What Keeps You Off of Windows?

J. J. Ramsey asks: "schnell has already asked the question What's Keeping You On Windows? It seems only fair to ask the opposite question. For those of you who have elected to not use Windows, what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?" Might recent events sway your decision to keep Microsoft's premier software offering off of your computer?

Comments

I live without Windows

[Quebec]

What keeps me off Windows is mainly because I don't want to be
locked-up in some savage immoral decommoditizing scheme.

The practice of scrambling and obfuscating the standards to insure
the failure of the competition is so much a threat to my eyes that
losing some compatibility and some discutable features for not dealing
with this is more then acceptable.

Death to close source, death to DRMs, long live the Open Source.

Re:I live without Windows

[John Courtland]

The goal of any business is to profit. Not to make the competition fail through shady practices. If the competition fails because you made such a good product, that's one story. If they fail because you illegally cornered the market using underhanded licensing tactics, that's another all together.

Re:I live without Windows

[Alien Being]

"Nothing wrong here."

Too young to remember that they were found guilty of illegal trade practices? Ah, you see illegal trade practices as moral. Now I get it.

Re:I live without Windows

[squiggleslash]

Why is this insightful? Since when has the goal of any business been the failure of its competition?

The goal of a business is to make a profit, preferably the largest it can. In many cases, a business cannot thrive without competition, and even if it still considers competition a problem, it's goal is not to eliminate it.

Re:I live without Windows

[Short Circuit]

There are two reasons to have a free-enterprise economy. First, people can earn a living on merit. Second, consumers get decent products at a decent price.

Unfortunately, some (though admittedly few) controls have to be in place to gaurantee the latter. The FDA exists so that we don't get fed shoddy food and medicines. The FCC exists in part so that radio stations don't fry all the electronic equipment within a ten mile radius. The FTC exists in part to keep both consumers and shareholders from getting shafted.

Re:I live without Windows

[AviLazar]

hmmm. obfuscating, discutable, decommoditizing... lots of big words, this person smarter then I am.

Re:I live without Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

• Being able to do a network boot (fully diskless workstation) served from a RAIDed fileserver over a gigabit LAN
• Being able to tweak the system beyond belief
• Having everything 'just work' once it's set up
• My work environment is in Linux as well

Notice that I haven't said anything about cost. In fact, I probably spend more per year on distro stuff than I would if using Windows.

For many of us, Windows can't do what's required.

Re:I live without Windows

[Phillup]

Sounds to me like you can't tell the difference between morality and legality.

They are not the same.

Re:I live without Windows

[carlos_benj]

...this person smarter then I am.

Cheer up. You're equally smart as neither one of you knows the difference between "then" and "than".

Re:I live without Windows

[nathanh]

The goal of any business is to profit.

The goal of any business is to do what the business owners want. The goals are often stated in the mission statement. If the business owners are greedy swine then sure, the businesses goals will solely be to make profit. But most businesses are not that narrow minded. Most businesses have an agenda and the profit motive is secondary. For example, most businesses aim to provide a certain product or service. Other businesses have stated codes of conduct (eg, Google's "do no evil" rule). Any business you look at will have a similar set of profit unrelated goals. I guarantee you will have great difficulty finding any business whose single stated goal is to "make money".

If what you said was true (and it is not) then companies like Ford could just stop making cars and start playing hedge funds on the stock market. That's tying in with "making money". But that's not what Ford does. The goal of Ford is to make cars at an affordable price. Everything else is a secondary goal; including the profit motive.

Re:I live without Windows

[polemistes]

The goal of a business is to make a profit, preferably the largest it can.

In my business, the only goal is to create something so good that people will make sure I continue doing it, often by giveing me money.

Re:I live without Windows

[shaitand]

You might have missed it, the law said what Microsoft is doing is illegal.

Surely nobody would question it's immoral.

Re:I live without Windows

[shaitand]

You've got it backwards jack. Business exists to make profit. Their other stated goals are merely how they go about making profit.

Ford's goal is to make affordable cars so they can sell them in larger numbers, thus cutting out competition and making more money.

Since when does the marketing literature (ie stated goals) have much to do with reality?

Re:I live without Windows

[plugger]

Are you equating lack of education with laziness?

Perhaps if there were nothing but well paid professionals on the planet, you might realise where your food comes from, who packs it, who drives it to your local store, and who takes your garbage away when you've finished with it. Or are they too uneducated to deal with your trash?

Re:I live without Windows

[Martin Blank]

I know a number of small business owners, and none of them want to dominate their space. They want to provide a service to make their customers happy. Some of them are better at it than others, but they have good-natured relationships with their competitors, sometimes sending potential customers to each other when they're out of something or when that other business is closer to the customer.

Not every industry is cut-throat.

Re:I live without Windows

[mrchaotica]

Well, you see, we only agree with the government when the government is right!

Re:I live without Windows

[Queer Boy]

Sounds to me like you can't tell the difference between morality and legality.

If you place second, middle, last in your class because someone else had better grades than you, that's one thing. It's quite another to have someone pay the teacher to flunk you out of school so they can be head of the class.

Why does a difference between morality and legality needs to be distinguished in such a case?

Re:I live without Windows

[John Courtland]

Incorrect assumption. When someone starts a business, they don't say, "oh, I want to lose money, but help people." Well, not unless it's part of a bigger picture in order to get tax breaks... Regardless, a business makes money. If it doesn't, it will no longer exist. That's all you should conclude from my statement, no more no less.

Just beacause I state something simply, doesn't mean there isn't more to the picture. A lot of slashdotters seem to fail to come to this conclusion, and it's pretty damn annoying.

Re:I live without Windows

[Captain Splendid]

When someone starts a business, they don't say, "oh, I want to lose money, but help people." Well, not unless it's part of a bigger picture in order to get tax breaks...

I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else. Of course money's an important consideration, but what about providing the best goods/services/whatever, or committing a certain percentage of resources to charitable causes? What about starting your own business and forsaking steady pay for doing what you love?

Not to mention there's making money and then there's making obscene amounts of money and wasting it. Companies laying off workers while simultaneously awarding mutli-million salaries and bonuses to their CEOs are, as far as I'm concerned, failures.

Regardless, a business makes money. If it doesn't, it will no longer exist.

Unless the government bails you out or takes the hit (too many instances to bloody mention.)

And then, you've completely forgotten to take into account businesses that have been wiped out by greed, adverse tax law, predatory competitors or government regulation, and not because they weren't making a profit.

Re:I live without Windows

[Phillup]

Why does a difference between morality and legality needs to be distinguished in such a case?

I'll recap:

Poster #1) I don't want to use it because it is immoral.

Poster #2) Immoral? What they did was legal.

Me) legal != moral

So... my point is that response by #2 did not address the point brought up by #1

Re:I live without Windows

[mandalayx]

You might have missed it, the law said what Microsoft is doing is illegal.

Surely nobody would question it's immoral.

One thing we've learned over the past 4 years is that we have many different ideas of what is "moral" in America. On copyright, on plagarism, on profit, etc, etc.

I am not sure that folks enjoy you imposing your morals upon them.

Re:I live without Windows

[Quebec]

Then, than...
it's all sound the same for my french ears

Re:I live without Windows

[Flere Imsaho]

Did it hurt when they removed your sense of humor? Or are you just American?

Re:I live without Windows

[t1m0r4n]

They have blocked OEMs from putting out useful products (e.g. dual-boot computers).

You list this, I assume, as a bad thing. Selling dual-boot boxes is just silly and confusing. Back in the day, a cousin of mine was an OS/2 fanatic. He talked another cousin into buying a computer with Windows and OS/2. When I inquired how the recient liked OS/2, the reply was "I've opened that _program_ a couple times, but I couldn't figure out what it's supposed to do". I highly suspect that far too many geeks would recommend Linux dual-boots, and the results would be the same. Ignorant users would assume they knew Linux because they had it on their computer, although they never really understood what it was, found Windows far more useful because it did Office and games etc, and they would just disregard Linux in the future. I find it far better to let them find Linux on their own because of Windows problems, or go with an all Linux system with plenty of training.

P.S. Just started reading this thread, and I couldn't help but wonder. There are ~1,400 comments, yet I doubt there are 1,400 readers of slashdot who use Linux exclusively at home. I find it kinda funny.

Re:I live without Windows

[Syntax Heir]

Interesting trivia related to this. Amtrak has never posted a profitable year since it's opening in 1970. They keep at it because they're backed by the feds.

Re:I live without Windows

[t1m0r4n]

If they're unemployed, then they're obviously not the ones who are growing the food, driving the trucks, and removing the garbage.

Actually, the stupid and lazy people don't collect unemployment. That is for the smart and lazy people. Level of education has nothing to do with being smart or stupid, but I'm quite sure, the better educated you are, the better you will be at milking the system. And don't get me started on corporate welfare... As this is a somewhat MS related thread, I'll try to bring it back on topic. Just how much tax money ends up at Microsoft? Answer: mucho dinero.

Re:I live without Windows

[realdpk]

"I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else. Of course money's an important consideration, but what about providing the best goods/services/whatever, or committing a certain percentage of resources to charitable causes?"

You can provide the best services and give away money all you want, but when a competitor comes in and doesn't, and you start losing business, you'll have to cut back and possibly close and/or sell out.

Re:I live without Windows

[Alien Being]

The directors have a fiduciary responsibility to do attempt to do whatever is "advertised" in the prospectus as well as abiding by rules of law.

You can't talk about making money without talking about the risk. One could argue that M$ greedy approach to business will backfire in the end and that stockholders will get burned. Hell, if it weren't for Bush getting into office, MS's shareholders would have paid a big penalty for the company's transgressions.

Believe it or not, the owners of publically listed companies do have a conscience and would be happy with a modest return on an honest investment rather than being along for a ride with Bonnie and Clyde.

Re:I live without Windows

[nbahi15]

Actually the goal of business is not to profit, that is a byproduct of providing you a product or service. It may be that profit is the motivation for specialization but I wholly disagree that it is 'the reason' for business. Too much work is done for the sake of doing it, with no hope of profit, simply to dismiss every action of business to be profit motivated.

Causing competition to fail is not even necessarily profitable. It could be counterproductive. So please show some thought before you speak. Maybe read the Wealth of Nations again, or that new book by John Kay, Culture and Prosperity.

Re:I live without Windows

[shaitand]

Your missing the last step, there is no such thing as a business that makes a profit to stay in business.

There are however businesses which make a profit to increase and stay in business so they can make more profit.

It's simply another strategy to achieve the ultimate goal of making more profit.

Re:I live without Windows

[AmbyVoc]

While I consider dual booting silly and confusing too, I couldn't help but notice your post scriptum and comment on that.

How many computer users would there be in this world? How many do you think use Linux? And how many do you think post more than one comment on threads like these?

I suppose if there are as many Linux users as li.counter.org suggests or more there would surely be a chance there'd be atleast 1400 Linux users reading slashdot. And while I do not use anything else but Linux on my computers and always keep a bootable Linux live-cd handy if going somewhere else I believe there are others too. If I know a couple of those here in Finland I suppose there are more of us linux-only folks all over the world. Do not forget those 140000 at counter.li.org are just the `registered' amount of users and not the whole bunch. Most of us don't even know such a site exists.

Re:I live without Windows

[jsebrech]

I don't see why business has to be about money and nothing else.

Well, corporations, when founded, sign a charter with the public (the government) outlining what they will aim to do. Theoretically corporations could be disbanded if they did not abide by rules in the charter. However, in practice, no corporation ever gets disbanded for shady business practices, no matter how bad they are for the public, and lots of corporations don't even get fined for screwing people over.

Ofcourse, the entire problem is that corporations got the courts to say they are equal citizens over a century ago. The flaw in that is that corporations don't die, ever, so they can keep gathering power and resources as long as they want, making them inherently superior to humans. Because of that over time you've seen corporate power grow. The only way to avoid corporations dominating the people is by giving them less rights than you give humans, and it will require a huge populist movement to roll back that decision.

Re:I live without Windows

[AviLazar]

I only know three languages: English, Hebrew and bad English. The third one is my primary language :)

Re:I live without Windows

[hesiod]

> So are you saying that anything is all right so long as you do it for money?

You are a fucking idiot.

He said:
> > Just because I state something simply, doesn't mean there isn't more to the picture

Re:I live without Windows

[Moofie]

Call it revenge for the silly notion of assigning genders to inanimate objects. : )

Re:I live without Windows

[vsprintf]

First it's something rather silly to debate about to this length.

Indeed. The rest of the world, including the tax authorities, believes that there are nonprofit businesses, but that doesn't fit with your personal, very narrow definition. So, obviously, you are correct, and the world is wrong. Forgive the rest of us if we're slow to recognize your omniscience.

One thing

[DougMackensie]

Sanity

Re:One thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the question "What's keeping you off of windows" to be interesting.

Literally, I stay off of windows because too much stress and they break.

Same is true for GLASS windows.

Re:One thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear..

Staying off Windows keeps me sane. I have a bunch of PCs at home. A Linux server, a G4 Cube, an iBook.. One is an Athlon 1 GHz machine I use to play Counter Strike. When I use it, there's no problem. I boot it, start CS (or MTGO), quit CS, turn it off.

The problem comes from my friends. One morning, I sit down in front of my PC, boot it. Something comes up full-screen, immediately. I've been spywared. By no fault of my own. My less-than-savvy friends have just cost me an hour of my time downloading, updating and running AdAware/SpyBot S&D.

This is why I like setting them loose under Safari on my Cube. They can visit sites loaded with IE exploits, ActiveX crap-objects and more and nothing bad will come to my system.

The fact that Windows is the big spyware/trojan/worm target is reason enough to keep me off of it. Of course, this is posted from a Dell WinXP box that I use every day at my job. Go figure.

Re:One thing

[Cromac]

The problem comes from my friends. One morning, I sit down in front of my PC, boot it. Something comes up full-screen, immediately. I've been spywared. By no fault of my own. My less-than-savvy friends have just cost me an hour of my time downloading, updating and running AdAware/SpyBot S&D.

That's not a fault of Windows that's your responsibility for allowing your friends to use your machine with an account that has permissions to do such things.

Would you blame Ford if your friend borrowed your car and wrecked it?

Re:One thing

[somethinghollow]

Yeah. I go insane when Windows starts freaking out after a month, and I think I need to do a re-install. It wouldn't bother me at all that Windows breaks so quickly if the place I work wasn't an ASP / VB shop. As it is, when Windows freaks, and I need to re-install, I have to install tons of apps. Work keeps me on Windows, and is a frequent reminder why I stay off Windows at home.

Maybe I should just start doing ASP.Net with Mono?

Re:One thing

[autopr0n]

Yeah. I go insane when Windows starts freaking out after a month, and I think I need to do a re-install. It wouldn't bother me at all that Windows breaks so quickly if the place I work wasn't an ASP / VB shop. As it is, when Windows freaks, and I need to re-install, I have to install tons of apps. Work keeps me on Windows, and is a frequent reminder why I stay off Windows at home.

What are you doing to it, installing spyware? My main win2k install was actualy done in 2000. None of my other machines have ever been reinstalled, and they've been running fine.

Re:One thing

[It'sYerMam]

"permissions"

This is windows!

Newer windowses do have methods to prevent some (not all) of this, but older windowses, and if you need your account to be able to install things (No su in windows) then it has to be an admin.
It's one thing when your friend takes your car out for a spin and smashes it into a tree, another when it falls apart as soon as he takes the wheel.

Re:One thing

[hazem]

You definitely should consider doing some kind of "imaging". If yo do linux, the easiest is to split your drive in half, or have a 2nd drive. Put linux on that other drive.

When you get your windows box set up "just right", go into linux (or boot on a linux cd... linux doesn't even need to be on that computer). The do something like:

(first assume that your backup location is at /backup)

# dd if=/dev/hda1|gzip -c |dd of=/backup/winbackup_20040607.gz

When windows gets dicked up, just go back into linux and reverse it:

# dd if=/backup/winbackup_20040607.gz| gunzip -c |dd of=/dev/hda1

and reboot.

You can do that with cat and such as well. I do it with dd so that this can be done over ssh easily:

# dd if=/dev/hda1 |gzip -c |ssh backupserver "dd of=/backup/winbackup_20040607.gz"

and

# ssh backupserver "dd if=/backup/winbackup_20040607.gz"|gunzip -c |dd of=/dev/hda1

Like I said, you can probably avoid the "dd"s and use cat, but I know this works for me. And I'd rather spend time on slashdot than find other solutions!

This works extremely well if you can get all your apps to use another location to store data. Get your mozilla profiles, "my documents" and other defaults to go to a D: or network drive. Then, you don't have to change anything to get back up and running.

Re:One thing

[txviking]

What keeps me off Windows ?

The fact that I have no idea what kind of trojan horse of timebomb windows might be. In a world of open network, I have the feeling that it is my ethical obligation to know what my computer is running. And if I am unable to check that out myself, that there are independant experts that can check it out.

I believe it is too easy to trust one corporation. We don't even do that with governments. There are checks and balances, separation of powers etc. Where are the separation of powers and checks and balances concerning Windows ?

