OSFirstTimer

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OSFirstTimer
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Overview
Created
11/03/2012
Creator
Philip Adams
Participants
Diana Adams, Ben Adams, Jasmine Adams
Subscribers
108K
Videos
280
Views
~26M
Channel
@OsFirstTimer

OSFirstTimer is an Australian YouTube channel run by Philip Adams. This channel has Philip's family (his mum, dad and younger sister) test out various operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. As of October 13th, 2023, OSFirstTimer has reached around 108,000 subscribers.

Initially having started as a series, where five basic tasks were given to complete on various operating systems that were never tested before by his family, the channel has branched out to testing out and reviewing devices, software and games, either by himself or together with his family.

The original aim of OSFirstTimer was to find the best operating system which eventually turned out to be Arch Linux with the KDE desktop environment installed; it was given the unofficial name of 'The Diana Perfect OS' as Diana, Philip's mum, personalized it to her liking. MS-DOS was declared the worst operating system in the 'Top 3 Worst and Best Operating System User Interfaces' video, although Arch Linux, in its base form, was presumably given a similarly low ranking to MS-DOS a few videos later.

After the best and worst operating systems were decided, the channel then solely focused on exploring operating systems in general; this was expanded upon with the OSFirstTimer Advanced series.

Philip took a break from uploading on OSFirstTimer from October 2018 to December 2019 due to renovations in their house in Tasmania. When renovations were completed, Philip uploaded a video on the 9th of December 2019 to explain why he couldn't upload due to VFR (Variable Frame Rate) issues, but was able to later. His Alienware Area 51 PC was replaced by a custom Mwave PC in January 2020 due to the Alienware's failing hardware and it being unable to record the screen. According to the update video addressing said information, Phil said it could take up to 2 months for a new video as his new Mwave machine won't boot every second day and due to Hobart-to-Sydney and Sydney-to-Hobart shipping taking a long time (Sydney is where Mwave is located in).

Cast

Series

OSFirstTimer Advanced

OSFirstTimer Advanced was series where Diana complete more complex tasks on certain operating systems throughout history. Initially, videos of that series used the OSFirstTimer Advanced intro as opposed to the original OSFirstTimer intro only used in the videos that follow the 5 basic tasks format.

Diana Games Through Time

Diana Games Through Time was a series started in 2020 in response to people wanting Gaming Through The Ages to return on AstralPhaser, as well as wanting Diana to play games on TerrifiedMum. Philip did not want to make Gaming Through the Ages videos anymore, and wanted to make content for OSFirstTimer again, he then had an idea to combine these into making a new series called "Diana Games Through Time". He posted a video explaining about this idea on the three channels, and the video on OSFirstTimer got around 1,395 likes.

PodcastFirstTimer

Philip pranked Diana thinking that she was listening to a real podcast in one video, after a while he then revealed to Diana that it was AI generated she was left disappointed. In response, OSDailyTimer, MightyEagle73, and LightBrownWolf made a podcast together called PodcastFirstTimer. After the video was published, Philip decided to react to the video with Diana while going on a walk and split the podcast up into episodes, and at the end of each episode they read the comments of those videos just like More Comments Please which they don't read hate comments, but rather fan comments.

Can ? Replace Windows 7

On "Can Ubuntu 12.10 Replace Windows 7", Philip experimented to see if he can replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu, he liked it but according to him, drivers, screen recorder, playing games did not work for him (this was way before Valve's Proton existed).

Video Intro and Outro

OSFirstTimer Intro

Starting from Ubuntu 4.10, Philip started to use an intro, but during it, he made a mistake by putting "Staring Diana Adams" instead of "Starring Diana Adams", and people pointed that issue out which was fixed a video later.

OSFirstTimer Advanced Intro

Despite popular belief, the initial OSFirstTimer Advanced intro prior to the Tandy DeskMate video was not created by, but only customised by Philip. YouTube user RavenProDesign is the creator, having created it as a free trailer template in 2014. Furthermore, Neosphere, the song used, was published in late 2012 by Jack Trammell, working under the independent music company and record label PositionMusic. Since permission by the company was missing for RavenProDesign to use said song, the song was never allowed to be used and redistributed by the user in any shape or form.

