I am wondering what people run on thier personal home machines for doing things like e-mail, web surfing, chat, ect... I know a lot of you use linux for servers and database and all that jazz, which its great for, but I wonder what people use for their primary workstations.

Linux of course...

Gentoo for a server, Mandrake for a desktop.

D

I'm mixed. My server at the moment runs trustix, For a desktops I run W98, W2k and Mandrake.

Gentoo linux for email, web surf, chat, music, etc.

Windows for games like Counter Strike: Source and Diablo II.

Servers are using Debian 3.1 (Sarge)

Ture Slackware 10.1 User, I've tried all the new Red Hat distros along with Suse and Mandrake and always end up back to slack. Fars im concerned theres nothing that I cant do in slack that I can do in any other Distro.

I think the first linux you try is the one you stick with personally. I tried Suse 8.2 pro for my first desktop and to this day I've tried more linux distro's then I can count but I still go back to the tried and true suse. I also run windows XP sp2 for all the games and apps I don't want to find the linux version of. it's just easier

OS X

Well that proves , we love pretending.

Windows XP. There's no reason for me to use linux as a workstation, for as long as I'm playing games on it. Dual booting would be pointless.

for me its Linux..
I use windows only for writing some Turbo C graphics code (for college labs ) and writng 8086 programs again for college courses and testing some software

Slackware. I've tried redhat in the past, and even though a lot of people don't believe me, it ran SLOW. I also didn't like the way it tried to do configurations for me (setting you to runlevel 4 before you even get to test X... bah)

Slackware ran like a dream for me. I started out by trying zipslack. I was interested in slackware because I had heard it was more complicated than other distros when I first started using linux a couple years back. I then found it was not complicated to use at all.

It's nice and stable, runs well on both the systems I've installed it on, and contrary to popular belief, I find it an excellent desktop OS if you don't mind doing all the configurations yourself.