothing to lose, and tried Mandrake.

My first Unix OS: A month later, I went to work at IBM. There, I got a RS/6000 workstation running AIX. The thing never crashed, ever (and I abused it on occasion). The only reason to reboot was a little reminder that came up after 2 weeks. Some of the systems ran for years with out rebooting. And it was fun to use. There was always another trick to figure out, to make things better. I decided to stick with Unix then and there.

After the WMF fiasco, I decided to boycott MS on any of my computers.

[qb4ever]

FreeDos - Like msdos but usable on modern computers, gnu gpl licensed also :)

PC-DOS - Didn't like it too well

MS-DOS 1.1-6.22 - \\:D/ good stuff at the time.

OS/2 Warp 4 - ran decent on older hardware but didn't like the layout to well.

Windows 3.0, 3.1,3.11 WFW 3.11 - Ran ok on older hardware otherwise crap

Windows 95 - The second best os Microsoft created

Windows 98 - Better hardware support but more bloated and buggy due to IE 4

Windows 98se - a little less buggy with better driver support than windows 98 but slower

Windows ME - Don't talk to me about that abomination, I won't go there [-(

Windows 2000 - Best os microsoft created

Windows XP - Slightly faster than windows 2000 but to much hand holding and GUI bloat

Plan 9 - Very cool with lots of cool concepts

DSL - Will run on any hardware you throw at it

Freebsd - Extremely stable and the most unix like

I'll probably think of some more later :rolleyes:

[hscottyh]

CP/M - yay for reverse syntax

OS/2 2.11, Warp 3.0, Warp 4.0 - still one of the best OS's in the world apart from the evil TCP/IP stack.

bin

You can say that again! I loved OS/2! I was considered an OS/2 guru way back when, even wrote soom REXX extensions and gave them away on Compuserv:) It's failure to catch hold of the market and eventually dieing, I think, is one reason it has taken Linux so to really be considered on the Desktop by everyday corporations. Company's have just been gun shy to stray to far from Microsoft, since some of them lost big when OS/2 died. I'm finally started to see attitudes changing, however, since FOSS now has a longstanding proven track record. The success of Firefox has hurt either.

Sorry to stray from the topic....

[fuscia]

windows Me does not crash all the time. i once went so long without rebooting, my fan died.

[bjweeks]

windows Me does not crash all the time. i once went so long without rebooting, my fan died.

You must be a god...

[fuscia]

You must be a god...

many mistake me for one. hard to stay humble.

[John.Michael.Kane]

CP/M, BASIC (on tape) used on the Coleco Adam
Commodore 64
dos
os/2
win3.1
win for workgroups
win nt 4.0
win 2000
win xp
novell
redhat 5 and 8
suse9
ubuntu

[MrChips]

CP/M, BASIC (on tape) used on the Coleco Adam

OMG, someone remembers the Coleco ADAM. My dad bought us this thing when I was a kid. It kept eating cassettes.
Then the Apple IIe (dad got a little smarter) I made the little orange guy dance.
Then I found a set of headphones, a drum set, a guitar, girls, booze, drugs, and many other dangerous distractions. And no computer...EEEK!
(15 years later)
$50 bought me a cheap Packard Bell w/ Windows 98SE installed. And I have been hooked ever since.

Win98SE-Ok and simple. Easier to go in and tweak certain things. Crashes were fatal sometimes...
WinXP-Everything looks cool and runs pretty good, but what's all this junk running in the background? Wait a sec...why are you contacting MS for me. Hold on...updates? Oh you're already downloading them for me...uh yeah thx.
hmm what else are you up to in there.
Knoppix-I love that CD!
Agnula/Demudi-The music programs are nice but some essential OS needs were not met.
Ubuntu-Dialup config left me wondering whether or not this would be good for me. But with a little connection "sharing" from my Windows comp, the packages! Oh THE PACKAGES!\\:D/

[ModusOperandi]

Lemme think for a bit...

Windows 98: Decent, but the instability was getting to me.

Windows XP: My OS of choice, and I enjoy it immensely.

Kubuntu 5.10: Good, but there are some problems that drive me to choose XP over it.

Why I like XP over Kubuntu: Several reasons. First, print quality is better under Windows. Second, my dual-head setup actually works. Third, I can actually get good performance out of my video card (the OSS ati drivers on KDE suck and every time I try to enable fglrx, it can't start the xserver.)

[LMP900]

Win98 SE: I liked it but stability issues kinda ruined it for me

WinXP: Good OS, stable for me but pretty boring IMHO

OS X Tiger: Wow. My favorite OS at the moment (I use it at home)... can't wait 'til Leopard

Ubuntu Dapper: I was impressed with the stability while still in development. Not using it anymore... decided to take a break (let's just say I shouldn't be allowed near the terminal anymore:-D ) Will be installing it again in June.

FC5: I'm using this one for the meantime (here at school). I find it a little quicker than Dapper (both GNOME) but this is because Dapper is still in development. It took me a little longer to install multimedia stuff, flash, java, etc. but I really enjoy this distro. This is my current one as I await the arrival of the Drake.

[stargazer]

DOS, UCSD p-system and CP/M on an Apple ][ - My intro to this computer thing.

MS/DOS - had to program to the bare metal to get any performance

Coherent - Ran good on an AT with a 30M hd. My first introduction to Unix.

O/S 2 Warp - Loved it. Very stable and ran Windows programs better than Windows.

Redhat 4.2 to 7.0 - Peaked at 5.2 IMHO. Finally gave up due to RPM hell.

Debian 3.0 I had avoided Debian because of the rumours that it was hard to install and and administer. I tried it and found it easier than Redhat. Woody got old and I switched to unstable. I got tired of updating 3 times a week so I tried Ubuntu.

Ubuntu - The One True OS.

I repartitioned my hard drive this weekend and installed Dapper, Fedora FC5 and Win2k on various partitions. Dapper was by far the easiest install. It found all my hardware and just worked. Fedora found my hardware but the graphical installer is clunky and slow and downloading 5 cd's seemed a little excessive. :) Win 2k -- 6 reboots and searching the net for drivers. Need I say more?

[LMP900]

I didn't like the whole 5-cd deal either. You only need the first 2 for a basic install correct? Anyways, I used the DVD install instead of 5 discs.

[Mr_J_]

DOS - Usable. I didn't use it for long, but I still thought it was primitive.

Windows 3.1 - Usable. I didn't use it for long, but I like it having boxes and colour. Still it was ugly as sin, and not ver speedy.

Windows 95 - LOL! It was nice, but not very good. I was a gamer at this stage and I installed every little demo, game, ROM or anything distracting. So this windows got run down to the ground on formats and installs. Usable, but still not attrative.

Windows 98 - This one had on worse protections than the previous one. It's a password or Cancel. Usable, prettier and it also lacked some administrative tools. Gamed my heart out on this OS and it gave out a load of times. Learned to "fix" certain problems pretty fast on this one. The Reset is still my all time favorite of self taught "fixes" for windows.

Windows NT 4 - Didn't use it for gaming. Obviously ! It wasn't made for that. Didn't use it too much. I thought graphic-wise it wasn't bad, but definatly it wasn't good either. I like it. Almost never crashed on me, and it had some tools I liked. I belive this was the first OS i saw show me it's RAM and processor use. :mrgreen:

Windows 2000 - Still ugly, but usable. Never crashed on me. Liked the fact it had computer Geek oriented tools.

Windows ME - I almost didn't use this version as I tottally hated it with all the fiber of my being. I believe it might have been a traumatic gaming related accident that I have since blocked from my memory.

Windows XP Pro - Don't like it or dislike it. If it works I'm happy. Otherwise If I don't have to use it I just forget it exists.

Up until I met a linux distro I thought all computers were "fixable" within some sort of "I don't understand, but it's fine now." complex. Sorta like a crazy person. You don't understand, but if they're fine, then so are you.

Mandrake 7.1 - Got this old version from a hacker friend who I really didn't care a lot about. He introduced me to linux with his "I'll hack the workd sort of stuff. Which at the time I was into." I tried to use several versions of this distro for years until I got to version 10. At the begining it was confusing, scary and I quickly learned that if I found a forum or two online I was always able to fix the problem and I always able to understand the problem if I actually fixed it.
Many time I got bored, or scared, or just annoyed and lazylly wen't back to windows.

