If linux had decent support for .exe based games I'd dump windows instantly. Wine and other emulators just won't cut it. maybe some day though.

was my first computer love, and lm not used to change, but it was simple like me and a hell of a lot easier to understand than dos, which l tried to learn but never got the handle of *lix*

Windows 7 x64 is my OS of choice.

^

Win 7 64-bit is the setup I'm using too, but some of it's crap.

The XP filesearch box was simple to use, whereas Win7 needs clumsy commands like System.FileName:~="sex" to be typed in to the search bar. (Here, ~= means 'includes'.)

And also there's the read/write bug in Win 7, which can suddenly prevent some software from using a particular drive - but I won't bore anyone with the details of that!

I get used to all of them. In my opinion Vista was the worst. I`m running Windows 8.1 now and it isn`t as bad as many say. You can configure it so that it open with the desk top.

Win 7 on my laptop is my favourite.

I have Win 8 on my desktop which I don't like but I also have it on my tablet and it's ok on that.

Have linux on an old machine but haven't played with it much.

win7 64bit . tho i have win8.1 on my laptop. ugh . horrible horrible thing.

Windows 8.1 user, soon to upgrade to Windows 10

I actually like Windows 10. What I do not like is all the data being sent to Microsoft. I do not like the cloud either. I know how to back up my files. But I also know 90% of people do not do it as they should. So the cloud does help them with very little interaction from them.

Again I do not like Microsoft having access to my data.

As for Linux I tried it I can use it but since no good modern day programs will run on it why should I bother to keep it. All the programs I use requires windows of some form.

Daft Windows 10 gets the date arse about face.
For me, it should say the 5th of the 12th..not the opposite.
Them daft plonkers

It's got the date correct for me, maybe you have the wrong international settings.

Windows XP does everything I want my PC to do. Every now and then I still get updates.

More than happy with Windows 7 !

Currently using Windows 10 x64 Pro. It's not to bad, although it has some annoying behavioural quirks that microsoft don't seem to be able to get on top off. And as others have pointed out it's a bit of a spy unless you disable a bunch of stuff.

I've tried Linux a few times, but I've got a high end PC with a couple of GPU's and they'd just be utterly wasted with Linux.

I have used Linux for years. Mint is my choice now days.

It is sad to see windows users with all the problem they have with it.

My system boots up within seconds and shut down even faster.
Virus? have no ideas what it is like to get one on my computer.

Porn site are killers for windows users...

Oh well, such is life

i use windows XP (home/pro/media center), windows Vista pro, widows 7 pro 32 and 64bit, windows 10, linux mint, pepermint, vector linux, ubuntu, lubuntu, tiny core, cd linux, matriux linux, snow linux.( really!) they all have their strengths and weaknesses. i would not trust win 10 with anything that has pricacy implications, so i just play with it. linux in its many forms is good for privacy and security but is still more suited to the geekish. the GIMP is simply not match for photoshop etc. for ease of use. XPs security fades by the day and will be replaced. the most useful of them all is win 7 32bit. though if i did video it would be win 7 64bit. nearlly all linux variants suffer from long term support but it is free and for e-mail and surfing is as good as any one will ever need.

Commodore!

Junk ^^^^

After years of loyal service my Lenovo with Windows XP on it died in its sleep.

Fortunately, I had already bought a second hand Dell with Windows 7 on it, and I had backed up my important files.

With the new PC I had three problems: it was not activated; it thought the year was 2006; I had Internet Explorer 8 rather than Internet Explorer 11.

After the PC was activated I gave it the right date and time. I got a bunch of updates. These eventually gave me Internet Explorer 11.

I still have a few things to get used to. In general I like the new system.

Well Windows 10 is OK for the moment !

My favorite is XP, but I have learned to appreciate Win10.

Agree, Commodore 64 was a lot of fun in its day..

Right now I'm on Slackware 14.2 bnut about to install 15 (Alien's current live, updated a few days ago, is installable to HDD as well as usb thumb drive, if you use the script you can get persistence on the stick and the HDD install is a regular installation.).

On this laptop I'm also running 3 ports of Ubuntu, Salix 14.2 and 'Doze 10 build something. I do a lot of tweaking so I get a lot of use out of Parted Magic which comes in handy due to Ubuntu's whack permissions doing crazy stuff sometimes when you're running several distros even though I'm using the same username..., so I use "parted" to beat it into submission.

