No twister needed to visit OS.
I've been exposed to a few operating systems, though saying I really used some of them might be a stretch. I expect it's more than average, though certainly fewer than jmaynard has used. I can count VMS (from my time at UW-Platteville), AIX (shell on frontiernet), MS-DOS (and PC-DOS which is effectively the same thing) with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, OS/2 (3 Warp Connect), Windows 95 (work & cranky old laptop), NT4 & Win2000, Linux (Mandrake), and perhaps I can count HP-UX, FreeBSD, and MacOS (pre-OS X) though I haven't really done much with those three.
Somewhat surprisingly, the OS/2 machine has been useful. And not just as a box with a big disk to store stuff when working on something else. I haven't used it for much else in some time, but Jay has made use of it as some IBM stuff expects an OS/2 box to talk to, and there's shetland on the network with nothing else to do.
I once used PC-DOS/WfW3.11 for almost everything I did. I did this for far longer than many people considered reasonable, but I refused to have 95 around, save when it came on the used laptop. And I didn't have the hardware for NT4/2000 right off. Eventually I did and made the switch without much hassle. Win2000 may not be perfect, but if I have to run a Microsoft OS, that seems to be the one to use. I won't touch XP and whatever comes after it, not at home anyway. I don't like the way license agreements are heading.
That's why I started running Linux as my main OS. I'm not running the latest Mandrake, so maybe a few things have been fixed/updated, but I'm in no great hurry to upgrade. While things are not perfect, I can do the things I want on a daily basis without trouble. The things that are once in a while can be problems, though usually not big ones.
Last night Jay asked when the last time I fired up a Windows box (at home) was. I had to think about it. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? The Win2k box was used for a few minutes last month. The WfW stuff hasn't seen use in several months. I suppose I could use one of the 3.11 machines (there are two, at least - probably time to take inventory of the network) to play around with - if anything else would run on the old hardware.
This year wasn't my first try at Linux. But this year was my first successful try at it. It helped to have the KVM switch so I could jump from Windows to Linux and back for a while. It helped that Jay was around to answer questions. Much credit must also go to yakko for all his help and patience. I may be pestering him again about a thing or two.
It's ceased to be an experiment, I think. I'm no longer just checking out Linux. I'm running it.