Suse 9.3 - Tried it for a week or so, maybe less. Was dual booting to see if I could make my wireless card work on this distro.
Got tired and left.

Knopix 3.1 - Tried it. Was my first Live distro. When i first put the cd in I expected it to install an OS. I was scrubbing my eyes to my disbelief that there was an OS with programs and all running from a CD. That litle thingy to change keyboard and language was super! Ran this CD a bit, but thought it was slow to respond so I didn't use it for long.

Kurumin 3.0.1 - Got this in a Magazine. Probably the first magazine I ever saw in paper that even mentioned Linux. I used this distro because it was live, and because it was in portuguese. OK! It was Brazillian portuguese, but still the closest thing I ever found to a portuguese live CD.

FreeBSD 6 - Tried to install this one, but for some reason I didn't like it. Wasn't bad, or the installer or anything specific.
Just didn't feel right. I believe I had some wireless problems on this one too.

Slackware 10 - Downloaded and finished the installation process...

Gentoo 2005.1 - Right after Slackware I tried to install Gentoo. Tried to install it twice and actually liked the efort of installing it, learning new things... I finished installing this from stage 3 and had a few problems installing my wireless card here. I believe this was why I quit using it. No internet meant constant reeboots to windows to read even the simplest of pappers to explain anything about Gentoo.

Ubuntu Hoary HedgeHog - Got this installed and with the help of my really long ethernet cable I got my wireless card installed. Hadn't used Themes yet.

This account of OS use is not in order as I kept switching back and forth on OSes because I get bored with an OS pretty fast.

When I started using Breezy Badger R1 my wireless card was already supported and I was happy as a bee on honey. Found Themes and my first encounter with an easy, realiable and fast skinning system was made. Finally found out that an OS doesn't have to be "not so ugly" and can actually be more than just usable. A cute OS was found!
Started going after Howto's and trying to make a prettier OS. Poofyhairyguy was the person I started looking for posts of.

A bit ago I installed XGL and now I'm out of Themes but Cairo, which is fine by me as I liked that one. XGL is still pretty buggy at times, but usable. It's also something you have to try out! I like the Cube, and the Wobble the most of all of XGLs features. Dapper Drake needs a few patches here and there, but It's usable.

So far the best thing I can say about linux is it helped kill my Game
addiction, which I fall back on if I have Windows installed. I see Windows like a Drug Dealer and Games are my drug. For work related reasons I'll need to use Windows at home again.:???:

[jead]

You can say that again! I loved OS/2!

Yes. I still miss OS/2. Hurts everytime I think about it. Such an awesome OS, in the hands of such a big company, and it died. I hate big companies.

Back on topic:

DOS 5.0, actually IBM-DOS back then, with Windows 3.1. I used DOS more and more, windows less and less.

OS/2 2.11, Warp 3, Warp 4: love it was. Fast, rock solid, HPFS filesystem (frag. resistant, long filenames, small clusters), awesome multitasking, crash protection, fully 32 bits, runs DOS and Windows 3.x apps, Object-oriented... that was the thing, that was the future. Little did I know about peoples stupidity back then.

Tried a bunch of Linux distros. Fell in love with the filesystem. No damned drive letters! Files permissions, no files extensions... How cool is that? Debian was my favorite. Now Ubuntu is good. Less time to be a geek than before, sadly.

Windows XP: What Windows 95 should have been. I'm actually ashamed to not hate it. It's totally bloated, uselessly huge, but works fine.

Actually dual-booting Ubuntu and XP.

[unbuntu]

Yes. I still miss OS/2. Hurts everytime I think about it. Such an awesome OS, in the hands of such a big company, and it died. I hate big companies.


Although OS/2 died, its spirit(HPFS) lives in NT:p :p

[oyvindaa]

Windows 95 - Used it once, but it's so long ago I can't remember.
Windows 98 - See above.
Windows 2000 - My favourite Windows OS. Stable and fast.
Windows ME - One word - bluescreen! :|
Windows XP - It's decent, but not as good as Windows 2000.
--------------------------------
Mandrake 9.2 - Quite decent, but I guess I like Gnome better than KDE and it was perhaps too difficult an OS for me to start with.
Fedora Core 1 - Better than Mandrake imvho, but I didn't use this one for long.
Suse 9.3 Pro - Decided to try this one, but during installation it couldn't find my HD!
Ubuntu 5.10 - By far the best OS I've ever tried - Linux or Windows.

[Ivaldi]

MS-DOS: I was about 5-6 years old at the time. Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 1 were awesome. :)

Windows 3.11: Used it very briefly on a computer my dad had borrowed. Don't remember much of it, thankfully.

Windows 95: Meh..

Windows 98: Meh!

Windows XP: I don't like it much, but it did work.

Slackware 9.1 (I think): A friend helped me install it. I used it for a couple of months, but in the end it just reinforced my misconception of Linux being too difficult to be enjoyable, so I went back to XP.

Ubuntu Breezy: Amazing. Deleted my Windows partition within about a week, and haven't regretted it since.

Ubuntu Dapper: \\:D/

[Christmas]

Windows Me
This was the first one, on my first PC. I had it for 4 years, from 2000 to 2003, and I didn't find it so bad.

Windows XP
Next I bought a new computer and installed XP. It was a system that I liked, obviously better than Me. Enough stable, no big problems if it has installed the two SPs and updates. I kept it always with integrated firewall off and ZoneAlarm in the background. Also BitDefender 7 Free Edition did its job so I had no problems with security. What I hate about it? :)) There are many many many things to say here but I won't get offtopic.

Red Hat 9
This was my first Linux Distro. I had it for about 1 week, didn't recognized my components and I was a little disappointed. Switched after one week to...

Fedora Core 4
A nice looking distro. OK.

Ubuntu 5.10
This is my current OS and I don't think I'll ever change it. I have it alone, no Windows OSes anymore on my PC. However I tried Debian for 1 week but I didn't like the old programs, packages and GNOME itself.

[Felix Jager]

Im not sure if this is off topic, but i use os X most of the time, i like it, its crisp, smooth and looks nice. Its a bit slow ill admit, but i still like it, but i have just had linux installed on my comp by a friend, and it has stopped finder running! all those who have used a mac know what that mean, no icons on the desktop, i can only use the shortcuts on the desktop, can someone please help me! or refer me to a thread that can!:confused: :confused: ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

[Tumdian]

dos - eh

win3.1 - pretty crappy, and just shelled dos through it

win95 - bit less crashes from 3.1, but too heavy for my old 486

win98 - on new computer, ran great, but still too many crashes for my taste

win2k - phewww...nice overhaul.

Redhat7 - me being new to linux scared me

Monowall - router distro based on BSD, running as a gateway on the old 486 mentioned above.

WinXP - Pretty nice, but a hefty price tag, and not as smooth as 2k

Ubuntu - what i'm typing this post on right now. LOVE IT.

MacOSX - Used it at school with Final Cut Pro....What can I say? Everything about it is nice. Some real thought went into making that OS.

[Stew2]

I think one topic about peoples experiences with other OSes and other linux distros is well needed. So I posted it. Post your experiences, good or bad. What you would and wouldent recomend.

First of all, ill start it out...

Windows ME - As everyone knows, crashes all the time. Bad ;)

Windows XP - This is much better then ME to me though it is definitally not worth 130$. For me often it wont start up, almost gets there then restarts. Sometimes I make it all the way, sometimes it takes me 6 trys.

SimplyMepis - Ok, this was an odd one. I made a 6gb partition today and installed it... The first install didnt work. I tried it again and it worked but it didnt show ubuntu or XP with the mepis grub. The ubuntu grub shows XP and ubuntu but to mepis. Very odd. Well, to the OS... It is not nearly as cool looking as ubuntu but its not bad. It didnt detect my monitor/graphics very well as it only got to 800*600 but aysiu said that it can be easily fixed. Into the OS, I did very much like how I could click on a .deb and it would install. I finally got cedega installed well. Mepis seemed to have a nice set of programs but I didnt like the fact it used KDE. I dont much like KDE. KDE normally has many programs for one job as in mepis had 3 text editors. As with all linux versions its bad at anything under 1024*768. I accually didnt use it long enough to recommend it or not as I deleted it and installed ubuntus grub again so I could see ubuntu and XP.