HDDs are cheap now, so I'm dangerous, LOL. This laptop now has a terabyte HDD,I have three Dell desktops but haven't finalized my plans other than to use at least one as a server... I have two 3 terabyte drives up on the one with several more Linux distros running on a 150 GB SDD, yet another 250GB SDD I haven't put anything on yet but probably will be for Kali, Blackarch, Cain/Able and the Frankenrobo (Ubuntu clone, warped) I've stuffed with virtualization (more than came with it)I have two more Emachine Desktopss (you don't even wanna know) Two more Dell Laptops, one I'm locked out of for now (came to me that way) the other from the same source I locked myself out of (actually a Win 7 boot disk did that for me.... and you definitely don't even wannna know the story on the two dell laptops and the two emachines because I've had to deal with some real true-to-life Twilight Zone uber shit that I have yet to figure out.

Something like 3 dozen live distros and rescue disks and several multiboot USB drives. I don't get why there's still so much hoopla over different methods to set up multiboot USB sticks other than for someone that wants a lot of live, insstallable distros on one device (because you can set them up.... just by putting the ISOs on the USB stick and it's actually not all that hard to set up Grub to boot the unextracted ISO files . Much of the time it doesn't matter if the thumb drive is formatted to fat 32 (or any FAT, really) or EXT4, NTFS, caveat that with depending on if your computer allows boooting in any particular method, there is can get complicated but get this... With WxHex Editor (at least on the Linux versions) you can duplicate a partition OR a DVD just as you would with DD except with a GUI.
With a 64 GB thumb drive going for about 15 bucks these days you can take you installation of choice and transfer the partition(s) to a thumb drive and the OS has no clue it's not on an HDD, it will even have the exact same UUID, filesystem, everything so it will thjink it's on the same HDD you installed it on and will run the same or at least it has for me of several different boxes those being Dell and HP.

Oh, and about ten HDDs of various sizes from my Win XP cluster I yanked when I got hacked (backdoored, actually or probably "ratted" fits better) They were screwing with me in real time. I never did hear their "demands as I had the volume turned down and only caught enough to know they were using the voices in
XP like are used with Daisy reader. Then various folders began opening like you'd fan out a deck of cards but very very fast, must faster than that particular laptop would display ... sort of like a self-extracting zip or maybe like the type of logic bomb that works that way. They showed me all my pics, recipies, reciepts.... and nearly al of it had never been on that computer which was actually airgapped not having been connected to Ethernet in a couple of years and having no WIFI or Bluetooth built in.

I kept all my files and decided to move up to Vista, which proved to be worse that the malware, LOL

Thus ended my long term love affair with XP. It was good while it lasted, I could do everything. I was running an antivirus little did I know that an AV is pretty much useless on any system no matter what OS you're running. Even your backups aren't safe.

Wanna know what works?.....: Honeypots, decoys and...

"Oh yeah? You've got out nekkid pics and Social Security information, bank records and all that" Big fucking deal, who doesn't? If you're interesting we might even send you more pics and if you really do have our financial details you must be feeling pretty discouraged right now, LOL!!!"


So the answer to the question is.... "yes"

I have to say no OS is perfect.
Win10 is maybe the best Windows ever made (and I used them all from 3.1 to 10, including NTs), if only it had less invasive and xxxxxx updates...
I use some Linux (an Debian based and now a CentOS based sytem) for work and while I'm getting used to it and appreciate all of its many pluses, I still can't convince myself to fully embrace it. Who knows what will happen.

QEMU is a virtualization platform that runs guest VMs almost as fast as the host. I think to get those speeds you need to also run KVM but it's all free and open source, very easy to install on Ubuntu and clones. I'm not as familiar with some of the other distros but it's also reasonably simple to install on

Slackware14.2 and and clones such as Salix and Slackware LiveSlak Current (Alien Bob's build) may already have it although you would still need to install to a hard disk however you might be able to get the speeds you need by installing to a USB stick. either as a live system with persistence (although you may not need persistence I would think it's need ed to keep scores and perhaps where you are in the game

My hardware can't decide if it's USB 2.0 or 3.0 ... evidently Linux upgrades some of the servers to 3.0 however my USB thumb drives are 2.0 and the live distros that I have like Parted Magic and various rescue disks that run completely in RAM and boot as well as run very fast. With an SSD you get even more speed. Slackware installs on as little as 9 GiB for the complete system I've got a couple of copies of 14.2 on 50 GIB partitions and the are far from being full you can easily get Slackware on a 64 GB thumbdrive with all sorts of room.