I believe in self-determinism. In my own decision when to upgrade my hardware (not because some software has an exploit and it is not fixed anymore, and the new version does not run on it). I believe in self-determination without a nanny that needs to be informed when I change my hardware configuration. I believe it is nobody's business, to put cpu-ids in my text-documents.

I believe in ownership. I believe it is my right to own what I buy. To sell what I own, and to fix it when it is broken, or to go to an independent garage to fix my software instead of the manufacture from where I bought it from

I believe in my right of protection from illegal search and seizure. I do not think anybody needs to know what my hardware is, or what software I have on my machine when I put in a patch.

I believe in the freedom of speech. I do not believe it is anybody's right to forsake my ownership of something that I bought and paid for, because I use it as a tool to opine something that is not liked by somebody else who in return can legally use the EULA to revoke my right of ownership for what I have paid for.

I believe in the right to use my possesion to make a profit in my business endeavors. I do not think that if I buy something, I can not rent it out for money.

This are only 7 of many issues that I have with Windows. I don't care if Windows would be the best product in the world, far ahead of anything else. I would have an issue with what I have to sell of my soul (or rights) to enjoy it. I am very happy, that I have a choice and can choose to use something else that does not deny my inalienable rights that are dear to me

However, like with lots of things, this is my choice, and I would fight for the freedom of others to choose differently while I hope they would stand by me in the same way to fight for my freedom of choice in this issue

Re:One thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, pedantic much? I mean, sure, there's a level of fault that I give myself, but that's why I don't expect these same friends to fix the mess they made.

But hey, who even said that a locked down 'user' account (not even Power User) would have been any less dangerous? Spyware could still install itself to any folder within that users own Documents and Settings folder. Registry keys under HKEY_USER could still be modified.

Simply put, by not being the target of all these worms and trojans (spyware is a trojan) then my life is that much easier.

Re:One thing

[pclminion]

Get VMWare, install your system how you want it inside the VMWare, then burn the disk images to CD. Now, whenever your installation gets hosed, you can simply use VMWare's "revert" feature to go back to the last working snapshot, or, if things are really fucked beyond repair, just restore the disk images off the CD and bam, you're back to a brand-new install, 10 minutes later.

In addition, if you change workstations you can take your virtual system with you. You'll never notice the difference.

VMWare costs money, but compare the price to the hours you waste fucking with hosed Windows installations. It's a freaking deal.

Re:One thing

[iserlohn]

Good for you. However, if you have been upgrading hardware or installing software, Windows does break, and more often than not, the breakage is hidden somewhere deep down inside the system.

The main problem with windows, as I see it, is the over dependance of the system registry. Corruption of the registry is fatal to the system. Even if the registry is not currpted, there are tons of keys hidden deep down within the heirarchy , many of which is not obvious what they control, and a lot of them auto-generated values with some arbitarty ID as keys! You can't get any user unfriendly than this.

Evan though the system configuration files of Unix and Linux system are diverse in format and not unified or centralized, almost all configuration is in a text based format that is easy to read and for the most part, well documented. If you run into a setting which you need lookup, you can mostly do it with a "man config.conf".

Re:One thing

[Kevin108]

Linux is safer around dumb friends because it's nearly impossible to install anything even if you want to, much less have the convenience of something installing itself.

Re:One thing

[rjstanford]

But hey, who even said that a locked down 'user' account (not even Power User) would have been any less dangerous? Spyware could still install itself to any folder within that users own Documents and Settings folder. Registry keys under HKEY_USER could still be modified.

Which is 100% true on UNIX systems also. It just happens to be true that most spyware type apps (the vast majority of which are actively and willingly downloaded by their end-users) are written for Windows. If more people were using UNIX, you'd get these apps for UNIX as well. There's no technical superiority here, just user frustration (ie: this app (which has bad side effects) isn't available for my OS so I can't download it and see the pretty cursors (or whatever)).

Re:One thing

[quantum bit]

But hey, who even said that a locked down 'user' account (not even Power User) would have been any less dangerous? Spyware could still install itself to any folder within that users own Documents and Settings folder. Registry keys under HKEY_USER could still be modified.

Same issue with any OS. Malware could easily run under a user account -- in Windows most doesn't (fails horribly if Program Files or HKLM isn't writable). Of course the added bonus here is that if one did, when your friend logs off and you log back on under your user account, that crap they installed under their account isn't running anymore and can't touch your files.

Plus it's a lot harder for spyware to hide out inside a user profile directory -- no mess of DLLs in System32 to camoflauge itself with...

Re:One thing

[Phillup]

My main win2k install was actualy done in 2000. None of my other machines have ever been reinstalled, and they've been running fine.

Congratulations. Not everyone is so blessed.

What keeps me from running Windows?

When I turn it on, I wonder if it will actually boot.

When I turn it off, I wonder if it will actually shutdown.

In between the two, I wonder what the hell it is doing.

Simple... I want my computer to do what *I* tell it.

Re:One thing

[Tony-A]

That's not a fault of Windows that's your responsibility for allowing your friends to use your machine with an account that has permissions to do such things.

I think that's the best argument for Linux over Microsoft Windows that I've ever seen.

Re:One thing

[HeghmoH]

This would be more like blaming Ford if your friend borrowed your car and bumped the "Explode" button while going around a sharp turn.

But real-life analogies to computer problems generally suck, so who knows.

Re:One thing

[Hizonner]

If Toyota sold a car that would prevent my friends from wrecking it when I lent it to them, whereas Ford cars were easily wrecked by non-expert drivers, then, all other things being equal, I would buy the Toyota.

Re:One thing

[Gortbusters.org]

Hey, spyware/adware gets in under the radar of normal usage.

Ever go to a non-techie's computer... it's probably infested with this shit. This is not the fault of the user, it's the fault of things like the browser or outlook [express] or whatever that makes these things so easy to do.

I've never installed something unknowingly using linux, or even firefox on XP for that matter.

Re:One thing

[jc42]

Sanity

Nah, money.

Many years ago, I started noticing when job shopping that the MS DOS (and later MS Windows) programming jobs never paid as well as the unix programming jobs. This didn't strike me as odd, as working on bottom-of-the-market jobs (whether fast food, auto mechanics, or software development) never pays very well. You're better off going with quality goods, and then you get jobs from people who are willing to pay for quality.

I did get tricked into working on DOS and/or Windows on a few projects. But in interviews, I've always been careful to tell them that my experience on MS systems is limited and not very recent. This encourages them to consider me for only the higher-quality unix (and now linux) job openings.

The Mac was always interesting for similar reasons. But the cost of entry was high before OSX, and I always had plenty of unix jobs, so I never invested the time and money that it took to deal with a Mac.

Way back when, I did some work on IBM mainframes. I'm sure glad that I managed to escape from that ghetto. Actually, this happened because the engineers where I was working wanted to bring in Amdahl's unix that ran on top of VM, so they could have a decent place to work on the mainframe. I volunteered to be the admin, though I knew little about unix at the time. It was such a relief that I concentrated on writing as much software for it as I could. I had lots of time to do this, as it took almost no adminning (unlike the IBM OSs). I managed to get enough resume material to hop to a real unix-based development job. Life has been a lot better ever since then.

Yeah, money. And achievement. It's great to be able to write software that "just works", and doesn't crash unpredictably somewhere inside a system library routine.

Re:One thing

[shaitand]

In terms of the home directory yes, although there is nothing as bloated, nasty, and fragile as the windows registry on a *nix system ;)

The flaw is actually in the browser, most spyware comes from browsing the web with internet explorer including the nastiest of it. Freeware and Shareware are responsible for less than 1% of spyware overall.

Now I would never call the browser part of the OS, which is better defined as the kernel. But it is certainly part of the distribution. In the case of windows there is no way to remove IE. Thus it goes full circle and is in fact a windows problem... just not a permissions problem.

Re:One thing

[4of12]

Which is 100% true on UNIX systems also.

Don't know about UNIX systems where you live, but none of mine have /etc/rc world writable:)

Re:One thing

[m1a1]

That's not a fault of Windows that's your responsibility for allowing your friends to use your machine with an account that has permissions to do such things.

Why the hell does it matter? He was asked why he doesn't use windows. His answer is "because my friends break it."

Seems like a reasonable reason to me.

Re:One thing

[TheoMurpse]

while I agree with your statement you want the computer to do what you tell it to, i'm tired of ppl ragging on Windows for instability

i have windows xp...i have had it on this box for 2 years, since i ordered it from dell...2 ghz p4, 256m ram, xp home

so much hardware added:
extra HD, video capture card, new 5.1 surround sound card, firewire card, etc

i'm trying to show my computer is not some gimpy setup that is unconfigured

i hack my registry all the time for kicks

i run a webserver, mysql, constantly python, perl, php...this computer stays up for a month before i reboot it -by choice- not by necessity

my computer has been severely fuxored with, but yet it runs like the day i bought it...much better than any linux distro i've experienced (gentoo, redhat, debian) in user friendliness....altho i do run debian, too

now to make my post on-topic:
why do i stay off windows?
when i'm off windows, it's to familiarize myself more closely with how operating systems and disk operations work...i'd never learn what partitioning really was w/o linux, what the MBR was w/o linux, etc.

so to sum up: windows is not as unstable as ppl say, and linux teaches you so much (which is why i use it some now)

so don't get all pissy please

Re:One thing

[t1m0r4n]

So clearly, 'limited user' is not the way to properly limit the users so they cannot install spyware.

I don't know if that is true or not. But I do know that when you set up an admin account for the folks, and user accounts for the kids, the kids will only use the parents account. Typically the parents could use a user account and not complain much, but the kids are the ones who want to visit sites that require lowering security in the browser, install games and such. The parents may try to monitor the kids at first, but they will get tired of the pestering and just give up the password. Too much experience with this.

I'm cheap...

[ajiva]

Personally I use Linux because its free, the software is free and it runs resonable on my Dual Celeron 500 vs Win2k which runs slower. That's why I do it

Re:I'm cheap...

[metlin]

Exactly.

And as a student, I can get almost all of the software that I want for free, without having to worry about shitty licenses or any other issues.

More importantly, it gives me the ability to customize.

If my task is CPU/memory intensive (graphics), I choose a very simple window manager. Am I working on boring stuff like writing documents? I choose a window manager with bells and whistles to entertain me while am at it.

Do I have to repeat a task? All it takes for me is a simple two liner script to do it, while on Windows I almost always end up having to install Cygwin to do my tasks (do not give me the batch file crap, batch does not do regex or any of that stuff, nor can I pipe my outputs and inputs).

And more than anything, I get to mess around with the system the way *I* please -- if I do not like the messages during bootup, I can change that. And if I do not like the look and feel of my system, I just change it - at the bare metal level.

And another thing that pisses me off to no end in Windows is permissions. I have to be logged in as administrator to install the simplest of applications. WTF!? Whereas in Linux, I just get what I want and run (or sometimes compile and then run) the binary.

And more than anything, I philosophically disagree with the way Microsoft works -- yeah yeah, it's business and all is fair yada yada yada. But still, their practices are not honourable, nor respectful. And for that reason, I try to stay off all Microsoft products :)

Re:I'm cheap...

[cshark]

I prefer Linux because I can do more with it.

I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.

I'm starting to play with XFCE. I like that too.

The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!

I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.

I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.

My kids like the games that come with KDE and GNOME. They're colorful and fun, and they whine when I tell them they have to use the XP box in the other room for homework.

I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...

I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.

I like Linux because I never have to worry about the status of my license, or installing it on multiple machines.

I like the fact that I can set up a grid or a series of thin clients throughout my house without much real work.

I like the fact that my internet connection is faster under Linux than it was under Windows XP. It's a real kick. If you have both running side by side, try comparing them sometime.

It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.

It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.

It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.

Linus is slightly less evil than Gates.

And the fact that it's free, or at least mostly free doesn't hurt either.

Re:I'm cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer Linux because I can do more with it.

Quantify?

I like KDE better than Windows XP. It's a better desktop with more features that are easier to tweak and fix if something goes wrong.

Something goes wrong enough to where this is a feature?

The command line actually has real unadulterated power under Linux!

I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.

Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path).

I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.

Objectively? or subjectively?

My kids like the games that come with KDE and GNOME. They're colorful and fun, and they whine when I tell them they have to use the XP box in the other room for homework.

As opposed to the 1000s of games on the Windows box that all their friends are playing. Could be that you have only the default 5 games installed on the Windows box and they are tired of them and that's why they don't want to use those?

I like the fact that my nine year old can't break it... no matter how hard she tries...

Nothing that a good glass of water can't fix... but that is just a general hazard to the machine. Also, don't leave yourself logged in as root.

I like the fact that my wife can't install software on my desktop when she's not logged in as me.

Heh... you like the fact that your wife can't do what she wants unless it's with your permission...

I like the fact that my internet connection is faster under Linux than it was under Windows XP. It's a real kick. If you have both running side by side, try comparing them sometime.

I have... objectively and with real benchmarks. They are so close to the same it doesn't matter. In fact, on some HPC problems, using I/O Completion ports, Windows was markedly faster than Linux. Since then, the stacks have improved on Linux and they are about equal.

It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.

Why? I guess it's nice to be nostalgic but I replaced all of those machines with machines that are a bit faster. As far as creep, Linux suffers it as much as Windows, just a couple years behind. One time, back in the day, Linux could be installed on my Pentium 60 with as little as 8M of RAM. Today, minimum recommended is 128M with 256M being "better" (see SuSE web pages, since I was just there earlier today actually *buying* a 9.1 distribution from them, for this example).

It's nice that Linux doesn't have 19 system processes that report to the Microsoft mother-ship for no good reason at all, that can't be turned off.

Proof of that which exists today? or are you still living in 1995?

It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.

Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.

Linus is slightly less evil than Gates.

Who cares, neither of them kill babies and eat them raw. I don't idolize either of them, they are just humans like me, not a god, and not worthy of religion.

I've been using Unix since around 1986. I started using Linux back in the pre-1

Re:I'm cheap...

[Trinition]

do not give me the batch file crap, batch does not do regex or any of that stuff, nor can I pipe my outputs and inputs

Actually, you can pipe inputs and outputs in batch. However, batch is in fact dead. Years ago, Microsoft devised the Windows Scripting Host to replace it, and it is very very nice. You can run it in GUI mode or command line. It supports RegEx as well as any scripting-enabled COM component (including a lot of standard Windows calls).

Re:I'm cheap...

[wpc4]

I like the fact that my internet connection is faster under Linux than it was under Windows XP. It's a real kick. If you have both running side by side, try comparing them sometime. I do run both Linux and Windows XP. The bandwidth is the same.. XP by default enables qos which reserve 20% of your bandwidth for applications that support it. Just go into network properties and remove that protocol and there you go.

Re:I'm cheap...

[wastingtape]

I was about about to point out WSH as well. As long as the terminal is running Windows 2000 or XP, WSH is actually a usable technology.

Also, if you already know Perl, ActiveState released a COM-scripting library for use in this application called ActivePerl. It will allow you to write windows shell scripts with perl if you'd prefer.

ActivePerl Product Page

Re:I'm cheap...

[cshark]

Man that was sloppy post. I understand why you don't want to attribute it to yourself. No one ever said anything about OS religion.

Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path).

Look, if you cared that much about my stupid post, you would have pointed out that Linux isn't an operating system or platform. It's a kernel. Nothing more.

Further you shouldn't assume that redhat is the only distribution, or that I even use red hat. I don't think I even mentioned red hat in the post, come to think of it. Odd...

Something goes wrong enough to where this is a feature?

Have you used Windows lately?

As opposed to the 1000s of games on the Windows box that all their friends are playing. Could be that you have only the default 5 games installed on the Windows box and they are tired of them and that's why they don't want to use those?

Yes, to put it back into context from left field "Games that come with Linux" was the operative term. Darnit, I called it Linux again, you should have corrected me. What kind of old timey know nothing snob are you?

Proof of that which exists today? or are you still living in 1995?

Yep, it's no secret. Don't believe me? Buy any third party firewall with application level blocking. Norton internet security catches most of them.

Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.

Ouch. Sounds like fun. Actually, I've only really needed to resort to man pages a couple of times. There's this great thing here in the 21st century called the internet.

Who cares, neither of them kill babies and eat them raw. I don't idolize either of them, they are just humans like me, not a god, and not worthy of religion.

Babies? Raw? You're right. It was a joke, specifically engineered for a single brief chuckle, for those inclined to think it was funny. If you need help this definition comes in handy.

Re:I'm cheap...

[Alan]

>I like the fact that there isn't a central monolithic registry that can take the entire system down.

Unlike when your RPM database gets corrupted or when RedHat inadvertantly puts the wrong information on glibc and everyone upgrades and is left with a machine that you can only reinstall the OS on (the shortest path)


Try an experiment. Delete your windows registry file(s) (assuming you can find them) and continue using your machine as normal, or reboot and do what you normally do. Does your machine require a re-install to make things run again?

Now delete your rpm/dpkg/emerge database. rm -rf /var/lib/dpkg, or whatever the equivelant is for redhat and friends. Continue running your apps, or reboot and run your apps normally. Does your machine require a re-install?