Please post your experiences with any OS you have ever used :)

Miss original poster :( I enjoyed his threads/ posts

[briancurtin]

--basically all of the windows flavors that have came out except for ME, never bothered with that
--NeXTSTEP/OpenStep - i liked this a lot, used it on a NeXT cube at work when i was in high school
--solaris (on sparc hardware) - not as much experience as my work on NeXT boxes, but i thought it was nice. i didnt dig too deep into it
--linux - has been my everyday OS for almost a year now, with some usage here and there before it took over. i started on SuSE and used that for about 5 months, then moved to ubuntu for about 2 months, and then arch for the rest of the time. some fedora core and CentOS were mixed in there for a few weeks each. arch is definitely the best for me though, and i see myself being with arch for a while

[fuscia]

i used something called mavis beacon to learn how to touch type (just the letters. never got around to shift and all that mess). it might have been a commodore.

windows 3.11 was on my wife's old laptop. that got me hooked on the internet.

windows me, for five years, on my current machine (you all must be a bunch of retards if you couldn't get it working right)

tried knoppix, hoary, puppy (no keyboard), pc linux, mepis (so ugly i didn't even finish booting) live cds. wireless was always the problem.

finally just jumped in and installed ubuntu breezy and got wireless working. it's awesome, even though i'm never really sure what i'm doing.

i've messed some with damn small linux and a live version of netbsd.

i'm not a technical person and i really have no legitimate use for a computer, but it's all been a lot of fun.

[DigitalDuality]

Wow hmm..

I used win 3.1 to play alot of Wolfenstein but that's about it. I never installed it or uninstalled it.

Used 95 for quite a while. Unstable
98 and 98SE .. about the same
2000.. i loved it. Much better
Red Hat 6-- i installed, i played solitaire, didn't know what to do after that went back to windows.
XP-- can't say much for the color scheme.. but damned nice to have so many drivers pre-included

I dual booted XP/Red Hat 9 for a while. Rarely messed with Redhat

Used Ubuntu for 5 months. Used breezy and dapper, gnome/kde/xfce desktops.

Now i'm on fedora core 5.

I've been using OS X on a mac mini off and on for the past year. Quite nice. It just gets boring after a while.

[newlinux]

DOS - various flavors, it was okay for its time
MacOS - it was alright, but I was probably already to use to Windows 3.1
Windows for workgroups - slow, cubersome, easily messed up
Ultrix
Irix
Solaris - was pretty nice - these were my first flavors of Unix
NetBSD - was great, but I didn't keep using it and got stuck on windows for 10 years.
WinNT - seemed very stodgy
Win95 - Was pretty nice looking at first, when it would stay running.
Win98
Win2000
WinXP Home - okay, not bad
WinXP Pro - okay, not bad as well
Ubunty Dapper - best so far... Don't have any plans to try other distros for a while...

Probably some others (Old Apples, TRS-80s, Commodores - I don't remember what they ran).

[latebeat]

Ok, this is gonna take me a while....I've been in the computer "game" a LONG time...
....However, the biggest thing that is spoiling Linux is the inability for the more extreme elements to compromise with other elements of the software industry, instead attempting to exert pressure to force all sofware to be open (which is as wrong as forcing all software to be closed). This bothers commercial companies that have trade secrets and real hardware design patents to protect, limiting the ability of third parties to effectively support Linux (Despite thier increasing willingness to do so, they find themselves rebuffed unless they open ALL source code). Until Linux communities seeks some compromise in this area, further growth will bbe limited, and may even stagnate. Some communities do so, however, others are extremely inflexible, operating with the attitude of "my way or the highway" much like the company many despise, Microsoft.

...
Right on the money dude, right on the money. Read this as well (http://news.com.com/Torvalds+No+GPL+3+for+Linux/2100-7344_3-6031504.html)

Anyway, (K)ubuntu is definatelly a great distro. Don't wanna say OS, cause Linux is a great OS anyway. I jut think that ubuntu brought it closer to the average user. It simply works and it works great.

Before ubuntu my main OS was gentoo, which I have to say it was just awesome. After the long compilation times everything was very fast considering that my hardware was all the same and only the optimisations changed. However, it required very very much of my precious time to get everything working the way I wanted to. I wish I had as much time today as I had when I was still a careless student and I would probably still use gentoo as my main os. For now it will just sit on an unused partition :)

[RAV TUX]

This will be an excellent addition to "The Other OS Talk Forum"...

moving now.

[gn2]

Have been using PC's for about six years. Mostly on Windows

W95 nothing special

w98se worked most of the time

wXPhome came with first shiny brand new PC I bought and for me it's rock solid and excellent. But I won't be buying another copy...
(or Vista either)

w200pro I got a copy of this, for my laptop (2nd hand eBay) and it's the best MSoft OS by miles

Windows sems to require major system upgrades with every new incarnation, eg w2000 gets along fine with 256mb RAM, XP needs 512 or 1gig, Vista may require 2gig and a 3d graphics card just to run the OS!

Windows needs a fair bit of ongoing maintenance, de-fragging, spyware removal, virus-scanning etc.

Linux has been an off and on thing for about a year.

Started with PCLinuxOS 92 but struggled to get everything to run OK on 2nd hand laptop. Gave up and got aforementioned w2000.

Read MicroMart article about Ubuntu, and gave it a go. It's now on my laptop exclusively, works beautifully. w2000 partition wiped clean.

Wife refuses to learn new OS so stuck with XP on desktop PC.
Tried dual-booting Ubuntu, but found it too fiddly to administer.

Re-discovered PCLinuxOS, which has what for me is a "killer" application, the Drak Wizard installer.
This has a user friendly GUI and gives the option of installing directly to an external USB hard drive.
Before doing the install, enable "boot from USB" and put the USB drive above the internal drive in the BIOS boot order list. Now disconnect the power to the internal XP drive.
Now you can install to the USB drive and install either Grub or LiLo bootloader on the USB drive.
Shut down.
Unplug USB drive, and (permanently) re-connect power to internal drive.
When you re-boot, XP will start normally.
To boot into PCLinuxOS, shut down from XP. Plug in USB hard drive and when you re-boot, PCLinuxOS will load (because USB set to boot before internal drive)
After shut-down, unplug USB and XP will load at boot.

Hopefully this facility will become available in Ubuntu.

[turntabletux]

Suse 9.1(on my desktop) - 1st ever linux experience. I had the most fun I have ever had on a computer. Looking back after trying newer versions of Suse, I did have TONS of Rpm problems. Dependancies and whatnot.

I got a laptop from my school (ITT). It's a Dell 110L and the specs aren't that great. It's my main computer right now and I am having a lot of distro issues. Anyways, back to the topic.

Suse 9.3 - Immediate graphics card issues. Right after installation it was just a black screen :[.

Suse 10 - Very nice. Didn't have that many problems, except that I had a little bit of graphics card issues, because when I closed the lid to my computer the screen stayed black (no matter what setting I chose.)

Suse 10.1 - Best distro I have used yet. Very smooth, and plus I am used to KDE.

Ubuntu 6.06[/B] - Completely frustrated.l I have heard so many good things about it and I really want to give it a shot. The only problem I had since installation is; Wireless and Music. I know how to use ndiswrapper, but can't seem to get it installed right. Usually I listen to music while I work on problems with my computer so that is hard. All in all, I have never used Gnome before and I am looking forward to learning more.

Windows 95 - Good for it's time I guess.

Windows 98 - Same feelings at 95.

Windows ME - I loved to just sit and watch it crash 24/7

Windows NT - Haven't used it until I started school and it's pretty good.

Server - Just started using this OS also, and I must say that you can do some pretty cool things with it.

DamnSmall - Very cool idea, but I remember scratching my head with the GUI.

Kubuntu - Only used it for a few days becuase I couldn't get my wireless to work. (I am more patient now)

Mac OSX - Have used merely hours. Very nice looking and my friend wants me to get one. I would like to try it for a while, but I heard that you can't really customize that many things. Customization is the best part :P

All in all, I haven't used that many OSes. This quarter I am taking a LINUX class, I've been dreaming of one since I started 9.1 . I believe we are using Fedora. I also want to try RedHat.

Thanks for reading my novel lol. I just thought this topic was really cool.

