What OS do you use and what are your favourite programs?
I saw back in January that a lot of you were on Linux, I guess I should've expected that considering it's ~comp but I'm curious how the trend is going. But to spice things up a little bit more, tell us about you favourite programs, any hidden gems?
I personally run a fairly standard Fedora 30 install running gnome and some flatpaks. I'd say my favourite programs are
Well, I've been trying to fight the electron uprising while still using a modern and open source IDE and well, I think it works great and looks pretty good too.
Dino.im (Using the Flatpak PR) :
It's light, supports XMPP and looks relatively modern, what more could you ask?
It's not really a program and just really a skin for Firefox but I really like it. It integrates pretty neatly with the rest of the desktop. Can't wait for the Gnome 3.32 changes to come in though since it kinda clashes with the new theme.
I use Arch Linux. As far as favorite programs go, big question. VLC is gonna have to top the list, by far the best media player I've ever used. xfce is my favorite desktop environment, but that's down to personal preference of course. Valve's proton software is pretty awesome for making linux a viable gaming OS, I haven't needed to boot into Windows in months.
But those are all pretty common. Something I don't see brought up that often is KDE Connect. Brilliant little piece of software for pairing your phone and your PC over LAN that allows for all kinds of stuff, like SMS and call notifications to the desktop, accessing your phone's filesystem from the desktop, and my personal favorite, the remote features. You can use your phone to control your PC in tons of ways, from using it as a mouse and keyboard, to executing console commands, to multimedia controls for music and video players.
Over the past few years, I've really learnt that OS configuration is acceptable to a point, but there's a line in my sandbox where it becomes an endless time suck for me to correct with minimal if no useful gains, and it actually begins to hurt me as the opportunity cost of system configuration rises. To this extent, I buy whatever Apple laptop/desktop fits my needs, and pretty much utilise the defaults, because they're well, defaults, and it just works—with a few long standing complaints. If they're serious enough for me to get frustrated, I'll usually file a radar.
That means: Notes.app for notes. Reminders.app for reminders. Safari.app for Internet browsing. Xcode.app for a lot of development. iTunes.app for music. Calendar.app for my Calendar, and so forth. If it's a default on macOS, there's a high chance I'm using it.
It'd be easier to talk about what third party apps I do use. Vim & WebStorm are my preferred text editor & IDE respectively. IINA is a fantastic little media player that wraps mpv.io, which itself wraps ffmpeg, I believe. Tower 2 is a great GUI for git—although recently I'm trying to get into the habit of just smashing my head against the git CLI, to some extent figuratively. Paw might be the best HTTP request client ever. It's so slick. They know how to design a good macOS app.
I'd love more suggestions for polished-to-a-fine-sheen macOS apps, if anyone has them. I've been meaning to get into Panic's tools like Transmit, but haven't found the time yet.
Damn Paw is beautiful. IINA, too...
Can't stop marvelling at how well-crafted so many of the apps on Mac are. There's attention to detail in them you rarely see elsewhere.
This goes slightly counter to your “use defaults” idea but since I agree with you in 90% of cases I wanted to throw out the only app I feel truly cemented my macos love. That’s the BetterSnapTool. For $2 or $3, I’m able to snap windows in half screen or full screen positions like I can on windows. It’s probably the only windows feature that I miss. And now I have it and am never going back
Yeah, macOS still lacks basic window management and that's ridiculous for 2019. I don't use BST, but Magnet does basically the same things for about the same price.
Spectacle does this as well and is free. I don't mind paying for software but I tend to use free apps if they do the job as well.
I'll be honest, I didn't shop around at all on it. I got a mac for work and was suggested bettersnaptool by a coworker the same day I was handed the laptop. If there are free options out there that work, 100% people should use them.
Didn't Apple disallow extensions on safari recently? Do you browse without an adblocker?
Extensions are still supported, but they are now required to be signed by Apple I believe. You can still side load extensions yourself however. This will change in the next release of macOS. So right now I have uBlock Origin enabled with Safari, and a PiHole to filter out a lot of the cruft before it gets to my machine.
I'll probably consider something like purchasing AdGuard when macOS 10.15 is released. I'm happy to pay for software, so it's no big deal. Life goes on.
