Right now I quad boot the following: Trisquel Brigantia w/KDE 100% Free Gentoo Hardened Stable w/libre kernel 100% Free Gentoo Hardened Unstable w/libre kernel Gentoo w/BFS scheduler w/radeon firmware blob
Gentoo Hardened Stable is what I use always. The Gentoo BFS w/radeon firmware was more a test to make sure I could get it working. Like Xgl back in the day, 3D acceleration is superfluous, useless eye candy for me and doesn't work completely on Hardened anyway.
I have a third hard drive free for BSD installs. I will put either DragonflyBSD w/HAMMER file system, beta FreeBSD 10 (to play around with clang compiler) or NetBSD w/pkgsrc to get more familiar with editing Makefiles directly.
I switched to GNU/Linux in March 2001 from Windows 98, after having only used both computers & Win 98 for a year and a half. At that point, I could not understand why people actually paid money for Windows, because it was buggy and unstable. I didn't get rid of Win 98 immediately. I eventually learned to install 98, update it, then install the apps I wanted. Then I would boot into my GNU system, and create a tar file of the 98 drive, then bzip it. I wrote one script that could wipe the 98 drive and another script that could unzip the 98 bzipped tar file back onto the drive. This way I never had do go through a Win 98 install again. The possibilities to do things like that convinced me the GNU tools were both genious and superior to anything Microsoft had. So not longer after tha, I dumped Microsoft products completely.