Ant

[Omnios]

Windows 98 Original when it came out :
very stable ,runs well, drivers where a bit of a pain but easy to learn. By the end 2002 or so totaly unstable, currupt files required a reinstall or reformat every six months or so. Became unbearable

XP hated it even before I bough it. Used to look at it in stores and thought the graphics where stupid. Bought upgrade the driver stuff was ijnteresting but made users stupid. Worked pretty quick at first then the spyware craze hit. After installing all the anti virus stuff and anti spyware had to spend hours updating and running it. Current set up which I bearly uise normal load up and log in then I have to wait 10 to 15 till everything loads and makes the screen useable. Then again just used for some games so I realy do not care about it. I was thinking about my computer one day before linux and thought it was the equivalent to a flower pot sitting on a desk

Ubuntu : Best computing experiences I had since I just got win 98. My computer became my toy again and spent hours learning and tweeking. Man computing on Ubuntu is what computing is ment to be. Mean learning curve and you know how it works. Using for a year and a half or so an must say I learnt more about computers using it than I ever learnt in windows.

Fedora core 5 : Interesting distro, very polished but found the package manager took ages to load. Not playing with it much lately, might use the partition to install edgy

[Rhapsody]

MS-DOS 6.2: Well... it's DOS. What else is there to say about it? Except that I wish I'd gotten MS-DOS 6.22 instead, because a few games wanted that instead.

MS-DOS 7.0: Again, it's DOS. Better than 6.2, but I really only used it for certain games.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11: Gotten entirely by mistake, as the PC was advertised as having Windows 95 on it (this was in 1996 BTW). Not bad though, just hopeless at games, which is what I wanted the thing for.

Windows 95: Not bad really, it's just that the PC it was on seemed to hate it. Had some fun with games though.

Windows 98: Like Windows 95, but a bit better. The PC was a lot better though, so I have more good memories of this.

Windows 2000: Used briefly on other PCs. Seemed nice.

Windows XP Home: Using it right now actually. It's served me well (four years) and we've had some good times. It's just that Ubuntu Linux is demonstrably better designed, infinitely cheaper, and doesn't treat me like I'm on permanant probation because I payed Microsoft for usage of their product. Considered replacing it with ReactOS (so I could keep some of the functionality around while using Kubuntu for everyday stuff) but decided that Wine was more practical.

BeOS 5 Personal Edition: Used very briefly. Seemed OK, but didn't really have good enough hardware or software support. Considered installing Haiku to go alongside Kubuntu, but decided I'd rather use that HD space for Kubuntu.

Ubuntu Linux 5.10/6.06.1: Used only on Live CDs. It's not like I hate it, I just like KDE better than GNOME.

Kubuntu Linux 5.10: Some rough edges, but overall very nice. Managed to win me over by doing almost everything I wanted for the price of a CD-R.

Kubuntu Linux 6.06.1: Massive improvement over the old version, showing just how fast Linux is moving along. I could live with this for a long time (but will probably upgrade to Edgy Eft soon enough).

[mips]

Apple DOS - Had a apple IIe clone, could not get any software for it due to sanctions
Amiga Kickstart/Workbench - Had a A500+ & A1200 running OS version 1.2 and up. My fondest computer memories ever.
Windows 95 - It's windows
BEOS - Geez, this had so much potential.
Windows 98 - It's windows
Windows ME - It's bad windows
Windows 2000 - It's windows
Windows XP - Still windows
Ubuntu - Warty to Dapper. Happy so far.
Must try Mepis & BSD

[3rdalbum]

I started off with an Atari ST; the operating system on that was hopeless.

System 6.0.8: Simple, extremely lightweight. Stability not bad, but not that good either.

System 7.1: The same as 6.0.8 really, but includes features that make it workable. Not quite as lightweight. I never noticed any compatibility problems with older Mac programs. Very stable.

System 7.5.3, 7.5.5: Crash central. I didn't notice any new features from 7.1 except for some new control panels. Used lots of memory too.

Mac OS 8.5.1: Quite stable, great looking interface (could someone please write some GTK and Metacity themes for this?). Things worked intuitively, with everything in their place and lots of places to store things. Great speed. Bad USB support.

Mac OS 9: Noticably slower than 8.5, and noticably less stable. (the installer CD, what we would call a "Live CD", often crashed on startup). I had to reinstall that puppy so many times... It was also more difficult to keep it maintained, find out which extensions to get rid of, etc. I honestly would've stuck with 8.5 on my computer, but more and more programs required OS 9, including all the new Carbon apps.

Mac OS X: I tried it on some other computers. The stability was as good as OS 8.5... disappointing seeing as how it was billed as "crash-proof"! But then, a program crash on 8.5 still didn't bring the whole system down anyway. OS X didn't feel intuitive, it didn't feel Mac-like. It seemed like the only place you could put things was the Dock, which really made no sense at all! There was no replacement for the control strip, except I suppose for the system tray in the same place it is in Gnome. Most importantly, it was very slow.

Ubuntu 5.10: You know what it's like. It's stable, things have their places, performance is good. The GUI looks nice-ish, and things are easy enough to use.

Ubuntu 6.06: As stable, but performance wasn't quite as good to begin with (I think this was due to Beagle). It screams along now I have prelink and preload.

Knoppix: It's not bad, but I didn't like how some of the integral programs are curses-based. I also don't like the menu structure. It also doesn't run properly on my friend's laptop.

SimplyMEPIS: I got used to it. At first I thought it didn't work with my sound card or internet connection... and then when I went back into Ubuntu I realised that my modem and speakers were turned off! But I used it again on another friend's laptop, and it was quite nice-looking and considering it was a Live CD, performance was great.

Mepis was the first KDE distro I'd tried, so I suppose I can't comment on my impressions for the user interface... I was out-of-my-depth in KDE, and even today I don't really like it.

DSL: I understand what it's getting at, but I question its usability.

Puppy: Apart from the setup questions at boot, and its USB incompatibility on a friend's laptop (the one which Knoppix didn't like), I like it. Very compact, good performance, good set of programs. Only thing is, the widget theme is horrible.

Windows 95/98: I suppose I didn't mind Win 95, except that it felt like it was going to crash at any time. Win 98 left a lot to be desired - whose braindead idea was it to have the web browser as the file manager? (sorry, KDE fans). Other than that, meh.

Windows XP: I barely used Windows for years and years until I got my first PC earlier this year. I hate Win XP. It's slow, it never wants to kill programs that have hung (frozen, locked-up), it seems to want to do the opposite of what I try to tell it to do. Infuriating. I only use it to play games, digitise video, and author DVDs. I dislike its looks too.

[xhaan]

Apple IIc.. this was kinda like a toy for me.
C-64, another toy
Win 95... when I first got this, I thought it was totally awesome... especially when I put LiteStep on it and customized the heck out of it.. instead of having static icons, the desktop was a browsable file manager. I wonder if there's a way to do this in Linux...

BeOS, I really liked this system and I still miss it... I think I still have the installer for the personal edition or whatever it was called, but unfortunately it won't run properly on either of my boxen that I have now.

Trinux, boots into ram from a single floppy and you can do some neat stuff with it, like have a headless, diskless firewall...

XP... barf.
FreeBSD, good server, not quite as good but still ok desktop.
Debian, seems solid but maybe dated.
Ubuntu, looking good so far

[enopepsoo]

BeOS: I thought it was pretty cool. It seemed very responsive and secure compared to 98 and NT 4. I did not really know much about computers back then though, so who knows.

Syllable: This OS is cool, and has potential to be a nice option other than Linux and BSD, but I have had trouble with running it in VMWare, so never gave it much of a shot.

ReactOS: It would be cool to put more time into getting this to work, but I have never had it up and running to the point where it was anywhere near the screenshots that they show online.

Solaris: We had this in the compsci labs in uni, it seemed a lot like Linux at the time.

Windows: ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,) ](*,)

[circ]

XP - i dont get why people have various problems with it. i dont remember ever having a single virus on it even tho the first thing i do after a fresh install is remove any remnance of norton. i think i had an uptime of 3 months at some point, with very little slow down even tho i used it constantly for various tasks. if linux progs were more stable id ignore it because i like customizing my desktop with more than 4 themes, which are essentially the same.

FC 5 - i grabbed 6 but havent tried it out, but fc5 was fairly nice, though prone to instability but then i suck with linux. despite this, there were some things i missed and hoped would pop up in ubuntu or the derivatives, like the better graphical package manager etc.