I'd say your answers would be yes for windows, no for linux. Why? Because the rpm/dpkg database is not used for much beyond package management. If you were to accidently nuke your /var/dpkg directory you could quite easily continue running the machine while that dir was either restored, re-created, or a second machine is built. I somehow doubt that windows is as forgiving, because the registry really acts like your $HOME/.files. Maybe a better comparision is to wonder if you deleted all the dotfiles in your home dir would you have to re-install just to run normally. Again I'd have to say 'no'.


>I prefer Mozilla to IE. Always have.

Objectively? or subjectively?


For this I'd have to say security, standards support, usability, and features all contribute to making mozilla mail/browser better than IE/outlook. A fair question though.


>It's nice that Linux will run (granted with a little work) on my prehistoric 486dx2.

Why? I guess it's nice to be nostalgic but I replaced all of those machines with machines that are a bit faster. As far as creep, Linux suffers it as much as Windows, just a couple years behind. One time, back in the day, Linux could be installed on my Pentium 60 with as little as 8M of RAM. Today, minimum recommended is 128M with 256M being "better" (see SuSE web pages, since I was just there earlier today actually *buying* a 9.1 distribution from them, for this example).


Why buy a new machine if you don't need one? I think the 486 is a bit old, but I ran my website on a p2 with 128megs of ram for a couple of years and it ran just fine, including the latest linux distro. Think that w2k/w2k3/iis/exchange/sql server would have run on that machine? Doubtful. Course, that brings in that I couldn't afford to run the MS equivelant apps that I was running on that host (web/mail/database).


>It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.

Heh, yeah... those wonderful 'man' pages. When there is documentation, it is completely dry when having simply one example of a very common use would answer 90% of all questions about it. Linux documentation (and even Unix documentation for the most part) is seriously lacking. It's written by engineers for engineers. No examples, just lists of the 200+ command line options for every program with almost no direction of which ones are useful together.


Man pages suck donkey balls, but most linux support sites (ie: forums.gentoo.org, etc) are pretty decent. A heck of a lot easier to find things than searching on MSDN that's for sure. Of course, if you're going to compare man pages to windows, you'd better factor in XPs wonderful built in help browser ("is the cdrom working now? click yes if it is..."). Sure it's blue and pretty, but I find it's answers as useless as man pages most of the time, and at least with man pages they give me a lot of information that I can sift through, instead of NO information at all.

That all said I disagree wtih some of the things that the original poster had as well, a bit too much of the Linux party line, but not all of the party lines are wrong, if you know what I mean.

Re:I'm cheap...

[Mephie]

It's nice that there's so much useful documentation on Linux out there. No matter what problem I'm having, the Linux community has documented just about everything incredibly well. And they never ask how helpful they were when they were no help at all. That's nice too.

I'm glad someone said this. It seems like there's a big misconception about Linux or OSS in general not being well-documented. I recently wanted to set up a radius server for EAP-TTLS. The amount of documentation on programs like FreeRadius is amazing. I found four different walkthroughs for configuring EAP-TTLS using FreeRadius/OpenSSL.

I don't have a monitor hooked up to the server, which is fantastic. I telnet in via OpenSSH, for which there is also tons of documentation. It's also a DHCP server, which I found incredibly easy to set up, thanks to extensive information online.

I admit to not being terribly proficient with Linux but I've used it to varying degrees since my first copy of Redhat 5.1, and virtually every time I've thought "Hmm, I wonder how I..." I pretty much just have to google (or even yahoo, back in the day) for it a bit and there's all the info I need.

Re:I'm cheap...

[cshark]

Now that you've mentally masturbated all over me, I feel dirty.

Jesus Christ man...
So you're telling me that I'm not entitled to my opinion because I don't present you with enough irrefutable evidence?

Really?

Burdon of proof? Refute my "information?" What information? This isn't exactly Lincoln v Douglas here, buddy.

If any web site is that important to you that you can spend enough time to write such a long useless response like that or even the last one, to my comparatively short stupid initial post, I'm a little scared of you. Okay, maybe more than a little scared.

Please don't come to my house and beat me up.

I know the job market's been tough lately, but there are a million better things you can do with your time than try to start a fight with the first idiot you find because it makes you feel like more of a man on Slashdot.

You fucking clod.

Fine. You win. You're so wonderful.

I will ask you before forming any opinion on anything.

But first, get some help. No seriously.

Consistency

[swordboy]

I always stop my "Linux conversion" when I get to the point where I have to choose Gnome or KDE (or both).

Re:Consistency

[abh]

Apparently reading the articles is too much to ask, but could you read the post at least?

He's not asking about switching to Linux... he's asking about why Linux users don't switch to Windows!

Re:Consistency

[xSauronx]

I stop mine when I want to play one of the many games that isnt supported under linux.

And spare me the short list of supported commercial games with linux clients, spare me WineX, and spare me lesser games people made for linux...Im playing Lineage 2 today, and perhaps an RTS game in the next couple of months, and undoubtedly a FPS that may or may not have linux support. It doesnt have *enough* of the games *I* want to play....unfortunately, as I like Linux much more than windows any day of the week.

Re:Consistency

[arose]

Nethack and "the falling brick game" are the only games I really need. YMMV.

I stay off of windows because it sucks!

[titaniam]

A couple of months ago I finally made the switch off of windows xp and onto Fedora Linux on my home machine. For years now, I have been using my home computer as a thin-client, doing most of my work via VNC and SSH on a remote server connected to a T1. That way, wherever I am my real desktop is available and stable and right how I left it with dozens of my windows open for various applications for months at a time. So I was already using Linux for most things. I would use windows on my home machine only for web surfing (firefox), gaming, digital camera hookup and its ability to suspend. Then I made the mistake of connecting to windows update... Suddenly all my programs started crashing, the windows on the desktop would pick a stacking order and not be convinced to alter it, and the new and improved active-X made all of my favorite games (diablo) unusable. So I said screw it, and made linux my default boot. I no longer game, and only need to reboot to windows when I have to upload pictures from my digital camera. And when I do boot to windows once a month, I make sure I am offline. My next laptop will have linux pre-installed so I guess USB support will be there and my need for windows will be gone. Oh yeah, I occasionally boot windows to see how crappy my various websites render under IE. So final answer: I keep off windows because it sucks. Also I do not want to support an abusive monopoly.

Re:I stay off of windows because it sucks!

[PhoenixFlare]

Then I made the mistake of connecting to windows update... Suddenly all my programs started crashing,

Perhaps there was a specific issue with one of the patches and another piece of software you had installed? I find it extremely hard to believe that your entire system would begin to constantly crash for some unknown reason.

If you're savvy enough to use SSH and VNC and all that, why didn't you at least educate yourself about the updates a bit before installing them?

Yes, some of the patches have caused problems that were not disclosed or known beforehand, but this is relatively rare, and you can generally either uninstall the patch or fix whatever issue it has caused.

the windows on the desktop would pick a stacking order and not be convinced to alter it,

This is so inane, it's funny. What, you couldn't figure out how to move through/around your various program windows? Give me a break...You sound like one of those people that equates everything they don't understand about computers to ghosts or magic or something.

Windows may have some odd quirks, but unless you're infected with a virus or trojan or have some extremely rare issue that i'm not aware of, your program windows do not pick screen positions and refuse to move.

and the new and improved active-X made all of my favorite games (diablo) unusable.

Utter rubbish.

First of all, what you're referring to in this context would be DirectX, not "active-X".

Secondly, your claim that it suddenly made all your games stop working is even more laughable. More specifically, i've been using Diablo, Diablo II, and Lord of Destruction under 3 different versions of DirectX (including the most current) over the years with absolutely no problems at all. So have thousands and thousands of other people.

I cannot recall more than one or two old non-DOS-based games that do not work now, and several that new DirectX versions actually improved.

Oh yeah, I occasionally boot windows to see how crappy my various websites render under IE.

God, could you be any more determined to ignore and twist the facts to suit your ranting?

I'll help you out on this one - if you don't like IE, try this. Works as good or better than IE for pretty much everything except Shockwave and Flash. There's a Windows version of Mozilla, too. And Opera.

So final answer: I keep off windows because it sucks. Also I do not want to support an abusive monopoly.

Judging from the complaints you bring up, I find it extremely hard to believe you have used Windows recently, if at all.

Feel free to respond, I have a feeling i'd enjoy it.

Re:I stay off of windows because it sucks!

[egarland]

I still use Windows on my primary desktop but I'm getting less and less attached to it. I do most of my work over an SSH session as well. I have a bunch of machines that run Windows, most of them came with it pre-installed. I stay away from most of the proprietary Windows stuff (Domains/AD, NTFS, etc) and know very little about them.

I recently got an LCD monitor and was forced to upgrade to XP to make it look half decent (2000's font rendoring is horrible on LCD monitors.) Wow was that painful. I don't trust Windows's upgrade tools (seem to leave things slightly broken with no way to back out) so I did a new install. It was the first time I had installed XP and it took a lot of time. Once it was done I was left with a shell of a machine that looked horrible (what kind of heavy drugs were the MS UI guys on) and had no working applications. I had to trick XP into using my old settings from my ntuser.dat file and I've had to reinstall or dig through and import registry settings for tons of programs. I've sunk tons of time into the upgrade and things still are a litte off. I install RedHat and Fedora a lot and I've just gotten used to having a working machine at the end of the install. Dealing with Windows again was annoying and frustrating.

Most of the machines I do work on are Linux boxes running various versions of RedHat. I put Fedora Core 2 on two of them after it came out and I have to say I'm impressed at the progress they have made on desktop usability. I used to think X was always going to be a little slow but Fedora is just as snappy as Windows. XP is seeming more and more like a clunky in comparison.

I don't like supporting an abusive monopoly as well but really I just need to get my job done. I doubt it will be too long before I switch my primary desktop to Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if XP was the last Windows I run on my primary desktop.

The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[YankeeInExile]

Curiously, in the last year I have actually started using Windows for the first time.

It has been the most difficult platform I have ever had to administer. Setting up even trivial network configurations is near impossible, with seemingly endless screens to move through, and very poor documentation.

Tasks that are trivial under Unix, have thus far eluded me. I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.

Doesn't that sound like precisely the Why $FREE_UNIX_SYSTEM Can Never Succeed on the Desktop Argument? I am sure that Windows is no harder to administer than Unix. But I have fifteen years of Unix adminning experience, and zero Windows experience. To people who grew up on PC-DOS and Wintel, it is as intuitive for them as dd is to me.

So, for everything that matters to me (writing, email, network infrastructure) I use the Sun. For everything that is trivial and fun (websurfing, chat) I use the Winblows box.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.

Did you try asking the dancing paperclip? He claims he has all the answers...

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Tasks that are trivial under Unix, have thus far eluded me. I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.

"I know how to do it" does not equal "This is trivial."

Setting up DNS on UNIX is quite complex. Whole books have been written on the subject.

Setting up DNS on Windows Server is no more complex than it is on UNIX. Whether it's simpler is a matter for argument. Personally, I think it's much simpler. But at the very least, it's no more complex. Just different.

But let's not talk about things like setting up DNS, a task that one person in a hundred thousand will have to do once every five years. Let's talk about things like sending and receiving instant messages.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Otter]

Same here, but on the desktop side. A job change has me in XP all day, and it is simply painful to use. (I just posted yet another JE complaining about it not ten minutes ago.)

It's not as bad as the noisier Slashbots claim (it doesn't give you cancer or make the monitor explode in your face) but everything is just hard!

I'd rather be using Linux, and I'd much, much be rather using OS X and Office X. (Why can't the put the Mac Business Unit guys in charge of the whole company?)

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Gortbusters.org]

I grew up with MS DOS, and let me tell you... the days of editing config.sys to free up memory to play wolfenstein are over!

Now there are tons of little options all over the place. Spyware/adware/viri install themselves in places you don't even know about. The bloat is incredible... one thing hangs, everything hangs.

Luckily, I got a unix shell account from my local ISP when I was 15 and started to mud. So, I got to learn both really easy.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[SuperQ]

some areas just don't have good communities.. and that's unfortunate.. because it takes community knowlage to do any kind of complex tasks, windows or *NIX.

The U of MN has a great community of windows people who actualy know what they're doing.. if you google for "disable lanman" the first thing that comes up is a U of MN security document for setting up windows without old (easy to crack) lanman hashes.

We also have a fairly good linux communit, www.tclug.org. We used to have beermeetings.. but the people who organized it lost interest.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[autopr0n]

Tasks that are trivial under Unix, have thus far eluded me. I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.

Are you using Win2k server or desktop? The desktop version has a DNS server. In fact I'm not sure if even the 'normal' server version has a built in DNS server.

Setting up a DNS server in win2k3 enterprise server (which I got for free as a CS student, I'd never pay for a server OS) was very simple for me, much less of a pain then manually editing bind config files.

The only real difficulty is that most of the standard barer OSS servers need to be downloaded and installed separately, while they come preinstalled on Linux. It can be annoying to find, download, and install Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc.

Honestly I find windows easier to administer, just because I'm more used to it. I prefer intuitive GUIs to text files for which you need to read gobs of documentation to figure out. The DNS server in windows is actually a good example of that. I was able to figure out how to configure everything I needed to do using just a few GUI screens. In contrast, I spent a few hours reading how to configure BIND when I used that.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Emperor Shaddam IV]

Thats because Linux/Unix admin is usually:

man "something"

vi /etc/conf/somefile

restart daemon or reboot and then check the logs.

While Windows is:

Search microsoft.com, if your luck
Otherwise, buy a Book.

Go to Control Panel, Click, Open, check, click, click, open, open, open, click, tab, type something in, reboot, Go to Control Panel, Click, Open, check, check. Reboot

And "Pray" everything works! :)

If God intended use to use GUI, the bible would have had Icons.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Mr Guy]

"I know how to do it" does not equal "This is trivial."

Setting up DNS on UNIX is quite complex. Whole books have been written on the subject.

And books being written on a subject doesn't make it complex. Whole books have been written on MANY topics that are relatively simple.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[thehun101]

The trick with linux is knowing what that "something" is. I have spent many hours searching the web and my manuals looking for a simple command in linux just because I didn't know the correct command to use or even the linux terminology for it.

However in windows I have always been able to "Click, Open, check, click, click, etc" until I find what I am looking for. It usually takes less than a half an hour the first time I do it.

I am now somewhat proficient as a linux user, but I am still lacking as an administrator.

-the Hun

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[awkScooby]

Tasks that are trivial under Unix, have thus far eluded me. I still don't know how to set up DNS under Win2K.

What makes Windows even worse to administer is the non-standard way Microsoft implements standards. Try getting Windows to integrate into a mixed environment. Many times you'll have to choose between doing things the Microsoft way (in which case nobody else can play) or a standards compliant way.

A quick example -- Microsoft doesn't implement IETF standard TSIG in their DNS implementation. So, your DDNS options are:

1. Use MS DNS and workstations register using proprietary TSIG -- non-MS systems can't use DDNS
2. Use MS DNS and have MS DHCP server make DDNS entries on workstations behalf
3. Use non-MS DNS and TSIG from workstations -- MS systems can't use DDNS
4. Use non-MS DNS and non-MS DHCP and have DHCP make DDNS entries on workstations behalf

We're not talking about oddball protocols here. DNS is a pretty fundamental protocol for a functional Internet.

I don't use Microsoft for DNS or DHCP because they don't work correctly. The protocols which they seem to get right I don't use either because in my experience it's just a matter of time until they make them incompatible.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[mystran]

Actually, I do know enough of Windows to be able to do basic administration on it. What's truly keeping it out of my desktop, is that for one it's too opaque (can't easily see what's really happening) and the usability is shit.

Really, the usability sucks. It's not only that the command line is poor, it can't be nicely used remotely without special software, or that most apps crash far too often. I could stand those.

What I can't stand is the braindead window-manager without proper support for sloppy-mouse, without ability to send a window to bottom (without minimizing them), the stupid taskbar that's mostly useless, and the fact that most Windows programs are simply awful for anything but the most basic tasks, and the lack of decent virtual desktops. I know you can fix most of these, but usually it introduces stupid problems because programs weren't designed for it.

Finally, I like the ability to plug devices into my computer and expect them to work. Generally, I've had less driver problems with Linux than with Windows. Finally, I don't like the idea of rebooting a system every ten minutes.

When forced to use Windows, I usually end up installing ports of the tools I use in Linux, so what's the point? Pay for software that just makes life harder?