Without prior checking or knowledge of such, Philip used the template and edited it for his Advanced series, not replacing the song. This resulted in Philip having received copyright notices in the form of shared revenue notices with PositionMusic, albeit three and a half years after the publication of the first Advanced episode. That led to the post-upload cutdown of the intro of many Advanced episodes through YouTube's video editor.

That situation, along with the often-joked-about length of the two intros used (being around 15-20 seconds long), is the reason why Philip decided to use a new intro from the Tandy DeskMate video onwards, for both normal and Advanced episodes.

OSFirstTimer Outro

Initially Philip used the music from the part where he introduces people the operating system as the outro music, but starting from USU Linux 8.3 he used the current outro music and have since sticked to using that.

Intro Music

Title Author
Original

2013 - 2018

Blown Away Kevin Macleod
Advanced

2015 - 2018

Neosphere Jack Trammell
Current

2018 - Present

Suspense Music A NP Music

Outro Music

Title Author
2013 - Present Solar Walk House

OSs Tested

Operating systems marked with "Dad tries out" or "Jasmine tries out" were tested by Ben Adams or Jasmine Adams instead of the main tester, Diana Adams.

OSs tested in 2012

OSs tested in 2013

OSs Tested in 2014

OSs Tested in 2016

OSs Tested in 2017

OSs Tested in 2018

OSs Tested in 2019

OSs Tested in 2021

OSs Tested in 2022

OSs Tested in 2024

OSs Tested in 2025

Software Tested

First started as OSFirstTimer Advanced, but it became testing out software in general.

Software Tested in 2015

Games Tested

Controversies & Criticisms

The earliest known controversy goes back to the video Top 3 Worst And Best Operating System User Interfaces (1985-2012) which was published in December 2012. At that time, people misunderstood the video for a World's Top 3 video and/or found the listed operating systems to only have been loosely tested out by Diana and Philip.

Back in April 2013, Philip published a prank video called OSFirstTimer - Talking About Operating Systems Prank on the OSFirstTimer channel, which got a substantial amount of backlash. The backlash has its roots leading back to 4chan, where users shared that video and described it mockingly. The main insults they gave is that Phil is "miserably failing at being funny and relatable" and that he is either "an attraction for autistic people" or "being autistic" himself. Other people would go for insulting his voice for being "too frog-like" in addition. Since then, OSFirstTimer was often associated with cringe, but in more recent days, the backlash for that video has dwindled.

The general type of humour and delayed knowledge of internet memes, that Philip used to have, created controversy as well, so did his overconcern and/or misinformation about topics such as radiation, sunscreens or geographical knowledge. Religious jokes and references were also made by him and his parents at times, especially about Topics like the devil's number 666 and Religious Deities. The controversy has been built up for alleged reasons such as them "shoving their religion onto other people's faces", "being too uneducated", and/or them "telling their audience things that were debunked before". Especially the radiation scenario has either been debunked or joked about a few times in the past, even by his viewers/subscribers. These controversies have dialed down significantly in recent years, and he, alongside Diana and Ben, have been openly mindful of how to word things correctly, like "gender reassignment" and "flamboyant" instead of "sex change" and "gay" respectively. They also are reminding others not to do things like discrimination and defamation of people that are immigrants, people of colour, indigenous people and/or part of the LGBTQ+ community, albeit that still came into question by some viewers, when Diana campaigned for the United Australia Party, a controversial political party aligning with conservative right-wing ideology, in 2022.