BEOS - was nice while it lasted, but since BONE never made it into a release, was largely useless. unless you liked finding 99% of pages on the web inaccessible and with poor gfx drivers uh. i dont know how haiku is progressing tho.

FREEBSD - the first unix derivative i tried a long time ago. i always wanted to try out unix, but was put off by linux because of the hero worship of linus, but of course im just ignoring that these days, and the elitist attitude has waned anyway. i couldnt even get audio drivers to run half the time. i put gnome on it initially, but it was horribly slow, so i switched to kde, which was surprisingly faster. heard of an AMD64 version years later and tried installing that, but failed and havent tried it out since. learned later that the AMD64 support is bad anyway.

X/K/UBUNTU - if only the apps were there, id switch over for more than a few days at a time. altho i dislike the overly done option choices in kde, ive began to enjoy it more than gnome. but the apps.. how hard is it to implement a proper browser interface in a picture viewer, like seen in acdsee, or the windows version of xnview. instead you get a dozen viewers, one or two with proper browsers that even show dirs, but that only work half the time. but if its not that, then theres no proper auto zooming feature, or it doesnt have a loop option. but then this isnt an ubuntu issue, however, strangely, edgy in itself seems much more stable than dapper, but the apps for edgy are more unstable. odd. i also like the installer improvements over dapper, made setting up a plain server install a breeze even. id pick xubuntu over the other two if there were more gtk programs that didnt have all the gnome dependencies, and if things like xarchiver and xfburn werent total garbage.

[dvarsam]

Hello!

This is my input:

1. Mac OS (don't remember the version - back in 1993):
Very good!
Very happy!
No viruses back then...
Buying hardware was very expensive outside the US & UK (twice the price of Windows Hardware).
That was why I got switched to Windows...

2. Windows 98 (Cleanly Installed):
You would get a blue screen after 3-4 hours of use...!!!
But No viruses!

3. Windows Me (Cleanly Installed):
You would get a blue screen within the next month!
But, more viruses compared to #1!
You need to format your Windows once every 6 moths!
(to remove viruses that can't get removed by antivirus software)

4. Windows XP (Cleanly Installed):
You would not get a blue screen within the next 18 months!
But, hundreds of viruses compared to #1 - #3!
I currently hate this fact!!!
You need to format your Windows once every 2-4 weeks!
(to remove viruses that can't get removed by antivirus software)

5. Windows Vista (Cleanly Installed):
After Reading that I can't format my Windows more than 3 times overall - unless I re-purchase Windows Vista (again!!! ??? @!#%%^&^*$) - I won't buy - thank you MS !!!
This way you can keep all the viruses (you can not get rid of with antivirus) bundled with your Windows OS!!!
... a true gift from Microsoft!!!
I truly wonder: will the virus threads quadruple?

6. Solaris (Cleanly Installed):
Sorry, I don't remember at all (it was my first Linux experience...).
And only used for a few days...

7. OpenSuse v9.2 (Cleanly installed):
Never managed to install from CDs.
Always crashed after the 1rst CD.
DVD worked fine, but support from the forums was coming it turtle speed!
And only used for a few days...

8. Ubuntu v5.10, v6.06, v6.10 (Cleanly Installed):
Never crashed!
Fantastic Forum Help.
Trouble getting Hardware to work (e.g. Printer, Web Camera, Modem, etc.)...
but now, before I purchase hardware, I ask whether it can work with my Ubuntu...
If it doesn't, I return it until I find hardware that works!
Voice Chatting & Video Chatting does NOT exist!!!
Networking is still buggy (e.g. NFS).
Networking with SSH is working great!
Networking with Samba - sorry, haven't tried yet.
It requires lot of your time & lot of effort in the beginning, but all your efforts are rewarded later...
The Most Important: NO VIRUSES AT ALL!!! :)

Thanks.

[kazuya]

XP / win 98 - Used them. Had no choice or knowledge of anything else. They functioned fine, but had to pay for them. As a student, it was very cheap. Got away due to my enlightening into linux distros. They all impressed me much better than windows XP. I always had to watch my surfing habits, had a number of virus / malware and spyware issues, and felt very limited in what I could do with my PC. Advantage of XP is just for certain commercial gaming. This is changing gradually though. I cannot go back to windows currently as it cannot compete well against the others in my desktop computing needs. Rating 5.0

Mandrake 10.1 - Easy to use and install. rpm-based so issues associated with that. Unstable. Install at time was hit or miss on the same PC. Now, I know it has gotten much better. Rating 7.5

Xandros - The first liux distro that I tried and made the transition from windows to linux very easy. It was great and easier at the time to use than even Ubuntu Hoary at the time. It was great, but not as fast as the other distro I went into {Mepis} Rating 8.2

Mepis - This distro for me blew everything else out of the water. It and knoppix were devastatingly great at hardware detection and ease of install. Mepis encompassed everything that many a distro could not yet accomplish, this included Ubuntu. Everything worked, system was way snappy by default and it made experimenting and recovery of system very easy. This was the distro where I truly learn't a great deal about linux while still operating with gui, etc. B/w their switch to Ubuntu core & the Debian etch, the inconsistencies with updates was what moved me off. Now they are great, but I figured why use Ubuntu via Mepis. Since I knew more about apt-get, etc, and since they were all Debian-based, I switched to Ubuntu. Rating 9.0

VectorLinux - First slack-based distro I used that was ridiculously easy to use and the community was incredibly helpful. I used this distro after Mepis and while using Ubuntu dapper. It was just so much more faster in bootup, and use and video rendering, everything than any other Debian-based distros I tried. Rating 9.0

Ubuntu - At first, I was not too impressed with Hoary, then Breezy got me slightly interested, but Xandros and Mepis still were much higher for me than Breezy. Dapper was were I first became hooked on Ubuntu. Edgy is even way up. Now Dapper is the first one I would recommend for a newbie. It is very customizable and very easy to use like Mepis. It's advantage was that it was very polished. Community is ridiculously awesome and helpful. My God, I am almost addicted to the community thing too. This distro is more than its OS. It is about its huge community involvement and great, easy to follow wiki. Almost any question gets answered properly here. Rating 9.5 / 10.0

Zenwalk - This is now my primary OS. I use it and am addicted to it, because I find it the easiest distro to manage while maintaining mind-breaking speeds, and customization. Like Vector linux, it makes slackware very easy to use, but unlike slack, it has great package manager in netpkg / gslapt. Also unlike Vector linux it strives for bleeding edge stuff as well while maintaing stability in the OS. Rating 9.8 / 10.0

Sabayon - Great as well. Gentoo-based, and very powerful and functional. Emerge is its advantage and disadvantage. It is the most beautiful distro I have laid eyes on. It puts beryl on startup at your finger tips. Major advantage is the fact that install time for all environments and software apps is 1 hour. You do not even have to do compiles to install new packages. You can choose to use binary packages like in other non-sources distro. And it is fast too. rating 9.8 / 10.0

Pclinuxos - This is Mandrake re done much better. Texstar did a wonderful job with this distro. It is like Mepis and Ubuntu in ease of use. Sometimes even easier. Alas I am partial to Debian-based distros and now slack-based. Not my cup of tea and not as fast as the slack-based distros or Mepis. It however deserves high ratings because it is the only rpm-based distro that has worked wonderfully and makes one almost forget the beauty of Debian-based distros for a little while. For those seeking rpm-based distros, I would say this is the best one. Rating 9.5 - If you prefer rpm then bump this to a 10.0

Fedora 4 to 6 - Installation always has hiccups. Very good as it is bleeding edge, but not quite seamless. Also a tart bit slower than my prefered distros. rating 7.5

OpenSUSE - Same complaint as in Fedora. Even slower than Fedora. Very bloated and slow for me. For others, it is great as it is very professional and innovative like Fedora. However, it does not allow user power of customization as much as some other others mentioned here. Rating 7.5

EliveCD - cool concept. Distro with e16 and E17 desktop manager, but not as easily useable or customizable as other distros. Very lightweight, and offers many of the benfits of others Debian-based distros. Not quite reccommended for total newbies. Rating 7.5

Arch - Still cannot judge yet. Still struggling with installation. But it seems a very good distro for a power user. And very fast. Some speculate as fast or faster than even gentoo. It cannot be proved yet though. Bad or good is that almost everything done in system is configuration is at the commandline. Definitly not for a newbie. Rating "unknown." This may be my future distro of choice

Knoppix - The standard at which livecds are judged. This is the true innovator. I compare it or liken it to kanotix. Both of these are much faster than any of the other Debian-based distros in my experience. And as livecd are much more capable than most. Sabayon, I believe has seriously caught up with these guys now. Rating 9.0

[steven8]

In order of usage:

Windows 95 - I liked it

Windows 98 - Also liked it

WindowsME - Like it too

MSDOS 6.2 - Learned DOS commands on a pieces parts comp a friend put together for me.