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[ortholattice]

One specific example is installing a private certificate server. On Linux it essentially involves 3 CLI commands. On Windows 2000 it is a tortuous exercise in point-and-click. Here are the exact details:

(sorry for this - I couldn't get it posted otherwise - even if I put this at the end) defeating1 lameness1 filter1 defeating2 lameness2 filter2 defeating3 lameness3 filter3 defeating4 lameness4 filter4 defeating5 lameness5 filter5 defeating6 lameness6 filter6 defeating7 lameness7 filter7 defeating8 lameness8 filter8 defeating9 lameness9 filter9 defeating10 lameness10 filter10 defeating11 lameness11 filter11 defeating12 lameness12 filter12 defeating13 lameness13 filter13 defeating14 lameness14 filter14 defeating15 lameness15 filter15 defeating16 lameness16 filter16 defeating17 lameness17 filter17 defeating18 lameness18 filter18 defeating19 lameness19 filter19 defeating20 lameness20 filter20 defeating21 lameness21 filter21 defeating22 lameness22 filter22 defeating23 lameness23 filter23 defeating24 lameness24 filter24 defeating25 lameness25 filter25 defeating26 lameness26 filter26 defeating27 lameness27 filter27 defeating28 lameness28 filter28 defeating29 lameness29 filter29 defeating30 lameness30 filter30 defeating31 lameness31 filter31 defeating32 lameness32 filter32 defeating33 lameness33 filter33 defeating34 lameness34 filter34 defeating35 lameness35 filter35 defeating36 lameness36 filter36 defeating37 lameness37 filter37 defeating38 lameness38 filter38 defeating39 lameness39 filter39 defeating40 lameness40 filter40 defeating41 lameness41 filter41 defeating42 lameness42 filter42 defeating43 lameness43 filter43 defeating44 lameness44 filter44 defeating45 lameness45 filter45 defeating46 lameness46 filter46 defeating47 lameness47 filter47 defeating48 lameness48 filter48 defeating49 lameness49 filter49 defeating50 lameness50 filter50 defeating51 lameness51 filter51 defeating52 lameness52 filter52 defeating53 lameness53 filter53 defeating54 lameness54 filter54 defeating55 lameness55 filter55 defeating56 lameness56 filter56 defeating57 lameness57 filter57 defeating58 lameness58 filter58 defeating59 lameness59 filter59 defeating60 lameness60 filter60 defeating61 lameness61 filter61 defeating62 lameness62 filter62 defeating63 lameness63 filter63 defeating64 lameness64 filter64 defeating65 lameness65 filter65 defeating66 lameness66 filter66 defeating67 lameness67 filter67 defeating68 lameness68 filter68 defeating69 lameness69 filter69 defeating70 lameness70 filter70 defeating71 lameness71 filter71 defeating72 lameness72 filter72 defeating73 lameness73 filter73 defeating74 lameness74 filter74 defeating75 lameness75 filter75 defeating76 lameness76 filter76 defeating77 lameness77 filter77 defeating78 lameness78 filter78 defeating79 lameness79 filter79 defeating80 lameness80 filter80 defeating81 lameness81 filter81 defeating82 lameness82 filter82 defeating83 lameness83 filter83 defeating84 lameness84 filter84 defeating85 lameness85 filter85 defeating86 lameness86 filter86 defeating87 lameness87 filter87 defeating88 lameness88 filter88 defeating89 lameness89 filter89 defeating90 lameness90 filter90 defeating91 lameness91 filter91 defeating92 lameness92 filter92 defeating93 lameness93 filter93 defeating94 lameness94 filter94 defeating95 lameness95 filter95 defeating96 lameness96 filter96 defeating97 lameness97 filter97 defeating98 lameness98 filter98 defeating99 lameness99 filter99 defeating100 lameness100 filter100

Installing a private certificate server, Linux version:

Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and change "<VirtualHost _default_:443>"
to "<VirtualHost 192.168.10.200:443>"

[root@dts conf]# cd /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key
[root@dts ssl.key]# openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
[root@dts ssl.key]# cd ../ssl.crt
[root@dts ssl.crt]# openssl req -new -key ../ssl.key/server.key -x509 -out server.crt
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:New York

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[phazethru]

And re: documentation?? Puh-lease. There are so many more resources out there for Windows, its no contest. Get real.

This may or may not be true, I'm not going to go count web pages. But documentation isn't about quantity, it's about quality. With windows, you can get resources about all common problems and concerns, occasionally get resources about not-common ones, and very very rarely will you get help with the most obscure.

But Linux documentation, like onions and ogres, has layers. The man page for simple usage and configuration, linux help sites for more complicated problems and example configs, mailing lists for horribly obscure problems that only the developers can really help with, and as an absolute last resort, the code itself, which answers all questions if you have a month to spend solving them.

And to answer the initial question posted...

I can have a web server, DNS server, firewall, mail server, and pop server in linux.

I can have a web server, DNS server, firewall, mail server, pop server, and X amount of debt in windows.

Then again, I read a study somewhere saying that my TCO is higher becuase I use Linux, so maybe I'm wrong? Or maybe the group doing that study got their software from the 'P2P outlet store'.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[RoLi]

Exactly my experience. Once you are used to multiple desktops and a good window manager (like one that supports moving windows with ALT+LMB) Windows just feels old.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[hawkeyeMI]

I got a nice hand-me-down pocketpc machine runding Windows PocketPC and went looking for software. It all costs money. To someone who uses GPL software on OS X and linux 99% of the time it's fabulously annoying.

It's the old shareware thing. People want money for crappy little utilities that may or may not still be available when the author gets bored. When people open-source (more specifically, use the GPL on) their software and release it, all they want back are bug reports and maybe contributions. This allows the software to improve and stick around even if the author loses interest.

I'm still lacking basic utilities on my pocketpc and wishing it were an iPaq so I could install Familiar Linux on it. I wish I had a clue about programming for Windows PocketPC or Mobile or CE or whatever the name-of-the day is so that I could maybe start trying to write stuff for it...

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[spectecjr]

Finally, I don't like the idea of rebooting a system every ten minutes.

Then stop rebooting it every ten minutes.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Bad Boy Marty]

Actually, what I find is that it is harder to become an "expert" in Windows, and even when you do, Windows is so user-friendly that it is actually expert-hostile. Add to that the fact that so few administrative tasks are automatable, and any single one of those tasks takes more mouse clicks than it would take keystrokes to write a program to do it. Well, that's how *I* define expert-hostile.

Of course, now that I sometimes use Windows for work, I can't even imagine running Windows without either ActivePerl or a complete CygWin.

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[plj]

Doesn't that sound like precisely the Why $FREE_UNIX_SYSTEM Can Never Succeed on the Desktop Argument? I am sure that Windows is no harder to administer than Unix. But I have fifteen years of Unix adminning experience, and zero Windows experience. To people who grew up on PC-DOS and Wintel, it is as intuitive for them as dd is to me.

You hit straight to the nail.

Back in 2001, I was still very much pro-MS guy. I had used linux, started to understand its benefits compared to Windows like scriptability - W2k/WBA is quite good, too, but NT4 was horrible without something like Cygwin, and it didn't help me a bit as I did not really know Unix.

I first played with Slackware at 1997, at home. Back then, I only had a modem, and downloading anything was rather hopeless. The distro was really primitive comparing to today's distros, and I really felt it was just a toy.

Then, at 2001, the company I was working for at that time hired a guy to develop Java servlets. I had just started to get the company network managed - when I came a year earlier, it was hell; a totally unmanaged local network and web administration outsourced to a company, which was totally incapable to provide any customer service whatsoever. As the company had both W98 and WNT4 boxes, and I knew the W2k was coming, I decided to upgrade all boxes to W2k ASAP to make the network management easier, and manage the webserver by myself in the future, and the CEO agreed.

Anyway, that Java coder absolutely wanted to place his creation to a Linux box! I rather opposed, but as we were both geeks we get to talks rather easily, and I finally agreed to install a RH6.2 box as a new web server, if he'd just make it easy enough for me to administer. I had a little earlier got broadband at home, and had briefly tested RH6.0, but although I had started to understand Linux a little better, I still did not know a lot about Apache, Tomcat or any other its server software. I then learned Linux yet a little better, although not that much yet, and started to believe it as a possible server alternative.

Btw, back then I was running an MS DNS software, and actually I found it rather straightforward, although I don't really remember that well anymore. In WNT4 that was a separate app, but in W2k that was some MMC snap-in. But then again I later found BIND to be a rather straightforward too, and it only became a burden later, when I first learned about chrooting.

At 2001 that company was aquired by a major publishing company, and I worked few months in a new position, where I also had to learn Macs. I have to say, that I really loved the Mac OS 9's UI compared to Windows, but I hated the poor memory management and multitasking. However, I also briefly tested Mac OS 10.0.3, and although that felt cool, it was not yeat ready for primetime use. I left the company before I could've get my hands to 10.1.

Later at that autumn, I finally made the switch at home, and it happened all of sudden; I had just upgraded my home box (which was an about one year old W2k install) to XP few weeks earlier, when Explorer got really broken; every time I opened any folder, it opened a search box instead - i.e. the default context-menu-function for directory had changed from "open" to "search". I've usually been quite pro with registry, so I tried to fix that - I tried really hard, and spent a lot of time. But somehow, I failed anyway.

As I thought the nature of the problem, I came to conlusions that I probably couldn't fix it without reinstall, and as the problem was in settings, which theoretically worked correctly - just a wrong option had been selected - a reinstall over existing install probably wouldn't have fixed anything and I'd had to do a clean install.

Now, just the thought about the work required for that really made me felt pissed, and as a MS customer, I started to do what any rational customer does, when (s)he isn't satisfied with a product: I started to look for alternatives! I downloaded a beta copy of Sta

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Pionar]

heh, those are the same complaints I have for linux.

Mozilla always hanging, having to restart X (the bad ctrl-alt-backspace way) every 6 hours or so, getting java to even do anything at all, lack of plugins for mozilla (come on, no shockwave? weak!)

Plus, the apps don't make the OS. XP has been just as stable as my Linux box was. Last time the machine rebooted was due to power failure two weeks ago (UPS kicked in and shut it down after 5 minutes since i wasn't there). 3 weeks before that, it crashed due to a classmate's mistake (we were in a group project for a programming class and he put an endless loop in on accident).

Hell, XP is more dependable than my cable box!

Re:The fact that it is so difficult to administer.

[Pionar]

Oh, I'm not saying that Linux sucks or anything, I really like it. However, I was pointing out that some complaints about Windows can be made about Linux, too.

And the shockwave thing, it's not a deal breaker. However, I do use shockwave from time to time.

One thing that sucks about windows is a lack of a cron-type app. Windows scheduler or whatever it's called is weak.

Another thing is the lack of a viable, native, free scripting language that is actually being worked on. I hate having to install python or perl on every Win machine I work on.

The Cost

[blackhelicopter]

It costs too much in buying it, maintaining it, getting new anti-virus software, fighting with it... I just don't have the money and more importantly time...

Re:The Cost

[Gortbusters.org]

True that.... You can download Linux for free and get all of your power applications (evolution, open office, dia, gimp, [the list goes on...]). Do some security configuration and then you don't have to buy virus scanners, or adware removal tools, or spyware detectors, or pop-up blockers, or any of that shit.

If you want games, it's cheaper to just play on the console -- yes, give MS some money for Xbox becaues Xbox live rules, but that is certainly better than to having to constantly upgrade video cards, and new versions of windows, and directX versions that may screw things up.

If you want to take it a step further and theme windows, then there's more money to get a decent theme desktop program (and even then it starts to slow things down).

Sasser

[awhelan]

Sasser keeps me off windows... then I go back on and it restarts my computer within 10 minutes!

Mac OS X

[pmj]

Mac OS X.

Re:Mac OS X

[alfredo]

Me too. I only mess with the system when I want to, not when I have to.

Anyway, windows is butt ugly.

Quick

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone mod this article flamebait!

The price is the sticking point

[Wellmont]

The price, almost absolutely the price....it is just to expensive to keep up with windows releases for a college student. Microsoft is really doing a disservice by selling software for hundreds of dollars and sometimes even thousands.

Re:The price is the sticking point

[fornaxsw]

Since when do college students pay for software?

Re:The price is the sticking point

[KrispyKringle]

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. While my current desktop was custom-built, previously--and probably much of the time in the future--I bought and will buy machines from an OEM. It's simply faster, easier, and generally as cheap, if not cheaper (of course, with your own custom build, you get what you want, you know the components are good, and so forth). But I don't really enjoy hardware enough to get a thrill from building a machine.

Anyway, when I get an OEM, I get Windows. Additionally, at my university, I can get Windows licenses for free (site license) with minimal hassle. So price is hardly a sticking point (of course, I have become used to free software enough that having to mess about with license authentication and so forth is still a big hassle).

On top of that, I know literally nobody, I think, who does not pirate (other than myself). So if the vast majority of students are willing and able to get Windows for free, legally or not, why do some choose not to? Perhaps you are unwilling to pirate Windows, and I commend you, but likely it came with your computer (and if not, the educational version of XP is under $100).

I personally use Linux, FreeBSD,and MacOS X because I prefer the environment. I've been working on Windows machines in the lab I work in, and it's painful. For development, I've heard VisualStudio is supposed to be great. But I'd say give me grep and Emacs any day. I've tried Cygwin. It's installed here. But it still just isn't really the same.

I think security is my number one concern, but it's a concern with Linux, too. Despite the zealotry, Linux security is hard to do well. Sure, you don't have to worry about worms as much, but in all honesty if someone were deliberately aiming for my machine, can I be sure it would hold up? Probably not. That's not to say one can't do Linux security; by dint of being open source, I have a plethora of options like PaX, GRSec, and SELinux to choose from. But I don't personally think many Linux users are as ``secure by default'' as they might think.

Stability might be a close second, but I've had some complaints with OS X (which I've only been using for a few months) and my experiences with WinXP show it to be a big improvement in that regard over previous versions.

Familiarity, then, is what takes the cake. On a UNIX-ish system, I am at home. On Windows? ``Where can I find the button to do this?''

Once you go Free, you'll never go back

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Last October I made the switch from Windows to Linux (SuSE 9.0) and
haven't looked back. I was a long time Windows user and programmer
(going all the way back to 3.0---just remember how great it was when
3.11 came out!), but I'd grown tired of the bulk and cost of Windows.
When Microsoft finally stabilized Windows with XP it was too little,
too late.

What keeps me going back to Windows is simply that I don't need to.
Here I sit with

0. A Unix command-shell that let's me do real work
1. A perfectly nice GUI (I'm using GNOME)
2. A stable web browser and email program (Firefox and Thunderbird)
3. A good personal finance application (gnucash)
4. Instant messaging (GAIM)
5. Outlook compatibility (Evolution)
6. A stable operating system that doesn't hide things from me
7. Speed, such speed, compared to XP.
8. No viruses, worms, and other crap targetting Windows
9. Graphics editing (The GIMP)
10. Multimedia (mplayer, XINE, etc.)
11. Complete office suite (OpenOffice.org)
12. Built in firewall (iptables)
13. A really cool spam filter/email sorter :-)

Why would I go back?

0. Windows costs $$$ to buy and they've got this evil registration scheme
1. It seems like every week some worm or other would be able to take out my machine
2. No freakin' idea what all these services and things are doing
3. A web browser and other components integrated into the system like some sort of cancer.

and bottom line

5. Microsoft's software just isn't cool. It's like some pale imitation of cool software with just the minimum set of features to make the average Joe go "cool" while drooling into his beer.

John.

Re:Once you go Free, you'll never go back

[Gorath99]

Pretty much my story too. I've used MS since DOS3. Never really got into *nix, as for a long time I had no way to try it out (no internet) and once I did get a chance to try it out on a Solaris machine, I found it sorely disappointing (CDE annoyed the heck out of me and I didn't know any of the CLI commands).

Then about 18 months ago I had to work on a Redhat desktop for a couple of months. I took some time to learn to use the CLI commands and eventually got hooked.

When I installed Mandrake at home, I set the machine up to boot into Windows by default. After only two weeks or so I noticed that I pretty much always chose to boot linux instead, so that became the default. Stayed that way ever since.

Why do I keep away from Windows? Two things mainly.

1) Pretty much everything I do except playing games and making PowerPoint presentations (OO.org is great, but Impress presentations don't always look perfect in PowerPoint, which I have to use for the actual presentation) can be done just as easily or more easily under linux.

2) I'm in charge of linux. Linux doesn't try to dictate how I should use my computer. If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one. If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can. If I want to get rid of some program I dislike, linux won't try to stop me. Etc. etc.

And of course the price is really nice too, but that's not as big a selling point to me as those other 2 points, since I can get cheap/free copies of Windows programs for most things that I need to do (student license for MS-Office, eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX, etc.)

Re:Once you go Free, you'll never go back

[IAmMaxHarris]

Wrong.

I used Linux exclusively (starting with Slackware, running kernel 1.2.3) over a five year period from 1996 until 2000.

The quality/stability of Windows 2000 won me over.

I switched to Windows 2000, and never looked back. Gone are the installation headaches, poor user interfaces, lack of integrated features, poor documentation, and politics of free software. I'm more productive with Visual Studio, SQL Server, .NET, and Windows Server than I ever was with Linux, MySQL, vi, and gdb. I don't have to waste time worrying about which toolkit to code for, or how to hack around some mind-numbingly bad design (like X).

The cost of software licenses is not something I care about: even Microsoft's retail prices add up to far less than 1% of revenue at my company. And if I didn't have their software, I'd be much less productive than I am now. So their stuff pays for itself.