Have you looked at the Swagger Suite option? I know you said you use Paw and I’m looking at similar tools for my company. Paw looks beautiful but I didn’t know if you looked at Swagger’a tools at all and if you did what made you choose paw.
Still using OpenBSD as my primary OS, it's been solid in terms of stability and updates. Favourite program? Probably going to be boring and say my terminal emulator, st. Second most favourite would probably be (again, boring) dmenu as it integrates so well with dwm for searching applications. I'm quite excited to try fiddling with unwind as well, it promises to fix the most annoying issue I've had with unbound, capture portals.
Secondary OS, I've switched from Void to Gentoo. No particular reason as both worked well for what I needed, but at the time an online friend was having difficulty installing Gentoo so I went through the procedure myself to help them out. Favourite program there is the only application it's used for, Minecraft ;).
I also use OpenBSD primarily. I've been into using the Dillo web browser instead of one of the big bloated browsers. It works good for most things and is blazing fast. It's not so hot at doing bank stuff, but for just regular web browsing I love it.
Damn, I missed that because I only looked for "OS" threads. Thanks!
I've spent a few years as a MX-Linux user, but have been using Manjaro for the past two weeks. It has some of the expected instabilities of a rolling-release distro, but I was tired of managing versions and compiling stuff from source. I may come back to MX, though.
My favorite program of all time is Emacs. It's where I write everything, including this comment. My configuration is a tamed 3000+ lines monster.
That's an unpopular choice around here, but I'm a Google Chrome user because it's just too handy and I'm way too adapted to it by now. I tell myself there's nothing left for Google to learn about me at this point, so fuck it.
I really like xfce4-terminal because it's a good compromise between performance and being easy to configure, theme etc. I don't use any of it's advanced features, Tmux takes care of that.
The i3 window manager is another essential part of my routine. I always preferred a keyboard-centric workflow and after I went into the Vim/Emacs/Bash rabbit hole I just couldn't stop there. I also use Vimium on Chrome. When I'm on the laptop, sometimes I disable the touchpad completely. It's great.
I use Spotify despite it being an Electron memory hog because I don't really have an alternative. Also qbittorrent for my "alternative" media habits, besides VLC and Kodi for watching and managing videos, downloading subtitles etc.
I also have a flash drive with Lakka and a few thousand retro-games. I first tried it because my gamepad wouldn't work right on MX/Manjaro, but I kept using it because it's nice to keep work and play separate. Not because I have trouble concentrating on work, mind you, but because I have trouble concentrating on games.
Did you write the comment in emacs and then copy-pasted it?
Yep.
If you don't need OS integration for things like dedicated keyboard play/pause buttons, you can run Spotify through your normal browser at https://play.spotify.com. Then you don't need to run Electron as an entire second browser stack.
Clementine also has Spotify support, but I've never been able to get it to show me more than the top 40. (If someone can figure out how to see my playlists, I would be eternally grateful!)
And while we're on the topic, if anyone uses Pandora, I've found Pithos to be a great little native app for Linux.
I always use the phone app for Spotify. It sits on my desk w/o a purpose most of the time anyways, and thus I don't have to spend CPU cycles of my workstation just for listening to music.
I'm kinda at a limbo at the moment. I used to use an i3 desktop on Debian Testing. Recently moved to MATE to need less config, then tried NixOS briefly, and I came back to Debian Testing, this time with XFCE4. I'm trying to cut down on configuration, but all these DEs bring things to work around. On NixOS I had KDE, which gave me a lot of trouble with my mouse config and it disregarded my
~/.xsessionrc. MATE has some annoying bugs and shortcomings. XFCE4 with Debian Testing has some weird inconsistencies in looks and some Gnome stuff has leaked in to it, weirdly, but it might be my config. I like XFCE the best out of all the DEs available, tho, because it is the best at standards and at not jumping every bandwagon out there.I think I might just settle on XFCE4 for the time being, either on Debian Testing, or on Xubuntu (which I'll try on a VM soon). It is the sweet spot between configurability (altho less configurable than slapping an i3 on your X session) and out-of-the-box experience (altho nothing near Gnome 3 TBH). I've configured it to look a bit like Gnome Shell, and applied Bluebird GTK theme + Blackbird Window theme, and it looks like this. I kinda like it, but notice how Pulseaudio and Whisker menu stand out. IDK if they are supposed to.