Windows 3.1 - Nostagic fun

MSDOS 5.0 - A computer i put together. I like it

Windows XP Pro - I really like it. User friendliness out the ying-yang in my opinion.

PCDOS 3.1 - lots of fun playing old IBM games with my son. took me awhile to find the disk image, but it was well worth it.

Ubuntu Dapper - I was blown away.

Suse 10.1 - It had trouble recognizing my HDD the second time I tried to boot it.

Kubuntu - I've switched to this as my main Linux os.

DreamLinux - would love to dual boot with Kubuntu, but it is having some weird issues with my modem

[danielph]

I worked for Microsoft for 6 years and guess what - they made me use their products! Really should have got out sooner. Anyway heres the list.

Sinclair ZX81 (what system did that use?)
MSDOS - first intro to Microsoft (all downhill from here)
ROS and PICK - some obscure system I supported
Windows 3.x - 3.1 was solid and quick
WFWG - Same with networking built in, I liked this OS
WIndows 9x - things started getting busy trying to support this, lots of problems
Windows ME - even more problems, a big flop
Windows NT 3.5x all versions - not a bad system (3.51 was much better)
Windows NT 4.0 all versions - improved again
Windows 2000 - new install is great, seems to get slower the more you use it
Windows XP - hated it, a bloated mess
Red Hat - Could not even get it installed. This was the early days.
Xandros - first taste of actually using Linux, bad experience with install, but support was good
Suse 9.x (KDE) - very impressed. All bells and whistles and everything worked. Some strange problem with USB disk mounting, but all round a winner. I could have never configured anything without a button to press
Ubuntu Dapper - wow. Blown away by community and distro. Started to learn a little here
Ubuntu Edgy (Gnome) - faster, good hardware detection, started to move away a little in search of something a little leaner
Gentoo (XFCE, Gnome) - absolutely brilliant distro, loved it. Can get anything working, forums are great. The sourced based approach is a problem for me as I tend to play around with lots of applications, and compiling takes time, but I am learning so much from Gentoo.
Archlinux (Gnome) - great, fast, simple. Needs work with configuring compared with Ubuntu

[pelle.k]

3. Windows Me (Cleanly Installed):
You would get a blue screen within the next month!
But, more viruses compared to #1!
You need to format your Windows once every 6 moths!
(to remove viruses that can't get removed by antivirus software)

Yeah right! "Windows Millennium" also known as "the Millennium Bug". You got a bluescreen even before you got a bluescreen. The "blues screen of death" you got on a fresh install was something like "the tour of windows XP", but not as user friendly. I could go on all day... ;)

[belikralj]

windows 3.11 > interesting little thing, not as buggy as the current versions
windows XP > liked it for the first three months until it needed to go to the shop for repairs, after that !@#$%^...
Dyne:bolic Live CD > First time I tried something new and was impressed
Ubuntu Breezy > loved it
Ubuntu Dapper > loved it
Ubuntu Edgy > had it too short to notice it but it was a little buggy on my machine
Slackware 11.0 > Love it but it's a little too much work for me to invest at the moment
Ubuntu Feisty > LOVE

[HermanAB]

Hmm, I started on a Sperry Univac with punch cards.
(Giving my age away here!)

Since then I have used pretty much everything that works with ones and zeros and a few that doesn't...

So, to keep a long story short, I much prefer Linux - any version.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Roughly 1995:
Apple DOS: my school had old outdated apple II's but I always liked them

Roughly 1999/2000:
Windows 95/ DOS: again outdated computers that had either DOS or Win 95, actually missed DOS when forced to use win 95

2001/02/03:
Windows 95/ 98: got a olden used computer, beat up but very functional, win 98 was a fair experience but that was when they stopped supporting it.

Windows XP: XP was both easy and hard, our first computer we had was a piece of junk, but XP was off and on from that point forward.
XP has to be one of the best Microsoft operating systems I have used along with:

Windows 2000: What can I say, its the best OS Microsoft has ever made, it was solid as a rock and I NEVER got a blue screen on it.
It was fast, it was stable (for me) and I honestly say if Microsoft made more OS's like 2000 I would not be on linux right now.
I miss it

2004/05:

Suse Linux; after many complications with windows XP I gave linux a shot. My first true experience with linux was with Suse 9.1, but Yast was horrid, and dependency hell was all over the place. I kept it on the side as I could not stand XP at that point, but my wonders about linux were finally satisfied with:

Mepis linux 3.3: Without a doubt my best linux experience so far, it was slick and easy with everything I could wish for.
It had all the bells and whistles one could ask for.
Sadly my computer died that year and I had to back to a loner that had XP on it and I could not dual boot on it as they had a warranty on it.

2006:

Mepis 3.4: after finally getting my new computer (this one) I went back to Mepis, but Mepis 3.4 was a sour disappointment compared to the 3.3

Mepis 6 and its betas: when Mepis switched to ubuntu I was at first apprehensive, and rightfully so as I didnt like ubuntu at the time and the early betas of Mepis 6 were soso, I had mepis 6.0 beta 2 for a while but then I moved on to:

Ubuntu Dapper: Dapper was a real change of tune for me, I didnt like Hoary or Breezy but Dapper was a wonder, you can see my experiences with it here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=287493)

2007:

Ubuntu edgy: until the release of Feisty I used edgy, it was just as good as dapper and quite solid for me, as soon as it was out I then installed:

Ubuntu Feisty: Okay I HATE it, after two really good releases Feisty sucks, the ata error crap had really turned me off to it plus add on the matter that it didnt work with my CD burner I really hated it and went on another search for a new distro.

PCLinux 2007: my current distro, it seems pretty solid and despite it not having as many packages as ubuntu I like it much better then Feisty.

[toupeiro]

1987-1990 Amiga Workbench 1.3 - Imagine 256 color, 16 bit sound processing and a space economical computer design all rolled into one 80's Computer. It was way ahead of its time, and nothing in the IBM-PC world could touch the Amiga's. I mainly gamed and played with 8 and 12 track sequencers that lead the way for programs like fruity loops and the e-Jay series. Lemmings debuted on this system!

1990-1995 PC-Geos, DOS 3.3-6.11, Windows 286, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, Windows 95 - I ran a slew of Operating systems during this time. PC-Geos was something Magnavox pre-loaded on my 386 SX-20Mhz machine. It was an interesting alternative to DOS/Windows. MS-DOS did not get stable in my opinion untul 5.0. 3.3 lacked many features.

1996-1999 Windows 95 OS/R2, OS-2/Warp, Nashville, Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0, Memphis, Windows 98, RedHat Linux 5.2, Windows 2000, Novell Netware 2.12 -- Windows 2000 was the definate winner here for features and stability. Although booting it up was painful seeing that it was "built on NT technology" (Bult on New Technology Technology? Good one Microsoft!) Novell 2.12 was gross. I was an Administrative T.A. at my school supporting this. (I also started my career in this timeframe.)

1998-2007 (I know I jumped back a year, but I did so to accurately cover time gaps across my work career versus home experience), Novell Netware 3.12 - 4.11, several versions of Redhat from 5.2 - 9.whatever, SuSe, and Slackware (various versions), DG/UX, HP/UX, AIX,SCO, Solaris 7,8,9 and 10, 3 verions of IRIX (can't think of the release numbers) Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Several Longhorn beta's, RHEL 3 and 4, Damn Small Linux, Knoppix, Fedora Core 3-6, Debian, FreeBSD, OS/X, Ubuntu.

There is far too many different reasons I had to work with these different OSes. From a desktop standpoint, Innovation goes to AmigaDOS Workbench 1.3 and Ubuntu Linux. Since Workbench 1.3, I have never seen an OS distro as innovative as Ubuntu for the end user market. XP is one of the best things Microsoft has given its home user customerbase from a stability standpoint since DOS 5.0, but it falls short to what Ubuntu gives you off the line and for the cost.

