there are some truly great people in this world

Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home

These are the people who are doing Wikipedia. Now they also have:
Wiktionary -- online dictionary
Wikibooks - textbooks
Wikinews - world news
Wikiquote - collection of quotations
Commons - shared media repository
Wikisource - documents
Wikispecies - directory of species on Earth

...all free.

I just want a good operating system

Amiga OS is tiny (1MB) and works really well, but has lousy support for CDs and networking
Windows 3.1 is ridiculous
Windows95 has bad network support
Windows98 works but crashes all the time
WindowsXP is slow, bloated, insecure, expensive spyware
PalmOS is fast, works nicely in a small memory space, but is not suited to keeping track of millions of files.
Most modern Linuxes are too big and too slow, though they're reliable and stable
Puppy Linux is fast, secure, stable, but has some networking shortcomings... though it is improving quickly.

Looks like I may be convincing myself to go over entirely to Puppy.

Puppy makes a Pentium 300MHz machine act like a machine 3 times the speed. It fits all your office software and operating system, along with networking, multimedia, and other software into 90MB or less (40MB for some smaller distributions). It resurrects machines previously thought unusable and makes them fast, sleek, and responsive.

http://puppyos.org/