For my favourite apps, well, Emacs and Firefox for the most part. Here is a list of everything I use, the
"desktop"session has all the apps.Why the to and fro from Nix? I'm always curious about motivations and field reports for Nix. I wanted to use it for haskell dev, but I didn't want to buy into nix completely, so I tried using it to manage a userland profile and it didn't go so well. Long time ago now. I always hated nix expressions. I felt like they really dropped the ball there with the language. The ideas were great, but using them to package your own stuff always felt like such a chore. I was super pumped about guix, because their gexp stuff seemed to be much nicer. Then I saw their service model with shepherd and about died. when the hell is s6 going to take over. I need to get back to my void s6 spin.
Nix espressions are horrible. Sure it is easier to edit in Vim or Zile than Scheme, i.e. without Paredit handy, but that's where the pros end.
There are a few things I didn't like in Nix(OS):
Nix CLI is really badly put together.
--helpbrings up a manpage. And-hdoes nothing. Running a command w/o any arguments brings up the man page. You neednix, andnix-*, andnixos-*. Arguments are named badly. Compared with Guix, where everything is neatly put underguix, and with Arch, wherepacmanhas a really nice and complete convention going on with its CLI, Nix is more closer to Debian&co where it is all over the place withapt,apt-get,apt-cache,dpkg,dpkg-*,deb*. It would still be better if they did it like QEMU and put it all undernix-*commands.Docs suck. I spent so much time with my install failing because
/boot/efiis not an ESP filesystem, turns out something should be mounted at the pathboot.loader.efi.efiSysMountPointpoints to. The documentation for configuration variables is just a huge alphabetical list of unrelated shit. Also, the documented installation method will not get you a fully functional desktop installation, i.e. leaves out the potentially most amateurish kind of newcoming user. You'd rather accomodate the desktop guy who's potentially less experienced and is undertaking a bigger task than slapping some HTTP server or FastCGI app on a stripped-down container/vm. I know my way around usual Linux network connectivity stuff and get connected withip,wpa_supplicantanddhclient, but most people can't. You'd expectnetwork.wireless.*to give you something that works, but no, you neednetwork.networkmanager.*instead. Not that bad, but not that good either.KDE is beautiful, but it sucks. I'm sorry, but it is really hard to work with if you're not a KDE person, and thus it is not that good of a choice for default desktop. Not as bad as having dwm for your installation media, but still, at least configure it to be a bit more conventional. Also, KDE is reeaally bad at configuring the touchpad, does not expose all the functionality which can easily be used through xinput cli.
The user environment management is either non-available, or the UI/docs for it is not produced properly yet. It is way worse than how Guix does it. It really looks like it was designed for everything to take place in
/etc/nixos.When you follow the installation steps in the docs, you don't get a browser for your docs, and if you also failed to get wifi working, good luck viewing docs, which are in HTML format.
Apart from these, and because of these, it appeared to me that it'd take quite a bit of time to get my config working on there, so I just reverted back to something that I know to work. Guix(SD) is way better than this, the info docs are nicely structured and easy to navigate/search with the info viewer or Emacs. CLI tools are nicely made. I'd always have
guix pullfail on me, but I got it working on a VM. Add to that the absence of the horrendous Nix syntax, there is no reason to stick with Nix unless you need systemd or LVM for a specific reason.IDK much about Shepherd, but I'd not get hanged on it if I didn't really need to work with services all the time. It is something that works in the background, and it is not SystemD. That shit has leaked to boot now, even: I had to install NixOS with the SystemD bootloader. I am not particularly hateful towards it, and use
systemctl --userfor a couple services, but it is taking over everything in an awkward way and I don't like that.Thanks for the summary! I'm glad I'm not the only one that finds nix expressions a pain. I've been skimming the guix docs again because of the 1.0, and they look good. Of course I haven't even tried a VM yet so I can't say how good they really are.
It's a fair comment but alas because of the nature of my work I do use services probably significantly more than your average user so i care a great deal about the ease of writing new ones.
Packaging diverse software is the other which is why I favour distros that have an arch-style shell spec because I find that pretty convenient. I should bite the bullet and try guix.
I wonder your thoughts about Shepherd (and maybe other stuff) then, I don't know much about them as a GNU/Linux user since ~15yrs.
