OS help
 

Suggest me a good operating system. A lot of softwares I use at college are not suported by my Vista Ultimate which cost me a fortune. So I wanted you guys to suggest me a good OS and the very obvious choices are Windows 98, Windows XP ( which version?), Linux Ubuntu etc etc... I need an OS that can easily run 3rd party softwares and media.

If you've already got a list of software you're wanting to run then more than likely it's Windows based. In which case I would suggest Windows XP Pro.

But if you're up for alternatives, free alternatives that is, or you don't mind messing with installing some form of Windows emulation software, I would go with any flavor of Linux. Ubuntu is most widely used as it seems to considered the most user friendly but there are plenty of Linux distros that aren't that hard to deal with. But Ubuntu would be your best bet if you were new to Linux.

If you don't play videogames, I would probably go with Ubuntu.

What DS said. If you don't need games go with Linux. I personally use Debian Testing as my main OS (except for gaming - I dual boot) but Ubuntu is the best for beginners and is based on Debian, so it's all good.

Most really popular software (Photoshop, Office, some games) works pretty well in Linux under WINE but the free alternatives do work really well.

As DS said, you can also use virtual machine software to emulate all of Windows within Linux.

If you need 100% compatibility with your software, though, and aren't willing to/can't switch to the open source alternative and aren't willing to go through a bit of a learning curve, stick with Windows XP.

apt-get moo