Re:Once you go Free, you'll never go back

[Gorath99]

>>If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one.
>
>Why can't you do the same in Windows? I've recently used Geoshell a lot and it was a real cool minimalist (much more so than KDE or Gnome) Explorer replacement. There are dozens more, and this community is actually thriving in these days. :-)

Cool. I didn't know that there was so much activity in that area these days.

Last time I looked into that stuff most of these replacement shells were either glorified skins and/or ugly hacks that could cause lots of unexpected problems. Of course, that was still in the days of Windows 98, so I won't blame it all on the shells :-)

Maybe I'll give it another shot. I still got to use XP every now and then...

>>If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can.
>
>Why can't you file a wishlist to an author of a Windows program? However, I agree about the modification advantage though, although I'm not experienced enough at Linux programming that I could use that freedom. I doubt many Windows users are either, so it's probably no advantage to many switchers.

True. Problem though is that while you may send a wishlist to large non-FOSS companies like MS or EA, chances are that it'll never even reach the developers. And even with medium sized companies your chances usually aren't good. Of course, there's lots of FOSS programs for Windows too. It's just not the norm, which in general makes these things a lot harder.

What Keeps Me Off of Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple! Greased walls.

Repeatability, Predictability and Orthogonality

[Space cowboy]

What makes me stick with Linux is the fact that when something does go wrong, there's a finite and small number of things that can generally cause the problem. I can quickly and easily narrow down what the problem is without having to understand the significance of lots of unrelated things. The 'everything is a file' mantra has some far-ranging consequences, at least IMHO, and it's the exceptions that cause most of the problems!

It helps that it's very stable, it helps that most of the config files are in ASCII, and almost always commented. It helps that there's a tremendous resource (man) available about just about every command, and of course it helps that it can be learnt piecemeal to a large extent. The K&R book starts off saying that they don't think 'C' is easily taught using a big book, that the smaller concept-driven approach works better. I think the same thing applies to unix. I don't think the same thing applies to the Win32 API. Perhaps with .NET, I don't know...

To a certain extent this preference comes from learning unix (linux) before Windows - I know more about Unix than Windows, and I like what I learnt. Unix is a programmers OS, written for them, by them. I'm at heart a programmer ergo I like Unix :-)

The old adage, "Don't fix what isn't broken" comes to mind as well - Unix has served me well in various incarnations, most recently Linux. It's not broken yet...

Simon

Re:Repeatability, Predictability and Orthogonality

[SuperQ]

I personaly started using computers with DOS 3. xt's and 286's were around at my dad's work, and I would just poke around with them, trying any command I could come up with. When we finaly got a computer at home, it came with windows 3.0, (and then 3.1 free upgrade) It took so long for my 386-33 to load up stuff in windows, i just gave up and went back to doing things from dos...

Several years later, I started taking classes at the U of MN, and was given a free shell account on a sun system.. I didn't know anything about it, they provided a menu system that would get me to pine, tin, and gopher. There was a unix shell menu option, and I started playing with that, at first, I had no idea what was going on, becuase I was used to DOS. I finaly got a book that was "Unix for DOS users", and had a nice one-to-one table of commands, and some unix basics. I had no one around to really teach me any unix stuff, as everyone was using windows 3.1 and then 95. I eventualy got slackware of a local BBS.. and later on a friend ordered a slackware disk from walunt creek.

after getting to college.. i just stoped using windows because if I left my PC in windows, I had to be in my dorm room to use it.. if I was using linux, I could telnet to it from computer labs all over campus and play with stuff while being social with all the geeks who didn't have their own computers.

These days, I just don't have a use for windows.. all my work stuff is Linux, and I think the only windows software I have to use is for uploading music to my NetMD.

As a developer...

[Pivot]

I find myself much more productive in a Linux / Unix environment. Linux is just much more user friendly for me.

Re:As a developer...

[molarmass192]

I'm with you there. My top 10 reasons, in rough order, are:

1) I much prefer a single root based filesystem. There's just /, not C:\, D:\, E:\ ...
2) Symbolic links are incredibly useful.
3) Bash, I love it, period.
4) SSH / SCP via the CLI rather than a GUI.
5) Can optimize the kernel/OS image for each box/purpose meaning consistently superior performance to equivalent Win boxen.
6) SuSE provides me with a single DVD with (almost) all the software I need.
7) All configs are kept in real live config files, not hide-it, special key, binary value "registry keys", worst idea ever.
8) Ability to run headless boxes (did I mention that SSH rocks?)
9) Reliability, not just in terms of crashing but in terms of how difficult it is to corrupt a Linux install.
10) Win4Lin. It's an absolutely brilliant piece of software, except for games and a few DRM proggies, it can pretty much handle anything one would need Windows for.

That said, my only complaint is that you have to be careful when shopping peripherals, especially cutting edge stuff like WiFi cards. However, that's a blue moon type of thing and with a little research before hitting the stores, it can be pretty painless.

Re:As a developer...

[molarmass192]

Ok, you're playing Devil's advocate, so I'll concede on the lesser Cygwin/MinGW and putty points, but I have to rebuke a couple of your points:

1) C:\ != /, no way man. Show me how to map a drive as a subdirectory of C:\.

5) My personal experience says different. When I optimize a kernel for my VIA C3, it's noticeably faster than a generic i586 kernel. It's hard to put a number on it by I'd guess in the 20% faster range, at least when I use GCC on that box. I'll concede that WinXP does something similar with CPU specific HAL DLL loading. As for X, I haven't perceived any difference in GUI responsiveness between Linux and Windows since XF86 4.3 came out in early 2003.

6) You missed the point, I don't mean search, gather and burn it yourself. I mean you pay $60, get a DVD pre-stamped with everything you need on it. The equivalent would be an MSDN DVD will everything on it, which simply doesn't exist. As a side note, I used to have an MSDN subscription back in the day. You'd get like 50 CDs in a white binder, it was great for bragging if nothing else.

7) The point is that I don't like the way application configuration is detached from the application. Under Linux, I know if I tar up my home directory and move it from box A to box B, I know my app configs will move with me.

8) By headless, I mean no GUI running at all, no resources wasted. This is impossible under W2K, W2K3, and WinXP. My web servers, database servers and file servers do not need to waste their cycles managing a GUI. That said, most people don't run web servers, database servers, and file servers.

Anyhow, I fully realize that I'm in the minority of power users and at least 90% of the Windows users out there could give a rat's ass about my 10 points. If I was a lawyer or an MD, I could probably care less too, but I'm an admin/dev/arch so sadly I don't have that luxury.

It's funny you mention the second class citizen thing. I used to push Linux like mad a few years ago. However, I eventually realized that the things I found important (my 10 points) don't mean sh*t to casual users. That eventually lead to me reverting most of the "forced" installs I did to XP. I'm completely level headed about it all now. There's a place for Win and a place for Lin.

Re:As a developer...

[Badaro]

C:\ != /, no way man. Show me how to map a drive as a subdirectory of C:\.

1) Right-click "My Computer", choose "Manage", choose "Disk Management"
2) Right-click partition, choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths", click "Add", pick folder to map partition to.
3) Press OK, it's done.

Requires NTFS for this to work, but I don't think that's a big deal.

[]s Badaro

My default Linux install is just more USEFUL

[Dimensio]

The only thing that I get with Windows XP that is of any use to me is greater compatability with games.

I find Linux to be much more useful in that I have a lot of free tools at my disposal just from the stuff included in the default install (Debian testing user here). KDE has a built-in free newsreader, there are a lot more useful command-line utilities (Windows has no builtin WHOIS lookup utility) and overall I prefer the aesthetics of the interface (both the GUI, which is far more customizable than in Windows, and the command line).

Most of it is a matter of personal preference, but the free and fast availability of easier-to-use utilities (apt-get install vs looking for a website that has a Windows utility that matches what I want) gives Linux a greater edge.

Re:My default Linux install is just more USEFUL

[eric_ste]

Like you, usability is the main point. Good support for focus follows mouse is a major point for me. CLick doesn't raise window is an other. Tweakui provides badly implemented version of these features. A good scriptable shell. sed, awk, perl, gcc, find, grep, strace, tcpdump, lsof to name a few.

9 years without using a virus or an anti-virus is an other incentive. The virus of the week always makes me laugh. Yes one day virii might hit the Linux user but for the moment, Windows is the easiest target for kiddies. ;)

Last winter, I tried to give XP a shot... it lasted a week and I could not take it anymore.

Bottom line, linux is just more usefull.

Re:My default Linux install is just more USEFUL

[Dimensio]

The difference between Outlook and knode is that if I were given a choice between using knode and being stripped naked, strung to the back of a pickup truck with a rope wrapped around my genitals and driven through a field of broken glass, I'd choose to use knode.

Re:My default Linux install is just more USEFUL

[Frizzle Fry]

The difference between Outlook and knode is

Despite the name similarity, I think outlook is pretty much a completely different program from outlook express

I just simply hate Microsoft

[donbrock]

and Gates and Ballmer and ...

Well...

[xcham]

Shoddy business practices, nerve-wracking battles with the Control Panel (I'd much rather deal with /etc thank you) and a long history of instability crises. That and UNIXish environments are much more conducive to development work, I find.

I do know that WinXP is much less crash prone than stuff I was using years ago, before I made the switch, but I just use what works. GNU/Linux is a pretty good power user's desktop platform. And of course, the price is right.

The only reason I have a WinXP partition is GAMES

[Assmasher]

GAMES GAMES baby. I'm 32 but I still love to play the games. Yes, I have some games on my MDK9.2 partitions, but they mostly suck (sadly.)

If games came out on Linux at even roughly the same rate as WinXP boxes, I'd NEVER LOOK BACK (except at work where I have to [currently] use XP.)

Moving Away From Windows

[filesiteguy]

I've been very disappointed in the direction Windows is going. I'm a long-time NT user and have been a Lan Manager expert since '93. I still use NT 5.1 at work (unfortunately) and am now ready to jump to Mandrake 10 at home (where I currently have NT 5.0). I think MS has gotten themselves into a bind where they are moving too slow and in too many directions (xbox, NT, Office,...) and are doomed to recreate the IBM downsize issue when they lost focus in the '80s / '90's.

Nothing really. Especially fonts.

[Stupid Dog]

What I really like in Windows is the font system. It's simple. Drop a font into the fonts folder in control panel, and it will just work. And it looks good. Unix fonts are a pain in the eyes, and blurring them to death with font aliasing does not please my eyes either. In fact, bad looking fonts are the killer argument that _prevents_ me from running a Unix as my main OS.

Re:Nothing really. Especially fonts.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really like in Windows is the font system. It's simple. Drop a font into the fonts folder in control panel, and it will just work. And it looks good. Unix fonts are a pain in the eyes, and blurring them to death with font aliasing does not please my eyes either. In fact, bad looking fonts are the killer argument that _prevents_ me from running a Unix as my main OS.

Open up the KDE control center, and go to the fonts tab. Drop a font in, or choose it via the file dialog. Press OK. Font installed.

As for fonts looking good, if you use a modern distribution with xft2 and fontconfig installed, fonts look better than under Windows.

Re:Nothing really. Especially fonts.

[jamesots]

On a modern linux distribution you can just put the font file in ~/.fonts and it's installed and shows up immediately. Works on my SuSE 9.1/KDE laptop and on my Debian Testing/Gnome desktop.

I only use Windows now for testing webpages in IE (yuck) and the occasional Flash creation.

Re:Nothing really. Especially fonts.

[mrroach]

That's the exact same method used to install fonts for over a year now in Gnome. I'm guessing that KDE has the same thing.

-Mark

Re:Nothing really. Especially fonts.

[Graff]

I read the parent and immediately thought of why I stick with OS 8.6 for typography - drop da files into da fonts folder. Easy beans.

It's even easier with Mac OS X. If you have the Fonts folder in a Finder sidebar or on the Dock you just drag the files to the folder icon and they are installed. The Font Book application that comes with Mac OS X is also great for managing your fonts, as well as installing them.

Not only that but also Mac OS X has much better typography than Mac OS 8.6. It's Display PDF all the way through from font handling to printing. The antialiasing is smarter, the kerning more exact, better handling of Unicode and right-to-left character sets. The text just overall looks better and more consistant.

Well..

[autopr0n]

Personally, if I was looking for a sys-admn I wouldn't hire someone who wasn't familiar with Windows and Linux, at least. But then again, I'm not.

In order for you to switch to something it has to be cool or compelling in some way. And for most individuals, I don't think windows is. Maybe a couple years ago it might have seemed "cool" to switch from old UNIX stuff to windows, but I don't think many people perceive it that way anymore. And for home users, windows is probably what they've always used.

And Mac users probably wont switch to windows because they hate it.

Heh. Actually this post is story is kind of funny, I mean. It's just a chance to bash the hell out of Microsoft without being off topic.

Re:More propoganda from a linux company

[mrwonton]

The irony in them asking their readers why they use Linux and not Windows? I don't think thats irony, but thanks Alanis.

Ethernet?

[pdbogen]

Originally, I installed RedHat 5.0 on my old 486 because I needed to plug it into a cable modem, and Windows 3 just didn't cut the mustard. Ironic, because it probably would have handled it (in hindsight), but to my uneducated eyes, it seemed that it'd be easier to do under Linux (and, admittedly, it probably was easier, since my only goal was connectivity, and I didn't really do anything requiring a GUI in those days.

Legal Software

[kinzillah]

I was tired of pirating software I couldn't afford. Open source software is largely gratis.

Re:Legal Software

[jc42]

I'd have probably modded that "funny", but of course there's a HHOS note to it. I've noticed an interesting cultural difference between Windows and unix/linux users.

When you dig a bit into Windows systems, you find that they almost always have lots of commercial software that hasn't been paid for. The users aren't ashamed of this; they think there's nothing wrong with it. They know very well that the vendors don't like it, and most are aware that it's illegal. But they grin and shrug when you try to get them to justify their "theft".

On the other side of the Great Divide, you find the unix/linux crowd really concerned with "IP" issues and unwilling to pirate their software. Many of them even do things like pay RedHat or Debian for a set of CDs when they could probably download them faster and legally for free, because they think these small companies should be supported.

Not that either attitude is guaranteed in either camp. But it's interesting that software "piracy" is common and accepted among Windows users but not among unix/linux users.

Maybe this is why so much unix/linux software is given out free. All software developers want their stuff used. If you can't get a group to pirate your stuff, maybe you're reduced to giving it away for free?

countdown

[That's Unpossible!]

Tons o' preaching to the choir in 3... 2... 1...

(This coming from a Windows/Mac user.)

Well of one....

[FerretFrottage]

my fear of heights and for two my lack of suction cup tipped fingers.

And seriously for 3, it's the stupid license model. I buy an OS for family/non-commerical use and I can only install it on one machine. No thanks, even Apple allows for a family license; sure they still charge you, but at least they give you some break. Maybe MS has changed their stance on this, but I doubt it.

And for 4, I do a serious HW upgrade about every 12-18 months and I'm expected to re-activate. I've heard the MS has made it possible to do this with out a lot of effort, but the fact that any is required or expected of me at all really turns me off from their product(s)

Usability among many other reasons

[drgonzo59]

Among the obvious reasons such as security and stability I also like the usability aspect of linux. I know, I know, Bash me all you want. For me, Linux is more user friendly than Windows. I like the command line, the config files in plain text that I can edit, and the choice of window managers (I use BlackBox, I like its simplicity). As someone said, "the only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned" most people consider Windows user friendly because they were trained to use only windows.

No reason to move

[microcars]

There is no practical reason for me to move TO Windows.

I am not losing income because I am not using Windows

There is no software that I need (yet) that is Windows-only

I'll leave the posts about viruses, worms and trojans for others to comment on.

Control

[Khazunga]

Thinking about it, the word Control sums it up. I keep on Linux, because I know what the system is doing, why it is doing it, and I can fix it if my setup doesn't behave. Every one of my windows boxes degrades over time, and I have no idea why. Before I switched, I'd love the feel of a freshly installed windows box: snappy, clean, everything in place. Now, my linux install keeps on and on feeling like the day I installed it: fast, predictable, secure.

So, I keep on Linux, because I like retaining control over my computer.

home/work

[phrostie]

the other day at home my wife discovered she had 9 different viri/worms on her windows computer.

I had Zero on my Linux box.

last year we were running AIX at work. reboots were once every 6 months.
now we have windows. we reboot 6 times a day.

i'll stick with what works. it's not windows.

Bugs

[vadim_t]

The biggest problem with Windows is that once it breaks it's really hard to fix. A few times Win2K was left unbootable, and it took me a week to figure out how to get it to install.

Linux, while it may be less intuitive is at least trivial to troubleshoot once you understand how it works. Windows though... it just freezed during the logo screen with the progress bar. You can't really get any less informative than that.

Besides that, stability. Not having to worry about the exploit of the day, spyware, and what every program will do with my registry is also very nice.

POST counting memory... following blue-screen

[DarthStrydre]

Used to be blue screens and reboots kept me off Windows and watching the POST count up memory - so the BIOS has kept me off windows. Windows (XP) has proved more stable - but it regularly dumps core as well, if not as often.