What is this? Googling it returns nothing.
I mean that PKGBUILDs are basically shell scripts with well-know variables. void linux has a similar thing. I place this in contrast to more complicated formats like rpm / deb
I'll write something about services later.
Oh alright, yeah, compared to PKGBUILDs or *BSD ports, writing a Debian package is a huge PITA. There is
equivs, but I'm not sure how much it can do for you apart from helping with metapackages.Still on Debian Sid here with GNOME.
Spend almost all my time in Firefox, occasionally fire up Epiphany when I want a clean browser (without 400 tabs).
Right now I'm using Atom. I've been dying for a good GTK3 editor but the only editors with any decent amount of Go support are electron-based ones. Also Elastic Tabstops, really only Atom seems to have a decent extension for that and it's buggy. I've tried GNOME Builder a few times and it's everything I want in an editor except that easy Go support, although it really feels like I should be able to pull it off.
Also use the heck out of ffmpeg. The more I use it the more amazed and terrified I become of it. Right now I'm using it to create an entire pan-and-zoom slideshow out of a series of 235 images for my little sister's graduation. Crazy that I can do that with the same tool I usually just use to blindly encode video.
Wow. Why not use something like Pocket or Instapaper? I use the latter (just switched, actually), and am quite fond of it. Its free plan comes with offline reading, and is cheaper than Pocket (full-text search and unlimited storage are paid).
Tried pocket, it's just too out of the way for me to effortlessly integrate. Besides if I toss them off to the side like that I'll never see them again lol. Been trying to use bookmarks and services that directly integrate with my bookmarks, like Pile, but it's still hard to always remember to actually do that.
I use Windows and Manjaro Linux. My favorite piece of software is easily foobar2000. I love it so much I use it in Wine rather than use a native music player in Linux. Not even deadbeef holds a candle to it.
At home I use Windows 10 on my PC with a 3 monitor setup. I have macOS on my laptop and since I'm away from home I'm using it as my daily driver. I definitely prefer my 3 monitor setup.
I tried switching to Linux on my PC a few times (most recently I tried Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) but all of them crashed with 3 monitors connected so I gave up.
Favorite programs include Notepad++, AIMP, XAMPP, SmartGit
I would include Firefox in the list, but since Quantum came out it lost a ton of useful features (mostly provided by TabMixPlus).
Are you on an Nvidia card? I feel like it's probably the open source driver giving up with it and you'd need to install the proprietary one to get anywhere. For reference, the open source driver doesn't receive help from Nvidia and is reversed engineered from scratch so it's really hard to get it to perform well. GPUs after the 600series don't even reclock.
I think it made sense and was worth it personally.
I'm on an ATI card.
Hm, that's interesting. Is it an R9 290 or 390?
And what version of Ubuntu did you try?
390
Last time I tried was probably two years ago. I don't remember the exact version - it was the latest one at the time. I remember there were some issues with drivers around that time so the timing probably wasn't too good. Anyway Win10 has been running perfectly since so I didn't try again because I never felt a need.
Yeah, two years ago the drivers were not as good as today and really, to put your luck worse, that specific card has issues to this day as noted here which can be fixed as per noted there too but you'll need to do those changes.
I personally can't stand any of the windows-ism anymore but if you feel comfortable there, I can only hope that time changes your mind, haha. In any case, the way is always free and there's people willing to help you if you change your mind ;)
Thanks for the tips, I might look into it at some point (though I would probably just buy another card if I wanted to move to linux for good).
I highly recommend an AMD card, as I said, that card is really the odd one out of the bunch, you really don't wanna deal with Nvidia's proprietary drivers on Linux.
Btw, the Archwiki article I posted applies to other distributions so you don't need to use Arch or anything like that.
I'm pretty basic. Most of my time is spent on firefox, hexchat, vscodium and rythembox. I used to spend so much time creating art in blender but I gave up that to focus on improving my programming skills.
Still have the same setup. Linux mint with i3 wm for programming and web browsing. Windows 7 for games and photoshop and also some browsing. Dual booting works great for me atleast 3 years now.
Have you considered putting windows into a VM? People at r/vfio have been successfully doing so for quite a while now.
That requires a dual gpu setup though and depends on your IOMMU groups setup by your motherboard, it's not exactly easy from my understanding.