Some viewers have mentioned in the past, that his videos are loosely prepared and that it still feels as if Diana/Ben and Phil are trying out operating systems and programs, and not just Diana or Ben themselves, remarking that there are a few things still being improvised and/or not fully researched upon. Other viewers find that Phil is restricting Diana too much, making her actions limited to the things that Philip finds "interesting or watchable" for their viewers/subscribers. However, Diana's purpose originally was to be portrayed to be a computer-illiterate person, trying out another operating system/program for the first time and in her own way. Several scenes were included in videos where even Diana herself questions Philip as to why he is restricting her to do her own actions. Examples are the episodes Mum Tries Out Solaris 11.1 (2012) and Mum Tries Out Solus 1.1 (2016).

Another controversy is his fanbase's action of doxxing Philip's current home address and/or phone number, although there is no report of Philip and his family having been nonconsensually visited by OSFirstTimer viewers/subscribers so far. However, they do not condone to be doxxed, or to doxx in general, as privacy and welfare is still needed to be respected regardless of subscribers being long-time or recent fans.

OSFirstTimer videos during 2022 had a slight influx in comments and remarks both within and outside of YouTube regarding political affiliations of Philip and/or Diana. Furthermore, remarks have also been made on how videos seemed to leave an advertisement-like impression rather than being an actual review or tryout, albeit with most of those comments being mostly vague. Other comments, that did expand on these remarks, included claims such as Philip's mother Diana being advertised. It is believed that those more detailed claims of advertisement have been made due to the campaign, that has been going on at around the same time, of Diana having been a senate candidate for the Tasmania division within the United Australia Party for the 2022 Australian Senate Election. They added onto that theory, that Diana might potentially get a higher amount of votes within said election due to her viewers, while possibly also "deceiving" her audience to think of the party positively.

Philip's series of videos, that started in 2023 and regard the topic of artificial intelligence, are also increasingly garnering negative feedback, with claims ranging from repetition of a topic that has been fading in popularity/favour to supporting a dangerous cause through positive exposure of it to a large audience, with the latter being a similar claim and feedback to what both Diana herself and some viewers in the comment section had of the video Mum Tries Out Tails OS 0.2.3 (2014) + Deep Web, albeit less nuanced or elaborated on in comparison to the Tails OS video.

Channel Activity

Up to this day, Philip and his parents had to do several long-term tasks and/or jobs, leading to Philip having increasingly less time to maintain his channels and produce, edit and upload videos. This was especially apparent in the years 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2023, with 2015 and 2019 being the most dormant years of the OSFirstTimer channel. When he did have time, it was most likely that his mother Diana didn't, leading to further delays of episodes. To avoid further dormancy, he started his Gaming Through The Ages series in December 2015 and the OSFT Archive series in February 2019, with the latter being due to the renovations in their house. According to Philip, these series are much easier to produce episodes of, as it doesn't require him to edit videos as professionally as he would normally do for OSFirstTimer episodes. However, with all that happening and being done, many of his subscribers still aren't happy about the continuous dormancy of OSFirstTimer, which has resulted in negative comments. In the video Mum Tries Out ChatGPT (Jan 9th 2023 Version), it was directly stated by Philip in the end of the video that there is not going to be a frequent upload schedule anymore and that he is in fact starting off a hiatus for OSFirstTimer in general due to his new job being a carer for foster children and teenagers. This then went on for just over a year before having uploaded the next video after that, but with people still worried about the channel's activity after only a few months since the hiatus started. After the video Mum Uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2024) to Code Games In HTML5 & Javascript was published, Philip even stated in response to a viewer in the video's comment section, that OSFirstTimer videos are to be expected to be uploaded at random times without any indication of frequency for now. The channel started uploading frequently. The frequent uploads continued until May 12, 2025, when Philip commented on the Mum Tries Out OS/2 1.3 (1990) video, stating that OSFirstTimer would be inactive for an unspecified period due to his involvement in many roles at a Tasmanian startup. He also mentioned that one additional episode had been filmed but not yet edited (Mum Visits 10 CRAZY Websites in 2025). As of May 9, 2026, OSFirstTimer has not uploaded since July 3, 2025. In recent responses to fan emails, Philip stated that “future videos are super unlikely” and that he feels “the channel had a great run going for over a decade”. In another response, he noted that he is “moving away from YouTube”.

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