Thankfully modern POST routines skip many power-up tests - so most of the time it is GRUB keeping me off of Windows :-)

Oh... and the other alternatives that GRUB permits...

Re:More propoganda from a linux company

[Emperor Shaddam IV]

One piece of propoganda to every 10 Microsoft FUD white papers. Sounds fair to me.

It never occured to me to use windows...

[DrRobert]

It never even occurred to me to get windows. I have never needed anything that only windows offers. My linux box did everything I needed and now the mac does. There is simply no reason to use windows especially considering the cost, licensing issues, and all the invasive and obnoxious phoning home that MS products do.

I had to use windows when trying to continue the work of another student in graduate school and that little escapade probably added a year to my Ph.D. I could run the same code on the mac, ibm workstations, the linux boxes, but I would have to stop and rewrite everything for windows... stupid.

My answer.

[Takeel]

For those of you who have elected to not use Windows, what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?

Yes.

Well...

[rbgaynor]

Samba and Wine keep me off Windows, I just can't find reliable alternatives on the Windows platform

Microsoft Software as a Whole

[artlu]

I am a hardcore Mac user back from the old days, but I gave up on Apple for a few years. OS Lineage for me: Mac->Win3.1->Win98->Debian->Debian->XP->OSX. However, my mac is not perfect and some mundane CPU intensive tasks such as Stock Streamers, just run better on XP. Recently, I got the sasser virus on my XP laptop before I knew what it was, and then, I did a clean install. Because of work (Oracle Programming and Stock Stuff), I am still forced to use windows, but at home, my windows laptop is never even touched.

On the other hand, if you look at Microsoft Software as a whole, there are some great applications. I absolutely love the new office for OSX, and microsoft Project for windows has virtually no competition - even from Oracle. Truly, XP has come a long way from the 98SE crash fest, but the fact that Microsoft leaves the systems wide open is never good.

Im not an M$ fan, but you have to admit, that if they get their act together, we could be in for some trouble. Even from my OSX world.

On a side note, I want to plug a new site that I just made live. If you are interested in Day trading or the stock market check it out: Group Shares.com.

Thanks,
Aj

My reason: Customization Options

[Gortbusters.org]

Ok, the reason I use Linux primarily [at home] is just the options it provides (for free).

- Evolution for getting all of my personal mail and OO-ximian for all of my office needs (very simple at home).
- Gentoo to compile and make my old hardware still useful
- Less chance for viri/worms and it's easier to see what's going on, or what was installed. Same goes for adware and spyware.
- Theme options are much better, much more choices and all for free. All windows themes require clunky third party packages that are slow, and some of them cost money (i.e. the ones you would really want to use).

For a development environment, I don't see a big difference other then that Linux is our production system and developing on Windows just means more testing. There are some nice development tools, but work won't even pay for them so that's not a reason to use linux over windows (or vise versa).

At work, I do use Windows -- because everyone else does, and every time I try to switch (OO, ximian connector, etc).... there are always little wrinkles that I don't have time to deal with. At home, I have more flexibility.

Oh yes, I also now use Xbox for all my gaming so I don't care if linux game support isn't that great.

Bang for the Buck!

[Interested Guy]

My OS desisions are based soley on bang for the buck. I keep a windows box around because I can devop simple data apps in Microsoft access faster than I can with anything on Linux.

I use linux mostly. Because I can't beat the bang for the buck on most every other application. I love using Quanta plus.

All of the other bonuses are nice. I like the freedom to look and figure out how something works. (or doesn't work)

I like the added security of evading the Worms and Viruses that plague Windows. Most of the plagues are avoided with a small amount of expense and a fair amount of common sense, so those are not a determining factor.

For the public Good.

[h4rm0ny]

I stay off Windows where possible, because it is better for society to have a strong competitor to Microsoft. Without the choice of other OS's Windows would be a poorer and more expensive product.

Furthermore, OSS ensures greater trust is possible. We can verify the source code. With Microsoft, we cannot do this and without a strong competitor they would have less incentive to keep things clean.

I use Linux, in short, because it prevents too much power accumulating with one small group.

Also, it's free and more versatile.

Pain in the ass to tell users...

[flatface]

Ok, I -do- use Linux, but when I first switched, I tried telling everyone who came to me with their Windows problems to switch to Linux. This was a few years ago. I tried this for a while, I even converted a few people. But in the end, for all the work it took me to tell people how to use the command line, use Google, and basically figure shit out for themselves, telling them how to fix what they did to Windows was much easier. There are way too many ignorant people out there who just can't handle the learning curve as well as most Linux users. Yes, my neighbours might have me come over once every two months to wipe their computers clean of viruses/worms/spyware and run Windows Update, but it saves me the hassle of telling them what to do each time. And I can't just write them a list either-- They have to have it told them to do in layman's terms.

So what keeps (most) users on Windows? The inability to handle the learning curve needed to use Linux. Don't get me wrong-- I love Linux to death, but it does have its own set of problems. Yes, I can fix most of them on my computer. No, I can't expect my grandmother to fix them by herself.

Windows subject to breakage

[jdray]

I run Linux to avoid viruses, keep from having to reboot all the time, have some control over my computer without having to figure out what to click on, and have a choice on my interface. Actually, the last thing is what really keeps me; I like being able to choose KDE over GNOME, or just using the shell. And, for that matter, once I've chosen a GUI, I like to be able to configure it the way I want to. Heck, if I want it to look like a Mac, I can have that, too, or some hybrid.

The biggest thing, though, is the openness. I don't read C code well enough to be able to delve into the bowells of the kernel or the GUI, or even modestly complex applications and have a chance of knowing what's going on. But there are people who can, and I know where to look to find out what they think. There's a certain safety that I feel when I run Linux that I don't feel when I run Windows. It's public safety, and it's maintained by the neighborhood watch.

Gaming Platform

[CHaN_316]

Windows is my primary gaming platform. I have no gaming consoles, so, if you want to play games, you have to go Windows, for better or for worse.

Several reasons

[gurps_npc]

1) Price 2) Viruses that target it 3) Bugs that they delay fixing 4) Anger at their arrogance and refusal to support a company that mistreats their customers 5) Less Hangs on Apple/Linux

OS X

[minus_273]

OS X is cheaper, more stable, more secure, runs all the really importants apps (office, photoshop, quicken etc), has tons or fantastic apple apps, has wonderful hardware support and best of all it can run almost any linux app as long as it is not hardware dependent. Oh and PPC emulates Intel very nicely. :-p

Usability...

[Android23]

When I sit down to do some graphic work or make music, I'd rather not have software crashing, hardware compatability errors, or any issues whatsoever. When I was trying to do this on a Windows box, the above was pretty much status quo, and it would irritate the inspiration away.

It's simple

[Tarantolato]

I don't feel like I should have to pay a bunch of cash to some a-hole in Oregon or wherever just so I can use my own goddamn computer that I paid my own goddamn good money for.

I have no particular ill-will towards Microsoft. I'm just not gonna give them a goddamn penny. (Nor are most people; most people I know just pirate XP).

That's one reason. The other is that I feel boxed in on modern Windows systems. You can't do shit. I used to get the same feelings from Macs, which is why I used DOS back in the day.

Having worked in tech support I can see the value of desktop lockdown; but it should be a possibility, not the only way.

Re:It's simple

[pclminion]

I don't feel like I should have to pay a bunch of cash to some a-hole in Oregon or wherever just so I can use my own goddamn computer that I paid my own goddamn good money for.

I think that hits the nail on the head (it's Washington, by the way, not Oregon). Something as fundamental as an operating system shouldn't cost anything. It is a requisite for computing.

How would you react if you walked into a car dealership and the dealer told you you had to pay extra for the car battery, that it didn't just come with the car? It would be ridiculous. You can't use a car without a battery, and you can't use a computer without an OS. Charging for it as if it were a seperate product, a seperate application, is simple highway robbery.

Yes, what I'm advocating here is tighter integration of the OS into the hardware. When you buy computer components, they shouldn't just sit around useless until you pay out even more money for an OS. It should be built in. Upgradeable, interchangeable, yes, but built in.

Microsoft argues that the price of their operating system reflects its true value, that an OS is really very valuable because it is required to make the system work. Yet a car battery is also required to make a car work, and it is one of the cheapest components of the car! So clearly, whether something is a requirement or not does not reflect on its value in any direct way.

People are beginning to wake up to this deficient argument, so now Microsoft's strategy is to bundle as much extraneous software as possible with the OS, and then claim that the extra value lies in the bundled software. But this is like selling a car battery than comes with, say, a matching riding lawn mower. Nevermind the fact that you don't need a riding mower, it's simply a way to get you to agree to pay much much more than what the product is actually worth. And of course you don't have the option of refusing the lawn mower -- you're going to pay for it anyway.

So the reason I don't use Windows is because I refuse to be forced to buy a riding lawn mower when all I really want is a car battery. Yeah, I'm forced to use a battery that most people are unfamiliar with, and which is somewhat persnickety, and doesn't work in as many types of cars as the Microsoft battery (in case you hadn't guessed, I'm talking about Linux here), but now I'm getting what I really want, instead of what some corporation in Redmond thinks I want.

Corperations

[Nicholas Evans]

Every time I start windows I'm helping an evil corporation that has been proven to use anti-competitive business practices maintain it's monopoly. Not to mention you really don't know what's in windows. Frankly, I feel safer using opensource software, because people with a practiced eye can peek into what I'm using and tell me if I have any backdoors open for the NSA/CIA/LEP.

Two words...

[KenCrandall]

PRODUCT ACTIVATION

I upgraded my wife's computer over the weekend (new Mobo, CPU, and Video) and I had to re-activate Windows. No problem? I don't think so.

I ended up having to call into their help line and read something like 25 numbers to a voice-recognition system and to get something like 25 chars back from a RealLiveHuman(tm) 5 minutes later.

So, all should be good, right? Wrong! Simply moving the HD over to the new configuration and installing the correct drivers made the MOST UNSTABLE system I've ever used. So, I tried going back to a restore point -- guess what? It was PRE-ACTIVATION so I had to call again. Still, after another call, the machine was broken.

Finally, I decided to just re-install. Guess what, ANOTHER CALL!

It's just silly that Microsoft is SO concerned about their $100-or-so per computer that they make people jump through these hoops. It's like the music business: people who want to use the product will buy it, either with a PC or stand-alone. The people who illegally copy it weren't going to pay for it anyway.

Fortunately, there's a happy ending: all this nonsense has my wife willing to try Linux (Fedora Core) so we'll be giving that a shot! (on a new HD, so we can go back to Windows if we have to...)

Cheers,
Ken

No usable shell.

[mo]

I'm doing a lot of network debugging and the lack of a proper command line is just infuriating. For example, I've got a laptop with two ethernet ports that I plug into various machines to sniff traffic and test network configs with commands like:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.2
route add default gw 192.168.0.1
ifconfig eth1 0.0.0.0 up promisc
tethereal -i eth1
dhclient eth0
httpd -X &
echo -ne "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc localhost 80

Now, granted this stuff can all be done on windows (and a lot of the commands are ported to windows) but a lot of it requires clicking into random dialog boxes. It's so much faster to hit control-r 'dhcli' and get a previous command, or even roll a few common sequences into a shell script (or a one-liner that I just hold in the history buffer). Perhaps this is just my ignorance of windows command-line abilities (it seems everything I want to do on windows is done by the 'net' command for some reason), but there's just so much more depth with a real unix shell.

Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never match

[markv242]

Ever since I switched, I realized just how much more intuitive the Apple designers / engineers really are. Microsoft has adopted the shotgun-like style of "throw a million options in front of the user and let them decide" when, 99% of the time, users don't want to decide, they just want their damned machine to work.

Honestly, who at Microsoft thought this was a good idea: "Start / Settings / Control Panel / Add/Remove Hardware / Next / Uninstall/Unplug a device / Next / Unplug/Eject a device / Next / Select device / Next"

...when the Apple engineers tell you: "Unplug the device from your Macintosh."

reasons

[thomasa]

1. Reasonably low cost
2. Part of Open Source Movement
3. More Stable then Windows
4. Different from Windows
5. More flexible then Windows
6. Cutting edge software
7. OpenMosix
8. Faster than Windows
9. Better Security then Windows
10. More transparent More understandable
11. Does not profit Bill Gates

I'm easy

[veg]

I like an easy life. Free from Application errors, licence numbers, bugfix delays, unexplained crashes and unpredictability. Linux, BSD, Darwin and Inferno behave as they should, as one would expect, and according to the manual. If they don't, then it's a bug and it gets fixed.
I like knowing my systems are going to stay up, and if they should ever fail, which in general they don't, I'd like to know they'll be fixed asap without me having to take the blame and pay.

Open source makes the world a better place.

Re:I'm easy

[Short Circuit]

unexplained crashes and unpredictability

You don't run X, do you?

Well, at least it's getting better. It used to be I couldn't run RTCW...now the only problem is that some GL screensavers cause X to freeze. However, with the power button set to restart X (through acpid), it's not as much of a problem now.

Re:I'm easy

[Phillup]

You don't run X, do you?

He said unexplained.

;-)

Care to share the the "power button set to restart X" trick?

TIA

Re:I'm easy

[killjoe]

I don't think you can understate the freedom of not having to keep license numbers handy.

I work in a large corporation and we have to get requisitions for every purchase. If the requisition is for over $500 it has to go to further up the chain. If it's over a $1000.00 it has to go to the CIO!. It's a royal pain in the ass to get anything, it takes weeks sometimes and you have to fill out a ton of paperwork.

If I need something I always look for an open source alternative first. No requisitions, no begging, no justifying why you want to spend $500 for some software, no hassles. Just go get it, if it does what you need then you are done. If it does not do what you need then you fill out the paperwork and try to get some piece of software approved and pray it works.

Re:I'm easy

[maja33]

Same here. I loved my athlon/win98 but for reasons of stability I had to partition my hard drive and install two copies of win98. One for 'serious' work and the other one for games, internet and new programms.

When the drivers of my USB cable modem corrupted the tcp/icp stack of windows I installed SuSE 7.1 (thanks to C't magazine coverage) with 2.4 kernel and never looked back. I decided that I'm just too stupid for windows.

I can follow clear directions, modify text files and understand a little about the syslog but the registry and windows mysterious behaviour are beyond my understanding. SuSE (and Mandrake) recognise my hardware, understand my Internet settings, comes with all the programs I need and gives me timely securtity and bug patches.

Re:I'm easy

[jadel]

Do they make you go through the same process for any tools that you use, or just the GPL ones?
After all Visual C++ or .net presumably do the same thing and they are definately not public domain.

Windows = prostitute

[DJ Rubbie]

Windows is like a prostitute. It's expensive, but it does look pretty, give you a good time with its 'ease of use'. Unfortunately you can easily contact virus, worms and other parasites (such as adware, spyware) easily by using it long enough.

I'd rather have a stable relationship, that's why I pick Linux.

might sound weird

[Anonymous Coward]

but its for the GUI that I keep away from Windows, the so-called ease of use of Windows is easy to use coz its been fed to most users since they started to use computers.

I prefer to use fluxbox with an easily configurable menu that I get by clicking at on the background of my screen.

All the icons and systrays items and taskbar are pretty useless to me.

Also lets not forget the mention the ease of use of multiple desktops something windows hasnt even been able to put in yet.

Lack of Games

[untwisted]

The lack of games is a big plus sometimes. I had started to play Asheron's Call 2, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, and I was spening entirely too much time playing it. I booted in to linux one day and told myself that I wasn't going to boot back. So far, I've found more interresting things to do than play AC2, and I've had a lot more free time. Don't get me wrong, games are great, but you can accomplish a lot more without them as a distraction. To sum it all up, I've been staying out of windows because I think that using linux has made me a better person.

An even better question might be...

[foxtrot]

How can you stay off Windows?

I love my Linux machines at home. I'd love 'em even more if nVidia would get their collective heads out of their asses and write some decent nForce sound drivers. But there's lots of great things about Linux, and my preferred flavor, Gentoo.

1) What, I don't have that piece of software? emerge foo. Poof, now I have that piece of software!

2) I _like_ typing at a computer. My Windows-using friends hate doing things like generating thumbnails of their digital pictures for web use or shrinking them. I just throw imagemagick at it and poof, the computer does it, like it should be. I don't have to make space on my screen for a picture, I don't have to go all pointy-clicky on widgets for resizing, I just type convert -scale 50% foo bar and I'm done.

3) I don't give a hoot in hell about Sasser or SoBig or any of the others.

But every once in a while, I get stuck rebooting and firing up the Windows hard disk. Turbotax and Taxcut don't exist for Linux. Still nobody's written a decent panorama stitcher fot Linux (or, at least, nothing half as good as Canon's PhotoStitch, and that's saying something...) How can I stay away?

-JDF

Here's the short list...

[Foofoobar]

- lack of cross platform compatibility
- OS lockin through products or development languages (SQL Server, C#, etc)
- poor security
- poor stability
- code bloat/ excessive functionality
- lack of choice; choices are forced down your throat on install
- no built in firewall or other security features
- closed environment that cannot be modified
- want to do everything for you

I like choice and Microsoft doesn't. That's pretty much it.

