Has anyone every used Linux Operating System? Share your thoughts and what distros you prefer or why you havent yet had a chance to check it out.

I always wanted to try using linux for a couple of reasons :

• it's free
• it's not windows

Those are the only reasons I can come up right now. Anyway, I always had the problem that all of my partitions were being used for storage already, so I had nothing to put linux on. But a few months ago I bought one of them little cases to put your IDE harddisk in. So now I have a 16GB external harddisk To keep the story short : I installed Ubuntu (I heard about that distro here). I ran into some little problems, but I found out Ubuntu has a great community (you can find it here). Most of the problems I would ever come to face are already discussed there. Now it's been over a month since I even booted into windows, I'm very pleased with linux, it looks neat (virtually EVERYTHING is anti-aliased). The only real problem I've had thus far is with playing games : most of the games were made for windows and therefor won't just work in linux. There is WINE, but it's still being developed. That's about all I can say about linux right now

Ubuntu is great and has a huge community. I hear google is working on an OS built off Ubuntu.

Never used Ubuntu

But i've always used Gentoo for my Linux boxes and its quite good

Just as ubuntu seems to have....great community and tons of tutorials and help there.

There are many many flavors out there such as RedHat, SUSE, Fedora, Slackware, debian, Mandriva (aka Mandrake) and several others.

There is a very nice Bootable free version that can run off a CD.....Knoppix
Worth checking out to see if linux is your cup of tea.

Also if your a long time Windows users and know XP well then I would recommend Xandros. Its a specialized linux that does and looks just like Windows XP to help people start moving over to it. Tho when i used this last i was only avail by purchase.

Most are free...some have commerical versions with "additional material" and such. Can also check ebay if you would like to have CD's.

From what I've heard, people in the Gentoo community often think of themselves as higher beings, and will not hesitate and call you a noob if you happen to have just started using linux. I don't know if this is true, and I don't really care myself, because the Ubuntu community is all I need for now.
Anyway, like Urlryn said, you need to give linux some time if you're used to windows. It's just totally different. Most probably, you'll be better off using Linux if you're not what they call a "windows poweruser". Sometimes I wish I didn't concentrate so much on just windows for so long.

Yes, I use Arch Linux as my desktop OS. I also liked Slackware and Ubuntu.