I'm running Void Linux with bspwm as a window manager. It's by far my favourite program along with cmus to play music.
I recently switched from MacOS to Manjaro with i3wm. My favorite program, on either OS is Vim. It’s funny I came to Vim in possibly the most roundabout way. I started using Vimium on Chrome which uses Vim key bindings to navigate the web. From there I started using Vim as my text editor.
I just finished my first year of computer programming at college so I decided to familiarize myself with Elementary OS over the summer. I set up a dual-boot with Win10 LTSC edition and I'm gold. I haven't had any hiccups and now I spend 90% of my time in Elementary. I've really been loving mpd+ncmpcpp. I never realized how much I prefer the simplicity of a text driven music library.
I also am probably in the minority here but I love Opera. I've been using it for like, 4 years now maybe. I remember the reason I decided to look for a new browser was because Chrome just devours battery life. I don't know how or why Opera doesn't, but they do a good job of making it lightweight. Also, it's nice having a built-in ad-blocker that actually works, and I just think it looks the nicest by default.
Besides that I use IntelliJ IDEA, Sublime Text 3, Vim, and Discord. All pretty standard stuff. One thing I found incredibly surprising is how much better Discord runs on Linux vs Windows. It takes forever to load for me in Windows, I don't really get it. But it opens almost instantly for me in Elementary. That being said, I've really been loving the LTSC version of Win10. I don't get why it's not available for the everyman to purchase.
Because it doesn't bundle shit Microsoft wants the undiscerning user to have 'cause it furthers the corporation's money-making agenda.
LTSC is designed to be used on devices where having undisablable crapware could cause chaos and confusion, like the kinds touched-upon here. Think ATMs, firefighter helicopters, medical equipment... It's not supposed to be available to the public, in part, because it's a sub-thread of the Enterprise Edition, which is supposed to be businesses-only. If I understand correctly, Enterprise Edition are supposed to be volume-licensed-only – and I wish I could confirm that within a reasonable span of time, but Microsoft does not make it easy for a regular user to do that.
That regular user, though? Windows 10 sends telemetry data to Microsoft servers. What does it send? It's not exactly find out, either. Sure, you can perform a rain dance to see for yourself, but Microsoft is not making it easy, either. I mean, hell: even if it's just for Bing auto-suggestions, couldn't they at least treat their users like adults and just tell them that?
Plus, they get to push bloatware on you without you having to agree first. One de-bloat script for Windows 10 cites the following apps that it deletes:
And, like... I can see how maybe a third of those may be useful to a regular user on a fresh install, but CandyCrush?
Obviously those apps are mostly junk but at the same time what's the big deal? If you don't need them just don't use them, they barely take up any space.
"Hey! We're your apartment building owners. Do you mind if we stash some junk in your apartment? It doesn't take that much space, so I hope it's not a big deal. On, and on the second thought: since we own the building, I figure we don't need your permission anyway, so I hope you like the junk we stash!"
This analogy doesn't work imo. Apartment space is extremely expensive. I wouldn't mind a room filled with junk if the apartment was 20000sq ft.
And in any case, the point you indirectly seem to be making is that saving every last gigabyte is a very important aspect of an OS. There are tons of valid reasons to dislike Windows, but this one doesn't seem like one tbh
True. I used to care about things like this back in the day but now I have more important things to worry about than Candy Crush being preinstalled on my PC.
The point I'm making is that you shouldn't tolerate big corporation shitting on you without your consent, regardless of what they provide you with otherwise.
The fact that some people go "I let them do whatever they want with my computer" sounds fucking insane to me. How little respect should you have for your personal space to consider this in any way appropriate? You wouldn't tolerate this kind of behavior coming from a stranger on the street; how the fuck does it become appropriate when it's your computer?
It's surprising to me how much shit people are willing to condone just so they don't have to face it.
"I let them do whatever they want with my computer"
You're attacking a strawman. I said no such thing. You seem very upset - take a deep breath, there's no reason to get angry on the internet.
Personally I don't care about this stuff because I don't experience the bloat in any way. After installing the OS I just remove a bunch of apps from start menu and that's it.
It's not my emotionality that harms the conversation: it's condescesion like that.