Options...

[Supp0rtLinux]

I don't know that I necessarily "stay off of Windows" as I also stay off of Solaris, Mac OS, etc. I even stay off of FreeBSD. I use all the above OSs in my line of work (computer consultant). However, I find that Linux is the best platform for connecting to all the other OSs. Linux connects to Sun, Mac, *nix, and Windows better than Sun, Mac, or Windows connect to each other. I also like choice. I like knowing I can keep my stable RH9 system and upgrade apps as they are released, but I can also use FC2 and try some newer, bleeding edge stuff. For me, its mostly a decision of compatibility and/or accessibility with other environments combined with the fulfillment of my personal need to tinker under the hood... something I can't really do on Windows, and am sometimes limiting on Solaris and Mac due to not all the code being public. My Linux laptop connects to all the networks I need (wired LAN, 802.11b, Verizon celluar network internet access) as well as the OSs my clients use Solaris, Mac OS 9/X, Netware, Windows. Further, I find more vendors that are *seeing the light* are developing for Windows and Linux, not Windows and other OSs. For example, both Network Associates and Computer Associates have made recent Linux software announcements. Note that they haven't made any new Netware, or Mac announcements, and no Solaris announcements at all. I see Linux as the most thriving OS out there and the one with the most (growing) vendor support next to Windows. Heck, in irony, its even most likely that we'll start to see Linux viruses than we will Netware or Sun viruses. In summary, its interoperability and the ability to tweak things that makes me choose Linux over Windows... or to choose something other than Windows. In all honesty, its not cost as I have access to all the costly Windows' softwares.

Just like a poll...

[LynchMan]

I would choose either the 'All of the Above' option, or CowboyNeal as a saftey guess...

Workflow

[cloudscout]

I'm not really 'off' Windows. I use Windows PCs and manage Windows networks daily. Linux systems as well. Most of my actual work, however, is done on a Macintosh. Even my Windows-related work is typically accomplished from my Mac using standard VPN tools in combination with Windows Terminal Services and/or VNC.

It is the solution that works best for me personally. I am rarely in the office which means that portability is a key factor and I enjoy the portability options of Mac OS X over those of Windows or Linux while maintaining a fantastic 'middle ground' to communicate with and manage these other platforms.

My favorite, albeit tired, phrase is "Use the right tool for the right job." For my job, a PowerBook running Mac OS X is that tool. But, like any good carpenter or mechanic, I have more than one tool in my toolbox. I just happen to use some more than others.

UI Inconsistencies, Annoyances

[Gryphon]

For example, Windows tells me every time I unplug from the physical Ethernet and go wireless.

I know that already. Why does it need to tell me?

I could go on and on. Usability problems in Windows are so numerous, and usually inconsequential or tiny when considered individually. But as a whole, they add up, and it's why I use a Mac running OS X at home, even though I'm forced to use Windows at work.

Oh... another favourite? When I reduce my resolution, Windows re-arranges my desktop icons. When I increase the resolution back (perhaps after doing a presentation when hooked up to a projector) the icons do not go back to where they were. Very annoying if you care about where icons are on your desktop. Mac OS X conveniently remembers where your icons were at the higher resolution and puts them back where they belong (where they were before you reduced the screen resolution).

Once You Go Mac . . . .

[adavies42]

Seriously, two things: habit and common sense. I've been using Macs since I was seven, but it was blindingly obvious as early as Win95 that Mac would always be a far superior platform in every category that mattered to me. The endless worm parade of the past five years and the agonies I've seen numerous IT people going through trying to secure Windows networks have only solidified my commitment to Macs. I'm currently socking away at least a third of every paycheck towards a PowerBook come the end of summer. (Here's hoping the G5 PB's are out!)

Re:Very rare

[kfg]

Prior to Windows 2000 I used Linux extensively, mainly because it was very stable indeed, and rather exciting. Now it's just not worth it, Windows does everything Linux can do and more.

I must say that "Windows has finally caught up to Linux" is certainly an unusual argument.

KFG

Weird...

[rjstanford]

I'm a UNIX guy myself, but a few months ago we started co-locing a Windows server. The "Manage Your Server" program (under Start->Programs->Administrative) has to be one of the easiest things to use when you're not entirely sure what you want to do.

I'm not talking raw power, or admining 50 boxen, something that you'd want someone who knows the ins and outs of the system for. I'm talking easy basic server administration looking for a "good enough" result.

Even the individual server admin screens are pretty easy to follow. I needed to add a new virtual domain to IIS - something I can do to Apache in my sleep. Followed the linky to the admin page, right-clicked on the "Web Sites" folder, chose "New...". Entered a description, the folder, IP, port, etc. Chose the default "Read" permission.

Did that take me longer to do that it would have done in Apache? Absolutely. Was it faster than it would have taken an IIS wizard to accomplish the same task? Almost certainly.

It gets more interesting though - right click on the new website and choose "Properties." Hmm - performance. There's a checkbox/field to limit network bandwidth to this site. Cool. Not something that I need, but the exploratory nature revealed it and - I have to admit - I don't know how to accomplish the same task using Apache. I've never needed to, and I'm sure that I could figure it out with a lot of STFWing...

But, for lone box / untrained admin situations, I have to say that Windows Server is surprisingly, even remarkably, easy to use.

For this UNIX admin, anyway.

Oh, and as for DNS - on that same program (which starts by default on your administrator account unless you've disabled it), you can choose "Add role" and then "DNS server" and be walked through the entire process. Just a thought.

Not price for me

[Snjit]

Its most definately not price for me. I shell out the $$ for each distribution because I believe in supporting them (SuSE in this case). I use it because:

1) It works great on older hardware saving me money and upgrade pains.
2) Unlike Windoze when I install a distribution I'm not only getting an OS and desktop platform I'm getting 99% of all the applications I need all at once.
3) Its reliable with uptimes in the months (I do stupid things occasionally otherwise it would be longer).
4) Its secure. My email is not my enemy and there is nothing on the system running that I haven't turned on myself.
5) Its multipurpose; desktop, server, dev environment, games machine, network monitor, firewall, you name it.
6) It can be modified/configured to do things the way =I= want to do them. Not the way I'm forced to do them.
7) Choice!!!

S'njit

My reasons...

[DarkDust]

...today (back fives years ago when I switched I was just annoyed by Win98 and curious):

Windows...

• has no virtual desktops
• has no useable shell
• has no standard toolchains
• has no network-transparency (like with ssh/X; this is one of the most important features I'm missing on Windows)
• has too many obscure/intransparent things going on (with the registry beeing just one such thing)
• too often does things it thinks I want it to do while in I don't want it to that (Windows sometimes treats its users like small children)

I know almost all features I miss on Windows can be "upgraded" with some tools, like an X server for Windows or SSH daemon for Windows. But it's not always working like it should. For example, since Windows has no native support for virtual desktops like X Window has all virtual desktop tools I've seen under Windows had some flaws and didn't satisfy me.

A few years ago I really hated Windows. Now I just don't care ;-) I don't have to use it, only rarely at work, so I really don't care what Windows can or can't. I've become a real fan of the Linux/UNIX architecture and acquired very intimate knowledge, so I don't think Windows will ever start to appeal to me again as everything I need is present in Linux/FreeBSD. Especially since KDE 3.2 is really good now and OpenOffice as well.

Well, I'll give an honest answer

[digitalgimpus]

My reasons:

- Slow bloated feel
- Awkward UI
- Buggy
- Insecure, always virus concerns
- Expensive
- Everything takes 10 clicks.

Mac OS X showed me how great an OS can feel
- Smooth slim feel
- UI feels right (can't explain it much better than that)
- never crashed
- software update is nice and elequent, pretty secure.
- inexpensive ($129 isn't to bad)
- minimal clicks.

Overall: Higher quality, gets my vote every time. Windows is just an inferior product.

Re:Well, I'll give an honest answer

[DeckardJK]

Its hard to compare OS X and Windows. I'm sure its nice and all. I've had limited exposure to some different Mac OS's.

As soon as I can run OS X on my PC, I'll give it a try, but you can't say its inexpensive when you have to buy the computer to go with the OS.

Maybe Windows is an inferior OS, but for price/performance/options thats the only way I can go right now.

Strategic advantage.

[Soko]

If you count on Windows, you are at the mercy of Microsoft and thier business model. They will try to make you and your business so depandant on them that you can't go in any direction but that which they tell you - you become thier cash cow.

Concientiously deploying thier solutions, however, means that they become just another vendor - who you can turf at any time for something better, if and when it comes along.

Realising what amount of control you give a vendor ultimately keeps control of your business where it belongs - with you.

There are probably more than a few businesses that woke up to the fact that Microsoft had an inordinate amount of control over them when they introduced Licensing 6.0. Once it sunk in that Microsoft was actually capable of exacting an annual tribute from them (and actually willing to attempt this), the ultimate damage was done. IMHO, Microsoft's huberis is killing Windows, not the worms.

*goes back to finishing the deployment of 2 brand new Linux servers...

Soko

virii and worms

[spir0]

sure they exist for other platforms, but they're not as prevalent as on windows.

before windows XP, I would have said stability, but that is getting better, no matter how much we hate to think so. perhaps once windows is stable to a workable level, they will work on security, but I'm not holding my breath.

I've always been a linux/unix geek, and after trying OSX 2 years ago, I haven't looked back.

I've stayed off Windows (on OSX) for 2+ years now

[dgallina]

Because...

* Windows isn't as elegant and pleasant to use as other alternatives.

* Windows isn't as well integrated (hardware / software / OS) as alternatives.

* Windows (and some other OS') make me work on the OS before I can get to doing what I'm *actually* trying to accomplish.

* Windows makes me spend significantly more time on patching & security compared with alternatives.

I *do* use Windows2000 / XP / 2003 daily at work, and can say with certainty that it's more effort to manage by comparison.

Scientific applications

[JackL]

My particular field is bioinformatics, but many (most?) serious math and science applications are made for unix/linux.

speed in linux?

[Siniset]

This is a question to all those who use linux because it's faster than Windows. I personally like Linux better myself, but I have to ask people, why do they think that linux is faster than windows. If you're doing command line stuff, yeah, that runs a lot quicker, but I've found for most gui stuff, linux runs noticably slower.

I usually run KDE or GNOME (neither one seems to really have a speed advantage on the other) and sometimes XFCE (which does seem a little bit faster) on Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake 10.0 but running the same program (Open Office.org or Mozilla) it definitely runs slower in Linux. This is noticible both on my Athlon XP 2400 and my 450 Mhz laptop. Just basic things about the GUI seem to run slower (moving windows, etc).

Am I missing something here? Should I be messing more with the configurations? Are people who talk about the speed of linux using blackbox without any eye candy whatsoever? I know this is slightly off-topic, but I'll tell ya, the speed issue makes me more likely to start up Windows instead of Linux, and I'm wondering why people say linux is faster.

Re:speed in linux?

[shish]

One of several reasons:

Windows uses a hack (which I wish someone would do in linux) to make things seem faster - it gives the currently selected window processing priority. Compress 2 things (7-zip works best for this, with "ultimate" settings), then have one window focused - the selected window's progress bar moves about twice as fast as the unselected one's, sometimes three or four times as fast. Open a third app, give it focus, and both compressings go slowly.

This should be quite easy to do in linux, apart from one thing - only root can give a process higher than normal priority, or raise a process's priority once it's started.

If you manually choose which processes get which priority, you can make things seem a lot faster (although things in the background suffer)

Viruses, spyware, drivers, flexibility, AA fonts

[dizzyduck]

Viruses and spyware. I like being able to click links and open random emails with abandon. I can do this with Mozilla/Evolution. And should Mozilla get infested with some sort of spyware thing like Internet Explorer is on my university computer account, I can just backup my bookmarks, rm -rf ~/.mozilla and be on my way. I don't even know where to begin in fixing IE.

Drivers. Strange as it may seem, it's a lot eaiser to get things working in Linux (provided it's actually supported).

Infinite flexibility. I have a D-Link USB radio jobbie. My computer is set to turn on at 5:50 every morning in the BIOS. In my crontab I have the following commands record Jono and Harriet's breakfast show on Heart 106.2 (great show - listen to it!)

• tune the radio,
• unmute the line in,
• start recording at 5:55
• stop recording at 9:05
• shutdown the computer at 9:10

I can't even imagine how to do that in Windows.

Better looking fonts. All my apps have AA fonts. The web looks so much more prettier in Linux.

Transparency

[Anonymous Coward]

With Windows, it just isn't there. With Linux you can often solve problems using logic alone. The powerful command-line tools, the text-based config files, the structured filesystem layout... these things all make it fast and easy to operate on the machine. Some things may seem a little arcane at first, but rather than requiring rote memorization, you can actually understand what is going on.

Compare this to Windows, where the system rarely makes sense, and where even after you become an expert administrator you never really develop a good understanding for what is going on under the hood. Consider the solutions to common problems found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: As often as not you're asked to follow some complex series of steps editing registry keys that no human can possibly memorize, rebooting, clicking through to deeply nested directories to delete random dll's, rebooting...

Now if all you've ever used on Linux is one of the commercial distributions running Gnome or KDE, Linux may feel essentially the same to you. But for the serious sysadmin (the kind of person for whom a window manager is primarly used for handling 50 xterms), Linux is a godsend. Even something like a remote kernel upgrade (2.4 -> 2.6) from 2000 miles away isn't all that difficult. [For the sake of reference, in the Windows world this would be the equivalent of migrating from Server 2000 -> Server 2003 completely over the Internet. Even if it were technically possible, how many MCSEs would be comfortable attempting this on a live production server.]

In short, the thing that keeps me (and many others) away from Windows is the inability to really understand and have control over the machine. And it all stems from the fact that the focus with Microsoft ever since the DOS days has been to make the system as opaque as possible in the name of user-friendliness.

Hate Pirating

[magictongue]

I would say that I'm cheap (or perhaps I just hate wasting money) and I don't believe in pirating software. Most people that I know who are loyally committed to Windows pirate a great deal of their software. It bothers me that someone would dismiss Linux and praise Windows but will not pay for Windows or Windows apps. Also, if a "free" application is just as good as a "non free" application its logical to pick the free version. Even when the "free' version is not as good it still makes sense to pick it if it meets your needs. Let face it, I eat more ground beef than filet mignon even though the filet mignon is better. It is simple economic logic. I bet if someone could end all pirating of software it would not be long before the majority of people where using Linux.

Re:Hate Pirating

[ArbitraryConstant]

I can get Windows through no cost to me through university. I have my OpenBSD firewall running on a seperate machine. I would use Mozilla.

But it's too damn much trouble to maintain. All of OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS are less annoying to maintain.

While it's easier for a non-savy user to click through a few windows or call tech support, equivilant maintenance tasks on those other OSes are either less time consuming or not needed. They might be harder to perform, but they take less time.

I might consider VMWare if I needed Windows for work that someone would pay me for. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Re:Lack of killer applications

[mabu]

What always amused me endlessly was that for the first few years of Windows existence what was the NUMBER ONE APPLICATION?

Berkley Systems' screensaver.

You know you have a winning OS when the most popular application sold for it addresses what your computer should do when you're not using it.

And what was the second most popular Windows application?

An un-installer.

I rest my case.

Ignorance, learning curve.

[jeblucas]

I don't really know how to do things in Windows very well. I've used Mac OS since 7.1 and Linux since Red Hat 7. I've had to use Microsoft at work off and on over the last 5 years. I do have to troubleshoot my parents Windows machines and it's a huge pain in the ass: Ad-aware, Spybot, Windows Messaging, etc. I've had to wrangle all of those. Nevermind the virus software that pops up and irritates my mother-in-law for more money every 15 days. I'm sure there's some savvy way of clamping down all the ports that are default open for no reason, but why would I want to bother to learn?

I have a Powerbook that kicked ass out of the box; both in terms of security and UI. I don't have the urge to play games on my PC's beyond MAME. (I have a PS2 for that). I got the OS for my Linux box from the library. It also installed without a hitch, and is loaded with help and man pages that are actually helpful and serve as manuals. Also, that book mentioned above is great.

I don't see the point in using Windows beyond the access to games--which doesn't interest me enough to risk trojans, zombification, worms, an obnoxious and backwards default browser that requires an act of Congress to remove, etc.

SansMS

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I use Apple computers and I have a presently non-functioning SUSE Linux box that I am nursing back into health (drive crash, then a video card failure - it used to be a RadioShack Compaq running WinME, so it'll be a while before it's working up to snuff...)

Why do I avoid MS?

Because I never had to submit to the Borg in the first place. My background is in graphic design and type design, and all the cool stuff in that little world was on the Mac OS, so I never had to get a Windows Machine. I *did* have to aquaint myself to the Borg Mind that is Windows, and when I was doing technical support in the late 1990s, I had to get *really* good at it (win3.1, 95, 98, NT). Everytime I found myself in the depths of the living pit of despair and mediocrity that is Windows, my love for that which is not MS only grew.