With a live system you might get messages that running a virtual machine isn't possible but I believe that Salix and Alien's build of current will actually do exactly that if you have persistence, and SWAP enabled. I would think you might want SWAP enabled , even though some Live systems do very well at performance level processor speeds and for game play I'd bit the bullet and install the swap on either the thumb drive or the SSD.

I've been getting those 64 GB thumb drives for about 15 bucks and I think I remember the 250 GB Patriot SSD I most recently bought was about 40 bucks or maybe less.. With wear leveling technology being included in nearly everything now you should still be able to tolerate the costs and going to RAID with two or more SSDs you may be able to squeeze a bit more speed out of your installation.
A few months before I got the 250 GB SSD I purchased a 150 GB Patriot SSD for about that same price so it may be possible they're on a downward trend as both were on sale

You can still get use from a HDD, if it's a hybrid you may opt to try installing the OS to it and find you're happy with it but if you want to go with full SSD you can still use the slower HDDs for data where speeds aren't as critical.

I have 6 distros on that 150 GB SSD and probably could put at least two more, and even more if I set it up to boot the ISO files without installing as that is almost the same as running a live OS.

I don't run games so I have
SWAP on HDDS in several of my boxes to extend the life of the SSDs but Microsoft was swap (swapfile rather than swap partition) I belive file vs partition is equivalent performance wise but there are linux distros that also can run swapfiles if it turns out to have an advantage.... the point though is that MS seems to feel they can run swap on a solid state drive without killing it prematurely.
You may already know you shouldn't run defrag on solid state anything nor wipe it with a nuke disk. I believe that still applies as SSDs aren't constrained to the physical geometry like cylinders and partitioning schemes, etc which is one reason they are so much faster, fragmentation is irrelevant.

It would cost much to get a couple of USB thumb drives and/or SSDs, less than 100 bucks, Probably would be double that if you added as much RAM as your MB will stand and there are some Dells that accept double the documented amount as you can read more than a few hobbyist have found and are confirming.

You want a 64 bit OS but your software is free, and Windows is really bad about lying to you and claiming that a system board is 32 bit when in reality it's 64 bit, and you might have to change the setting to enable another core or something similar. I have two ancient Dell Inspiron 380 workstations that claim they don't have hyperthreading in the BIOS even after you enable both cores yet Linux rescue disks also so that the indeed do have such capability enabled, IMO either Dell or Intel was intentionally hiding that , this extra capability is also revealed on Dells support boards. With virtualization also enabled in the BIOs Standard Linux 64 bit distros run these two core CPUs as four cores. I think these were made about the time Intel was outed for having locked extra feature in some CPUs that you could pay extra to obtain the access codes, I'm not sure they are included in that farce. I've been meaning to research that deeper as I think there's an available crack for that and they may have released it officially but I don't see that . I may be that mine are the ones that they looked at and got the idea from . There are features that can be enable in the CPUS I have that are claimed to make them somewhat unstable but I've also read that it might have been a tactic to keep it secret. The newer ones that were released just after those are running that with no problems and the only way you'll (I'll) know.

Also 32 bit windows can only run up to 4 GB RAM but 64 bit on those same machines runs 8 GB and oddly 64 bit Linux using only 6 GB and a few using the the 8 GB that is the max for those MBs . That may be a consequence of my RAM for those being very slightly mismatched , I can;t think of another reason for that .

With Dell having undocumented RAM specs (mine aren't included in those) it's reasonable to think that other OEMs or even aftermarket MS might have similar secrets and if a person had the extra RAM to try in most cases if it was incapable of running it it would most likely not damage anything to try you would either find it would used the increased RAM, it wouldn't and only recognize the specified max, or you might get beep codes about memory so you would just remove that added RAM. (but try that last one at your own risk, might be worth it if ole stuff like I have )