You used quite a bit of colourful language and had quite a few questions which seemed to imply (to me atleast) that anyone who disagrees with you is dishonest.
I'd personally hope that for you to act in such a manner, you'd be upset. Or perhaps you're not and you just act like this when trying to have a conversation?.. I don't see it.
I'm not defending myself in front of a person who thinks so little of me they might as well be talking to a terrier's puppy.
I cannot fucking believe I have to say this.
I'm also not taking their shit, but saying "fuck you" is not comme il fait on this forum, so I try to dispense the best wisdom I can compose in hopes that the person on the other end is being malificent without the intent of being so.
Honestly I wasn't trying to be condescending.
I run Arch Linux, although I do have a Windows 10 install in another partition that I hardly use. I don't have much specialty software installed, however. I use i3-gaps as a WM, polybar for my status bar, xorg for displaying things. I'm a vim user but still trying to optimize my usage. Other than this I use Chromium because its what I'm used to, but I am certainly open to switching.
I have irssi for IRC but I don't use it much these days (is there a tildes channel?), spotify for music, vimiv for images. That's about it, I don't really need much else for day to day usage. I have an iPad that I watch netflix and hulu on. The big open question for me right now is how to best take notes on my latop. I want some type of personal wiki I think, since I am used to that format and it's ultra flexible. I used to have vimwiki installed but I found it quite counter intuitive, but maybe I will give that another go. The thread on here from a few days ago was particularly useful, I have to go read through that again.
A whoooooole bunch. Sticking to my top 2, I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop with KDE 5 and Firefox, Eclipse, Amarok, Konsole, sshfs, etc. Pretty standard.
On my old ThinkPad I use Debian in combination with TDE, Trinity Desktop Environment, which is basically a modern version of KDE 3. It's super snappy, customizable, powerful, and I love the retro vibe, especially since it looks period appropriate for the laptop itself. The programs themselves are very similar though - Firefox, a much older version of Eclipse, Konsole, Amarok, sshfs, Kate, vim, etc.
My main system is on MacOS using chunkwm with skhd --- which is very similar, but not as elegant as i3. Having a proper tiling window manager with MacOS has been a dream since I started using i3 on my Chromebook running Gallium3-beta (based on ubuntu 18.04 with a special kernel.)
The setup for chunkwm w/ skhd is a pain in the ass since you don't have a proper SUPER key, but you can use Karabiner to map your capslock to HYPER.
I use
HYPER + arrowfor window navigationCTRL + ALT + arrowfor moving windows aroundCTRL + ALT + SHIFT + arrowto resizeI also use
HYPER+Dto bring up my Alfred search, which makes the workflow similar to DMenu.Outside of this, I use iTerm2 (with ZSH), weechat, VSCodium, Transmit Panic (sftp etc). I started using Commander One, which is a slick Finder replacement with SFTP, Google Drive, etc abilities with an overpriced 'Pro' license. I'm not sure if I'm sold on that yet.
I keep my menubar hidden (I can toggle it with
HYPER+B) and use Übersicht (Overview) for the basic information like unread emails, volume level, current SSID, battery, date, time. It's a handy little tool that takes scripts to show whatever you want it to.Other than that, I use FFMPEG a lot. Having BREW as a package manager for MacOS is excellent when it works (which is more often than not.)
For music I run Foobar2000 in Wine, and will do so until their MacOS app catches up with the bulk tagging / renaming.
I made a list here:
https://github.com/Apostolique/MustHaveApps
I think saying "Best X" in front of everything is not a good way to explain why you like the program... You should think about expanding on why you think it's the best.
Other people can do a better job at explaining why they are the best.
Isn't that a fairly bad idea for a server which presumably hosts critical information?
Can you expect a bit? I'm curious to see why you'd think so and how Trillian 'fixes' that..
I see... I've always thought that the 2 panel layout looked really dated and clunky but I guess I can see the use case.
I guess that makes sense although I'd recommend Fedora but I'd be biased ;)
Linux Mint 19 is my OS right now. The programs I use the most are GIMP (for work) and Audacious (for listening to music while I work).
Windows 10 on my desktop because I'm a gamer and won't accept anything less than something that runs games well. ChromeOS on my netbook because it's a lightweight machine I use for study. It's a pretty crappy spec one but Chrome runs decently on it.