For Servers, its tough so I will say it like this:

Best windows Server distro: Server 2k3. It is quite possibly the best and most stable server platform Microsoft has ever made, even moreso than the rock solid NT 3.51. In my last job, I had to run server 2k3 as my desktop OS because it is the only thing that could handle the kind of Scripting I was doing. I had so many simultaneous connections working on the workstation class OS of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, that I would literally bog them down until they froze and in some cases just reboot themselves. 2k3 could handle what I was throwing at it.

Best UNIX Distro: While I am growing more and more fond of Solaris 10, I think I still have to tip my hat to Data General UNIX (DG/UX). While a pretty obscure UNIX distribution unless you worked in downstream big oil (which I did at the time) It was doing Multi-Processing before anyone else out there, and its ability to carve up storage was so dynamic that only now I am starting to see the same capabilities in Enterprise sized NAS and SAN storage controllers.

Best Linux Distro: Although I don't run any production machines at my current job with it (yet), I would have to say Ubuntu here. The ONLY, and I mean ONLY, reason I can't start populating my server farm with ubuntu app servers is because of vendor licensing. When Ubuntu can work out licensing with companies like Paradigm (Earth Decision Sciences), Landmark and Mathworks, then I can have some steam built up to go move away from RHEL which I am not a particularly huge fan of, but they are the de-facto standard Linux O.S. for internationally sized businesses today. I want to see Ubuntu be this player someday because I think this distribution is far superior. (So if anyone in Canonical is reading this, GET VENDOR SUPPORT, the admins are ready for you!)

[Midwest-Linux]

Dos - Can't compare to GUI
Win 3.11 - Good - better than Dos
Win 95 - Blue screen of Death
Win 98 - Good
Win 98 SE - Very Good
Win Me - MS should not have released this
Win XP SP2 Home - Very Good and stable no issues
Windows XP Media - Freeze's up, Have to hit alt,ctrl,delete several times to get out of applications, can't record from soundcard, very buggy and bloated- a mistake
Vista - Would not use, buy or install on any computer.

Mac OS 9.0 - Limited and outdated for 2007

Ubuntu - Excellent for the "Price" Very good for the applications.

Vector Linux - Just got on a computer preinstalled - seemed to work OK

[RAV TUX]

I think one topic about peoples experiences with other OSes and other linux distros is well needed. So I posted it. Post your experiences, good or bad. What you would and wouldent recomend.

First of all, ill start it out...

Windows ME - As everyone knows, crashes all the time. Bad ;)

Windows XP - This is much better then ME to me though it is definitally not worth 130$. For me often it wont start up, almost gets there then restarts. Sometimes I make it all the way, sometimes it takes me 6 trys.

SimplyMepis - Ok, this was an odd one. I made a 6gb partition today and installed it... The first install didnt work. I tried it again and it worked but it didnt show ubuntu or XP with the mepis grub. The ubuntu grub shows XP and ubuntu but to mepis. Very odd. Well, to the OS... It is not nearly as cool looking as ubuntu but its not bad. It didnt detect my monitor/graphics very well as it only got to 800*600 but aysiu said that it can be easily fixed. Into the OS, I did very much like how I could click on a .deb and it would install. I finally got cedega installed well. Mepis seemed to have a nice set of programs but I didnt like the fact it used KDE. I dont much like KDE. KDE normally has many programs for one job as in mepis had 3 text editors. As with all linux versions its bad at anything under 1024*768. I accually didnt use it long enough to recommend it or not as I deleted it and installed ubuntus grub again so I could see ubuntu and XP.

Please post your experiences with any OS you have ever used :)

Much too many to list just use the Search function here.

I am sure that I have made a post about most OS's that I have used. ;)

OT: How did you burn your beans? ;)

[init1]

Okay. I'll try to be as succinct as possible.

Windows XP I know there's a tendency sometimes in Linux communities to bash anything Microsoft puts out, but I think Windows XP is an amazing OS for the most part. It's stable. Control-alt-delete almost always solves any program crashing problems. It's fast.

What I don't like about XP are its default settings. First of all, when I install it, right away there's nothing on the screen except a recycling bin. I've seen a number of Windows users get confused by that and wonder "Where are My Documents? Where's Internet Explorer?" Even the quicklaunch toolbar isn't enabled by default. So, after an installation, I usually have to spend many hours changing the defaults (this also involves turning off the search doggie and the Office clipboard thing and all the other animated "Can I help you?" annoyances). And, of course, I have to be a lot more security-conscious with XP, but once I got the hang of the whole avoiding spyware and such thing, it was good. What pushed me over to Linux was actually the lack of easy customization (if only Windowblinds were free without nagware...).

Mac OS X I like the general feel of Mac. First of all, everything is crisp, not just the fonts. The icons aren't pixelated. Animation is smooth. Even with some pretty darn good Gnome or KDE themes that are Mac-like, I've never found anything that can successfully mimic the smooth interface of the Mac OS X desktop. I also like (even though at first I found this counterintuitive) the fact that applications can be uninstalled simply by deleting the application's folder.

That said, I find the actual use of the interface annoying. Finder shouldn't be a program, and when you switch to it, it should show the desktop, not just the controls for Finder. When you switch to minimized windows, they should restore themselves. Windows should maximize if you want them maximized. I don't buy all that crap about how a window filling the whole screen defeats the point of multi-tasking. Otherwise, what's the point of cmd-tab or alt-tab? I don't need another app peering in the background. I'll switch to it if I want the other app. And it's very difficult to switch between windows within an app. I've also found Mac to just be extremely slow. My wife's Powerbook was a top-of-the-line G4 when we bought it, and we got 1 GB of RAM for it, too, but launching programs takes forever, booting up takes forever (even longer than Mepis), and the sleep function doesn't always work.

Mepis Mepis is what got me into Linux. Even though I'm a Ubuntu fan through and through now, if it weren't for Mepis, I'd be back on my XP now, and I wouldn't be typing this. For Windows users, Mepis is a boon. It's all point-and-click, and they don't charge you to download software (the way Linspire does). Some people don't like the bloat of Mepis, but at first it seemed great--I had all these programs. Okay, okay, I do uninstall the annoying KWeather thing almost right away, but most of the other programs are useful. I particularly like that there's a browse as super-user button in the menu (what we would have to create manually as the command gksudo nautilus in Ubuntu). In fact, for day-to-day use, there's not much I can fault Mepis for. When people complain about "Linux needs this or Linux needs that," they're usually referring to a feature Mepis already has (double-clicking a .deb to install it, reinstalling Grub graphically, having a graphical partitioning tool, including proprietary multimedia codecs, etc.).

I will say that Mepis is damn slow. It takes a minute and a half to boot (longer than Ubuntu's 56 seconds or XP's 27 seconds on the same computer). Applications take quite a long time to launch. The Grub menu and the bootsplash screens are extremely ugly and not easily customizable (they are customizable, just not easily so). The community is also lacking. They're well-intentioned, but sometimes it feels like the blind leading the blind. Ubuntu's documentation and support is much better.

Blag This was my first real distro, and I have to say it's quite good. I'm not that big a fan of Fedora (and it's Fedora-based), so it's not my OS of choice, but I do like it. It comes with just about everything you need, and the anaconda installer lets you customize your installation to be as frugal or bloated as you want. It also has Synaptic Package Manager, despite being an RPM-based distro.

What's lacking in Blag is support, even moreso than Mepis. Their forums are basically dead.

Ubuntu Obviously, I think Ubuntu's great. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. I like it's no-frills approach. It's fully functional but not bloated. It's totally free but constantly updated. Its documentation and community are amazing. It's just the right amount of user-friendly for a few-months-old newbie like me--command-line for configuration, GUI for general use.

What I don't like about Ubuntu is that it's often touted as being a great newbie distro without the qualification that the configuration of Ubuntu is command-line heavy. Sure, copying and pasting commands is quite easy, when you think about it, but most newbies from Windows usually don't think about it, so we should warn them ahead of time, and direct them to Mepis right away if they start complaining about "Ubuntu needs this, Ubuntu needs that."

Ok. I'll shut up now. Long post.
Control-alt-delete almost always solves any program crashing problems. It's fast.
Not for me. Winxp can be sluggish, and thus not even respond to ctrl-alt-delete.
Blag is OK. Nothing special. Nothing bad. Synaptic is nice though.

