Windows
Bill Gates made his money with the brilliant and evil idea of applying monopoly capitalism to computer software. In the early days of computers, only the hardware cost money and the software was freely shared. Indeed, for all of human history except the industrial age, the idea of intellectual property would have been considered insane if anyone had thought of it at all. The reason is simple: If I give you a physical item, then I no longer have it, so it's fair for you to give me something in return; if I give you an idea, I haven't lost anything -- there's even a good chance that we've both gained. Also, if ideas are shared by all, then everyone has the freedom and the incentive to improve them. If they are owned, only the owner has the freedom to improve them -- but the owner's incentive is to improve only one aspect of ideas: their usefulness in generating "profit," or control measured in money.
Windows 98. Was easy to use, reasonably transparent, and it could run all the PC games from the mid-90's golden age. The programs that came with it were crap, but plenty of great free software worked on it But then Windows started to go bad -- or more precisely, the universal corporate personality forced Microsoft's programmers to define "better" in terms of profitability, increasing control, and bloat.
It's easy to understand why a corporation would want to control your computer and make money off you. Bloat is harder to explain, but it has something to do with our pyramid scheme economy, and also with intellectual property. If ideas are owned, the owner has to pay people to maintain and improve them. Then those people have a motive that often goes against the interests of both their employer and the public: they want to keep their jobs, so they will make the body of ideas they work on constantly bigger and more complicated.
Windows 2000 and ME were bigger than 98 without being more useful.
Windows XP was actually better in many ways -- good hardware and software support, relatively easy to use, and stable. But with updates you can't refuse, inner workings you can't change, and a "validation" system that effectively prevents an XP system from being sold or given away, it constantly reminds you that Microsoft owns your computer.
Vista misses no opportunity to be a highly visible failure, it's unbelievably slow, full of frustrating and pointless changes, incompatible with a surprising range of hardware and software, and it's not a bit more useful.
Windows 7 -- Windows 8 no comment as I have used neither.
Learning Linux
Under the surface of Linux operating systems is the command line, which is very much like the old Microsoft DOS prompt, you type in text commands to tell the computer what to do. Just a few years ago, no one could use Linux without having to frequently go to the command line, which was a big turn-off for the majority of home users. In most distros, having to use the command line is now less common, and easier, than having to reinstall Windows when it gets too corrupted.
There are now hundreds of Linux operating systems for different needs and preferences of users, which gives us something Microsoft denies us: the burden and responsibility of having a choice. The differences are important.
Having began with Ubuntu. because it's very popular, well-funded, and carefully designed to be easy for beginners. Like most of the big distros, it comes in the form of a downloadable live installer CD: You just find a computer with a fast connection and a CD burner, download a big file, burn it to a disk, pop it in your computer, restart, and it will boot up and lead you through the installation. But gave it up because of lack of dial up support.
New users should know that Linux is made by and for people who have a live ethernet cable or wireless. Pretty much any Linux system will easily do ethernet. Wireless is a little harder. You might have to go online and download a driver, but in most distros that is less a problem nowadays.
Distros
Distrowatch has good summaries of all but the most obscure distros.
An aggravating part of most distros is the password requirement for root user, but I think it's a holdover from the 1970's when many users shared one computer.
Full-sized Linux distros aren't any leaner or faster than Windows XP (or at least it's close enough to argue about). and the Xfce desktop is only the first step down.
Puppy
Technically, Puppy Linux doesn't even have a desktop environment but a window manager, JWM, which takes up less than 200 kilobytes. I wondered how such a tiny distro managed to work on a wider range of hardware than most big ones. The answer to that question is the same as the answer to this one: with a 1GHz microprocessor and 512MB RAM, why do I need something as small as Puppy?
70MB is not a small operating system,it's a reasonably sized operating system. It's plenty big enough to work with most hardware and to have graphic user interfaces for all the stuff that most users will be doing. Puppy has stuff that Windows doesn't have, like a DVD ripper, an ISO editor, and a convert-to-PDF utility. It even has stuff I don't need, like a spreadsheet utility and a code editor. When I click on a PDF link in Windows, the dreaded Adobe freezes the system for half a minute while it loads, and often crashes it. In Puppy, PDF's come up in two seconds on a basic viewer. After adding Firefox (Puppy comes with a smaller browser called Seamonkey) and Gimp (a powerful image editor), I'm still under 100MB.
The real question is, if you can do everything you need with a 100MB operating system, and if that system runs smoothly on old hardware, why do we need personal computers to keep getting more powerful? Well, because computer manufacturers want to keep making money -- or more precisely, because they have to keep up with a general pattern of runaway linear increase plunging toward catastrophe, what we innocently call "growth."
But after the economy of increase runs out of room to increase, we will still be doing what humans do best: adapting. And if we still have electricity and fiber optic lines, we can run quite a good internet with software that works on both old and new computers, which is Puppy's specialty.
Its creator, Barry Kauler, designed Puppy to run on almost any PC without leaving a footprint. The coolest thing about Puppy is that it doesn't even need a hard drive -- it boots off a CD and runs completely in RAM. Any changes and downloads are saved in a file that can go on a hard drive, a flash drive, or back to the CD. So you can carry around a virtual "computer" on a 25 cent disk that can run in any CD-bootable machine with at least 256MB RAM.
You can install Puppy to the hard drive if you want to, but it runs much faster off the CD because everything happens in RAM with no moving parts. Another thing I like is that I never have to enter a password. Puppy is inherently highly secure because every boot is like a fresh install. The only thing that ever gets saved is one big file in a special format. For Puppy to get a virus, it wouldn't be enough for someone to design a Linux virus -- someone would have to design a Puppy virus. I can go to the most dangerous places on the internet and get no adware, no spyware, nothing.
It's still a young distro and it's not perfect. The game selection is terrible. The windows don't have pretty rounded edges or cool shadow effects. Sometimes it crashes. I can tolerate that as I tolerated the Blue Screen of Death in most Windows versions I have used.
There are many versions of Puppy, and I like trying the different flavours available.
Another small distro that I like is Damn Small Linux, which is active again and Debian based.
Obviously, not a leadng edge or serious gamer distro, but with Steam porting games to Linux, who can guess what the future may hold?
The disc WAS an original 
its alive lol.
. 
) and dummy installed it onto there to get the hang of it.