Twelve years ago I did run Ubuntu Linux. To cut a long story short, a friend badgered me into pirating PartitionMagic in an attempt to merge two awkwardly partitioned parts of my hard drive. It totalled my C:\ drive and my Windows installation and since I didn't have the Windows XP install CD handy, I had to switch to Linux. It wasn't a good experience and the only game I got to run near-perfectly was WoW.
Apparently Linux support for games is a lot better given the existence of dxvk, but it's still far from perfect.
Oh boy.. 12 years ago Steam wasn't even on the platform and AMD was still using their shitty proprietary driver.. We've gone a long way since then especially if you're on AMD, we have open source drivers worked on by Valve and AMD (and others) so they work out of the box! Nvidia is still sort of a pain since they still use proprietary drivers which may or may not break depending on your kernel but that's another story.
I'd say most of our games work pretty darn well or don't work at all because of anticheat (but that's being worked on by valve thankfully) or DRM. I'd really give it a shot if you have some time on your hands.
Yeah, Valve's Proton is magic. I don't have a game in my steam library that doesn't work (except MMO games with anticheat). Even things that you wouldn't expect to work like SpaceEngineers (built on .Net, complex space simulation) work, and with mostly the same FPS (I experienced about 10% FPS drop, which isn't really noticable - 50->45). Rimworld, XCOM 2, everything works.
I actually nuked Windows after Proton was released.
I mainly use Windows 7. On a secondary laptop, I use Windows XP SP3, and Devuan. Lately I've actually been using my secondary laptop more (IBM T40). I'd say my favorite OS that I use regularly is XP.
I've got a long list of windows (and some linux) programs I recommend:
Video players: VLC and Daum Potplayer. If I had to choose only one I'd go with VLC. not much explanation needed.
music player: Winamp. On linux, I use qmmp and I can use all my winamp skins with it.
web browsers: I use Pale Moon on my Windows 7 machine. Telemetry can be disabled (https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/palemoon.html), and I have uMatrix and uBlock installed. It works well. On my XP machine I use MyPal, it is a fork of pale moon IIRC that has good support for XP. It uses very little memory, and it actually lets my Pentium M and 1024M of memory play youtube videos which, for example, stutter badly on firefox. The best thing, though, is to play youtube videos through VLC.
other web browsers: I like Lynx and w3m on linux or through cygwin.
search utilities: everything for windows. it works perfectly, and you can search for any file and it will show up almost instantly. I haven't found something really the same on linux, but I use catfish for file search on my devuan install.
windows terminal: ConEmu. I switched to ConEmu from the normal command prompt because cmd doesn't show any japanese characters which I need to be able to see rather than ??? all over the place.
file managers on windows: for a graphical file manager I have explorer++ which is decent but sometimes a bit buggy. in the terminal window, I use far file manager. It looks like norton commander and works well, it also supports a right click context menu under windows 7 which I really like.
text editor: notepad++. I also use it whenever I write code. I'm not a programmer so I don't know if at some point you really need an IDE or something, but notepad++ has a lot of customization options, and you can configure keyboard shortcuts that will send the text to an interpreter or compiler.
office suite: I use libreoffice like many people, but on XP I use Openoffice instead. I also have softmaker office 2006 which is really lightweight but has fewer features.
IRC client: Hexchat on both windows 7 and Linux. I haven't found an IRC client I really like on XP.
I could go on but I'm going to stop myself here.
I use Ubuntu 19.04 and my favorite programs are Firefox and VS Code. Not using much else!
Also surprised at the low amount of Ubuntu users in this thread.
I use a combination of multiple computers with multiple OSes.
On my desktop I dualboot windows and Ubuntu, but without a proper setup of grub. Both OSes have their own disk and I use my bios to switch between them.
On my personal laptop a macbook I use OSX and I really like the Bear note taking app for making lecture notes in markdown. I used to dualboot it with Ubuntu as well, but the battery drain was too much so I use a virtualbox vm for my linux needs on the go.
On my work laptop I use windows, which can be annoying since i'm used to having a proper terminal, so I cant wait for the windows update that further integrates windows subsystem for linux.
The main programs I like, I like vscode for its ease of use and have been using that for a lot of school assignments. At work we use webstorm, which is nice since I like the experience of most jetbrains IDE's.