[darksong]

Sabayon (3.4) - worked a charm, looks feels and responds well on this system

Ubuntu 6.10 - kept getting problems with installing nvidia drivers, took about 7 re-installs untill i got it right, some applications bugs which used to crash my X server. Nice and quick.

Ubuntu 7.04 - Took about 5 reinstalls but no X issuses :D, again some application still crash the 3D x server

OpenSuse 10.2 - Yast was quick for me (in cetain aspects), looked good but everything is a pain to install

PClinuxOS - was working well, quick easy and looked good - nice apps , but it took them ages to update repos, i went back to it a week ago and some stuff that is on the PASS repo (about 2 months ago) is not on the normall, if i wanted new apps or updated apps i would have to pay £20.

Freespire- Works well, crap XGL support, quite laggy (on my old system) but CNR was brilliant, cant' wait for 2.0

Dreamlinux - it looked nice, but i couldn't install apps

PCBSD - Nice, best BSD in my top 3 of Os i would use, great package management, brillaint KDE - no bloat, great community. (like ubuntu's)

Windows XP - slow booting and shutting down, worked well

Windows ME - lightning fast, a little unstable - some BSOD every now and again

Windows 98se - unstable but on my old old old pc, and i was 10 when i was using it (6 years ago :D)

Windows Vista - an improved ME for me, almost as quick and very stable.

[fistfullofroses]

4.4 BSD - First OS I used. Very nice. Fast. Stable.

Slackware - Nice transition from BSD to Linux. Still the best Linux I have ever used.

Ubuntu - too much customization of packages. What I use is not what was made by the developer (goes for all of the "user friendly" distros).

All Windows = suck. Buggy. Crash prone. Too much maintenance required

Gentoo - pretty sweet, but time consuming for an optimal install

Solaris - ah what could have been

red hat - too much corporate artwork, do I really care about f-cking hat?! Nah, not bad but dependency hell is not where I want to be.

DOS - not multiuser, and not multitasking = suck

[Talar]

AmigaOS - For me this was actually a mix of workbench and the standard AmigaDOS shell with a lot of extensions and customization. It was great, I loved it. Quick, responsive and efficient. You could customize it to look anyway you wanted. I ended up not using workbench at all, just some version of the extended shell and DiskMaster2. For it's time the best OS I have ever used.

[fistfullofroses]

I see quite a few people used WIndows in here. So I guess that I will repost my listing, seeing as I left a lot out.

CP/M - quickly dumped in light of MSDOS, though I later decided was a bad move.

Win 3.1 - Ran sluggishly, so I got a copy of BSD

BSD - Loved it. This started my road toward Unix, and Linux

BeOS - I thought this was an amazing system, although I really disliked how little could be done in
terms of modifications, and tweaking.

Plan9/Inferno - Used both, didn't much care for either one. Really really bug prone.

FreeDOS - by far the best DOS I ever used. I love the ability to use unix like commands, the integration of network support, the availability of certain multitasking aspects, etc...

SLS - While it was functional and decently well put together, there were quite a few bugs in the Linux distro. It also lacked support.

Slackware - My second Linux distro... amazing. Still very dear to my heart.

OS/2 - Probably my favourite OS.

Visopsys - Very progressive with some ideas. Love the disk manager.

Haiku - took me back to BeOS. I liked it quite a bit. But, whoa... still not BeOS

Syllable - I love this operating system. I think that some of its ideas are amazing as well, however the massive lack of programs really hurt.

NetBSD - Wonderful. Very very stable.

Ubuntu - very well put together but lacking in some ways to me. All of the ease of use comes at a cost - flexibility, speed, and power.

GoboLinux - My current OS (though ubuntu is used on a seperate partition for gaming)

Win2K - I used this in conjunction with win4lin to run Sid Meiers games on Ubuntu, but I scrapped it due to bugs

MenuetOS - I use this to test out and compare various x86_64 processors

(im leaving out most of the various linux distros i have tried because they are all so similar)

[kf4tqj]

I'm off into Mint now and so far it's my favorite. It's based on Ubuntu 7.10, but comes with all the things you're going to add anyway. Things like codex for MP3's & DVD's and Flash for your browser. I only have dial up here so it's nice to get everything on the CD and not have to go fishing for them.
73's
Woody / KF4TQJ

[CM Xtasy]

First time using Ubuntu was ok, not the greatest. My touchpad did have the tapping feature, and the movement of the pointer with my touchpad was very choppy. I had to put in the Synaptic Touchpad settings myself, and it still didnt feel right. Ubuntu 7.10 has now fixed that and is great.

Linux Mint Cassandra was my first experience with it. Much much better than Ubuntu 7.04, I even kept Mint as my main OS for a while, but the touchpad had the same issue as Ubuntu 7.40. This is now fixed in Mint 4.0 Darnya. I highly recommend that OS to new linux users.

PCLinuxOS was the worst of all experiences. My ethernet nor WiFi worked (it changed the word networking to netbroken.) Did not bother with it, simply just uninstalled it and never touched PCLOS since.

Fluxbuntu was a very fast OS. Recommended for older computers. My WiFi worked but the feel and everything to it was not what I prefered. I wasnt familiar with the programs. Other than my laziness to learn more about it, it was a great OS but definitely not my main choice.

[uwishurockedthishxc]

ive used windows xp for the majority of my computing career being relatively young. it has server me well. very few bsods and quite snappy on my fast computer. after 6 months or though it begins to bog down with registry overlaps, viruses and bullcrap like that. not to mention running a daily virus and spyware scan. i never had compatability problems and it works great for games. so say what you will but it wasnt completely horrible. just the company behind it was

[elithrar]

Win95/95/ME = Just a big blur to me these days - they were just part of using a computer if you wanted to run 'popular' desktop-orientated applications, and as a result you had to deal with their issues.

WinXP = Solid. It's not perfect, and elements of the GUI are counter-intuitive to me now (ie. you can't drag a file over another Explorer window and have it take focus), but I don't abhor using it as I did ME. It's still a little too bloated for my liking though.

Vista = Immature. Bloated. It does some things right but all the [slightly overdone] eye-candy comes at the cost of performance. I'm not a 'hater' of it like many, but I wouldn't install it on any of the systems I manage, nor recommend it.

X/K/Ubuntu = Great. It's not perfect, but it's definitely increased awareness of the Linux platform and it is getting a lot of people who may not have bothered otherwise to at least dip their toes into it. I think Ubuntu is a little confused as to what it wants to achieve, though - it doesn't aim for ultimate ease-of-use/ease-of-transition, even though it's generally the first point of contact for many when it comes to Linux.

Mint = Brilliant, when it comes to introducing people to Linux. The learning curve from something like XP > Mint would be no steeper than XP > Vista - it'd probably even be smoother. Ideal for many people who need a secure system that can provide their browsing/mail/document/media needs. It's fast, too, so you can build a pretty light desktop underneath it with a nice big screen for peanuts.

Fedora 8 = I like it. I like the 'bleeding edge' ideology it embraces, because it's my 'tinkering' OS and relates to the RHEL work I'm focussing on. It's quick and you can do a lot with it - it'd work great as a LAMP setup.

OS X = My 'everyday' OS. Some complain it's too 'simplified' but that's the wrong way to look at it. Everything is at your fingertips - all the advanced options are always only a mouse-click (or even better, a key-combo) away. It's fast, too - I have no problems with boot times - I usually only reboot when an update requires it - and application load times & the interface are fast. The best thing about it, in my opinion, is the pure integration it offers. Apps share a common look and feel, and you can drag-and-drop nearly anything into well, anything. And with a bash shell, there's even more power there if you need it.

[Masterizaak]

Well I tried a alot..lets see..

oz-os-easy and simple. Great theme and eyecandy. Its a must have
Ubuntu-great, fast and rarely any bugs(atleast fiesty and down)
Dreamlinux- very pleasing to the eye but copys mac to much for my taste
Gos- Very interesting use of internet services, good colors and themes its an interesting choice..a good try atleast
Vista-ahh the memorys, so many crashes, bugs and errors. The windows aero is amazing to window users, but compared to what linux can do..nothing special.
Xp-a very usable os (good job microsoft!) Clean and not much eye candy
Fedora 8- good os, pretty much the same look as ubuntu.
Mint-I was pretty impressed in the simple view of it..great speed and community. It deserves a good try.