I still think the MacOS, specifically OSX, is superior to Linux, but I am also fairly well convinced that Linux OSs will be of comparable quality and ease of use in less than 5 years. Once the apps on Linux get GUIs worth using and looking at (which I also believe will be in the next 5 years), then Apple will have an interesting dilemma, but not half as interesting as what MS will face in the next few years in trying to get the travesty that is Longhorn out the door.

At first, I detested Windows because of its instability. Look at it sideways and the BSOD would come visit. Woof. MacOS v7 - 9 wasn't any prize for stability, but it did improve over time, and would often fail in a less spectacular way. Linux has always (to me) been more stable than either, except for OSX.

Another thing I dislike about Windows is its gamma. Looking into a windows machine is a dim and dingy thing compared to Apple. (I wish Linux were brighter as well...) And the OS has always been cumbersome, ugly and just plain nasty. Remember IRQs? What a load that was - just to hook up a freaking scanner or install a CD drive was often a nightmare in Windows.

So, let's see- it was ugly (still is, IMHO), unstable, unfriendly, and owned by a rapacious monopolistic enterprise run by an autistic geek and Monkey Boy. It's an insecure system in continuous need of updating, it's the source of continuous viruses and worms because of the Swiss Cheese nature of the OS and VB.

What exactly is there to BRING me to Windows? So I can trade .doc files with every other office drone?

So: that's why I don't use Windows. It's Just Not Worth The Hassle.

HW

Well, let me put it this way...

[Idaho]

Last time I booted into Windows (dual boot) was when I had to fill in the tax form (yup, in the Netherlands it's just as bad as in the States). This was before the Sasser worm broke out.

So naturally, my Windows-install was not updated when the following sequence of events occured:

• I read about the outbreak of Sasser on Bugtraq on a Friday (or so I believe), but couldn't care less as I did not ever boot into windows anyway
• Went home to my parents during the weekend it broke out.
• A roommate booted my computer into Windows to watch a movie or play some music in the livingroom or whatever.
• Go Sasser!

Needless to say, that Windows partition is now history. Some extra storage space always comes in handy.

Anyway, what keeps me away from Windows at this moment (the most important reasons, anyway):

• Spyware/malware. You think this only happens to n00bs who install KaZaa? Not so. Even recent Mouseware driver software from Logitech installs some kind of spyware program. So does the Kodak Easyshare software (or so I believe...it might not be spyware, but it is an annoying always-running automagic-update engine nonetheless).
• Virusses and worms. Need I say more?
• Last but not least: I hardly have time to play games, so I don't need Windows. Linux does everything I want, and often does it better then Windows (IMHO, ofcourse).

It takes too much time to admin even just my own personal Windows system to keep it 'safe enough' to even have it on the internet: I'd need a firewall (Windows firewalls, even commercial ones, often have security problems themselves, read Bugtraq!), Antivirus-software (which costs $$$, takes huge amounts of CPU power/memory, slows down even a P4 to a drag, etc.), Spyware scanners such as Ad-aware and/or hijackthis, run Windows Update automatically or at least regularly and generally spend at least a day freaking around after a fresh install, turning off services (in Linux they are off by default), running Windows Update and installing all the crap mentioned above.

Then, to sum it all up: in Windows, I would not use IE and OE, because - oh well, I don't have to explain why if you have read the above.

So I would end up using Firefox, Thunderbird mail and OpenOffice just like I would do in Linux. So why would I bother to run those apps on Windows anyway? That software runs great in Linux, too...

some good reasons

[jonastullus]

well here's the reasons i can come up with in 5 minutes:

1. scripting: i LOVE scripting! without some nice bash/perl/python scripts and the heavy usage of piping, bash variables, etc. an operating system would be more of a hindrance than a help!

1b. automation: automation together with scriptability is just the greatest. schedule some event for tomorrow, start anything in a screen session and connect from somewhere else lateron, convert all your filenames into something else, schedule backups, schedule reboots, *you name it*.

1c. remote access: any OS that doesn't allow remote access which differs in no way from local access is crap (hmm, hopefully remote sound support comes soon for X). windows incapability to allow transparent and easy remote access is one of the main reasons of not using it for anything but desktop. having a windows server and being responsible for administrating it remotely (as you most likely will, if sitting in some basement ain't your thang) is the most horrible nightmare imagineable!

2. transparency: i just trashed one of my file-systems (i WAS actually my fault). but linux/unix allowed me to repair what was left and most of all give me the CHANCE to spend as much time as i wanted! with proprietary systems you often have to rely on shoddy support (if you have any).

3. community: this has actually little to do with a specific system, but the open-ness of linux/bsd produces a better community. in free/open software there is so much know-how available on the internet with most of your questions already answered, and if not capable individuals in forums, IRC, newsgroups!

4. fixeability: windows give little choice when it comes to fixing bugs. the little you can do in the registry is most likely to trash your whole system (which you then will have no chance of reviving!). you CAN very well destroy a linux system, but much of the configuration files can be saved.

5. security: windows just sucks when it comes to securing against trojans, virii, worms! with A LOT of effort you can clamp everything down to a state where a w2k/wxp system can be called secure, but with stringent (it could be better) user separation of unix, compromising one service does not necessarily mean compromise of the whole system, as it does in most cases under windows.

6. extendability: in non-windows OSs (i.e. linux/bsd) you always have the chance to go further. if the system isn't secure enough, configure SELinux. if you would like some additional feature in the kernel, patch it. if you want perfectly configured mutt/exim/fetchmail/apache/cyrus spend hours over hours and get it the way you want!

7. choice: having the choice of several programs for one job is often a nuissance and will likely take you a while to figure out which one is best suited. but this inconveniance still beats having less choice (as you DO under windows!).

8. price ;-)

9. modularity: nobody is forcing you to update to such and such, update your operating system to install an office suite or anything like that. with the compile-from-source approach, almost any program should run under almost any posix-compatible OS (if written with compatibility in mind) and therefore put no pressure on the users as to what OS to use!

9. freedom: the certainty that you will NEVER have to do with anything less than you have today. the good feeling that a free-software community is building software for the future which will not be obliterated in a 5-year-cycle. sure, the bazaar model has its drawbacks, but the freedom from monopolistic enterprises which try to force you into dependencies (i.e. the MS Office format) should clearly be more important than the little comfort you gain over free alternatives (with notable exceptions of course).

i surely have forgotton many reasons (as well as not mention some drawbacks of not using windows), but the above should cover it for now ;-)

Re:What keeps me off?

[banzai51]

Steve fucking Balmer: a man whose wobbling, flabby, sweating body is a testament to corporate greed

Ahhh, so you are evaluating your software based on looks of the people in the company? Wow. Can it get any more closed minded than that?

Good Question - Here's my humble answers

[Grimster]

Probably the main thing is basic security. I've spent hours cleaning spyware and viruses and other bullshit off my wife's Win XP machine, and she's well trained not to open attachments in email and other idiocies but STILL that crap gets on there! It's goddamned annoying. I _would_ move her to linux too but the usb multifunction printer, her digital camera, not to mention all those silly browser games/etc she likes to play either won't work in linux or are a pain in the butt to get working.

Another big reason is I hate fucking with Windows licensing, every time I upgrade my wife's machine I have to call that god forsaken toll free number and read in the longass "code" and then they read me back another longass code to "re enable" my OWN LEGITIMATELY PURCHASED copy of Windows CP, the CD is on her tower case, and the product code sticker is stuck to her monitor, I HATE being treated like some kinda pirate just because I upgrade motherboards or swapped sound cards/etc on a computer I OWN running software I PURCHASED.

Mozilla tabbed browsing - ok I know I can run this in Windows too but I still like Mozilla's tabbed browsing :)

One of my other "biggies" is a rather simple one, tabbed SSH shells on Konsole in KDE, I keep upwards of 30 shells open to various servers open at ALL times, having these in one window with tabs at the bottom is absolutely priceless, I've yet to see any other apps do this outside of Konsole and unless my memory fails, the default term program for Gnome also does this.

Email - I like Evolution it serves my purposes without being bloated or trying to "do everything" for me. Check my email, send my email, I'm pretty happy. I will let procmail do my filtering and sorting thanks anyway (yes I know Evolution does a lot more than this but it doesn't put it "in my way"). Also, last I checked there isn't one single email virus that will fuck over Evolution (or any other Linux email client that I'm aware of). But this point is really made in point #1 about security.

Stability - uptime on my box is 28 days, nothing awesome (I'm not shy about rebooting but just don't have too much). Windows while it HAS improved, still isn't that stable, my gaming computer, which has a barebones install of XP with just what is necessary to play the games I like to play, still manages to need a reboot about once per week or so. Nothing more aggravating than having to reboot when you really don't WANT to.

Re:What keeps me off?

[Otter]

a gelatenous mass of scams and ploys to kill any project dead that could possibly take a few cents out of his yearly multi-million dollar paypacket, bulging with the gonads of the...his toad army are there, all puffed throats and poisonous flesh, yellow eyes swivelling toward

You know, I feel sorry for you and the people expressing similar sentiments. I like WindowMaker and X-chat, OS X and Qt, iTunes and Excel. And, Lord help me, I love my TiBook. It's pleasurable to work with tools you enjoy, and let you extend yourself. What they make you use at work is one thing, but I can't imagine sitting at a home computer boiling with demented rage at Rob Enderle. I doubt if the ex-Mrs. Enderle* does that.

* Purely hypothetical -- I have no idea if such a person exists or not, or what OS she uses.

Window's Woes

[G4from128k]

The reason I avoid Windows (beside the questionable business tactics of the company) comes from my own and my friends experience with the products. But mostly, its my experience with the horrible, inconsistent design of Office and occasional bouts of Window's use. Its obvious that MS has lots of coders and that they each do their little bit in total isolation from each other. Add viruses (more than 30 per day in May) and I see absolutely no reason to switch.

My one, recent , experience with Windows was trying to get a peripheral (with Windows-only drivers) connected so I could use it. On a totally fresh install of Windows, I discovered that inserting an IBM PCMCIA-to-CF card adapter hosed the system so badly, I had to wipe the drive (the fault persisted across a normal reinstall of the OS). Funny how my all of my Macs (from a old 190 powerbook to a newer Pismo) handled the IBM adapter perfectly with no driver software, no configuration, and no hiccups, while software from IBM's former partner barfed chunks.

I've also watched friends, highly intelligent friends who are profession Windows developers, struggle with their systems -- accepting that they will have to reinstall (and probably reformat) at least once or twice a year. In contrast, in nearly 20 years of Mac usage, I've only been forced to reinstall the OS once (and have never been forced to reformat a drive).

I'm sure some have had spotless experiences with Windows and I'm sure some have had horrible experiences with Mac. But my experience has shown me that Macs just work and work well when compared to the alternatives.

I know I don't own the cheapest, most popular computers, but then I've never owned the cheapest most popular cars either.

Whats keeping me off windows?

[SeanTobin]

My motherboard!

No, seriously. Earlier this year the hdd controler took a dump to the point where windows wouldn't run. I've tried: 98SE, ME, 2k and XP. Not a single version runs. I end up with "Hardware failure: contact your vendor for support" or something similar. On safe startups it dies immediately after MUP.SYS. I've been through new ram, video cards, hard disks, bios flashes, network cards, and HDD low level formats.

Anyway, I had a gentoo partition on it for a while, and I run mandrake/debian/redhat on various servers so I'm not quite jumping in the deep end here. The reason I was running windows was really for games and the 'it just works' factor. I know if I get a device somewhere, or a game, or some app I know it runs on windows.

Now, I know the arguments against all the above... if you want to game, get a console. Buy only hardware from linux-friendly manufacturers.. and I agree although the reality is that it doesn't always work that way.

Now, to get my computer functional, I installed several distros (all of which seem to work flawlessly despite windows claims of hardware inadequacy). I didn't feel like installing gentoo all week (I'm not knocking gentoo! I ran it for a year or so and liked it), and fedora lasted almost half an hour before me getting mad at it, so I went back to my old standby... Mandrake 10. I booted knoppix and saved the community iso to my ramdrive, burned it, and installed from the ftp official sources. An hour later I had a copy of Mandrake and it was my new desktop - permenantly. Albeit by force.

Now, I tried to go back to windows a few times on another partition with no success (and yes I mapped the partitions around with grub to be windows-friendly).. And it failed.

So I had a choice.. stick with linux (by force) and learn to love it in a desktop environment or shell out for a new motherboard.

Setting up the system was simple. Sound, mice, usb printers, nvidia graphics drivers etc... All that went well. The next task was clear - getting games to work.

Now, I have a collection of several hundred cd's and numerous floppies dating back to the days of the original Mechwarrior and Starflt (and I still have the code wheel). After a weekend of wine and compiling the winex cvs several different ways, I ended up with a grand total of 0 working games. This was very disappointing.

I struggled for about another two weeks with some mmorpg's I played and had just about finished with the withdrawl pains since I was unable to play them. Still no luck.

I was hard-set against paying $15 for a transgaming subscription, mostly because of the lack of it being free (in either sence of the word).

At one weak point I threw out my cc# and ended up with a nice little minty-fresh RPM. The installation was easy.. no config files needed to be setup (although I tweaked them later) and it made all the directories I needed. The interesting part was... most of my games actually worked. I've been going through KOTOR for the last week on linux, and aside from some mouse irritations it mostly works.

Now, I'm not an advocate for Transgaming, and I recommend using wine/x if at all possible, but for anyone thrown into the deep end it can ease some of the pains.

And now, my home system is linux and its staying that way.

I ditched Windows of OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

It was scary as all hell because I had never even touched an Apple computer since the IIe.

I was thinking "This is a bunch of money and I hope this f*cker works!"

Like most, I got tired of:

1) the nazi registration scheme for windows
2) the viruses, worms, spyware, and what have you
3) WINDOWS ARTHRITIS this just po'ed me
4) everything was a pain in the butt to administer
5) magical disappearing disk space
6) general flakiness
7) I ain't paying MS to help destroy the OpenSource movement

Why didn't I go with Linux?

-- I needed a laptop. There are few and far between Linux laptops.
-- I am so sick of fiddling with things. I want something that "just works." Sure I can get Linux to do what I need it to do, and often in ten minutes - but man. Come on. I don't want to fiddle anymore. I have been fiddling since the 80's.

It's more fun

[Scholasticus]

A lot has already been written about various reasons for not using Windows - stability issues, control, viruses, cost, customization, and so on. I agree with all these reasons, but I'll add another which I don't think has been stated: I stay away from Windows and use Linux because it's more fun.

I have fun tinkering with my OS. You can't do a lot of that with Windows, but you can with Linux. I'm not a developer, but I can still get a kick out of compiling my own kernel, editing a config file, or trying out a different window manager. I know a lot of people don't find fun in these things, but I do. This isn't my only reason for not using Windows, but it's important to me.

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[dasmegabyte]

Actually, what ticks me off is that Windows makes it easier to unplug a device incorrectly than it does to do so correctly.

On Windows, if I want to eject my iPod or my camera, I have to click unplug device. Then I have to click the device i want to unplug. Then I have to select the device. Then it tells me I'll also be turning off the filesystem on the drive (duh). Then is asks if I'm sure. Then it tells me it ejected okay.

That's 4 windows opened. If I just pull the cable, I only get one window. Guess which one I do?

On Mac OSX, if I jack the plug on my iPod or my camera, I get a single message telling me I did something stupid and probably screwed my file system (whcih, on the camera, i probably did). If I drag it to the trash, or click the eject button over the volume in the finder, and i'm not using a file on the drive, it ejects and doesn't even give me a window. It becomes LESS of a hassle to do it right!

Windows is Also Free .. but not the tools.

[prisonernumber7]

Windows may be free, but when you really want to do something with that machine, you will inevitably at one point shell out big bucks. For development, which I like to do, for example.

The reason I don't like to do Windows is because after I have installed a $free_unix, I can do this:

aeons:/usr/home/ava$ which emacs
/usr/local/bin/emacs
aeons:/usr/home/ava$ which cc
/usr/bin/cc
aeons:/usr/home/ava$ which CC
/usr/bin/CC
aeons:/usr/home/ava$ which perl
/usr/bin/perl
aeons:/usr/home/ava$ which python
/usr/local/bin/python
aeons:/usr/home/ava $ which mozilla
/usr/X11R6/bin/mozilla
aeons:/usr/home/a va$ uname
FreeBSD

It's thas simple. And it's all there, even without going through a thousand urls to download whatever program that just won't match these other operating systems anyways. And if I ever need some other piece of software I can have it in a minute by simply pkg_add -r'ing it. Simple convenience, I guess. Priceless.

Development

[bltfast32]

I use it because Windows is completely closed. I love programming and Linux makes it easy to screw around with (screw up?) anything.

Heck, Windows doesn't even ship with QuickBasic anymore. They've certainly made it clear you aren't welcome to explore (unless you have several hundred for VS.NET).

Too bad too; I think a lot of youth are missing out on the excitment of programming because of this too. I don't think MS is really interested in fostering more programmers. They have the ones they feel they need.

So anyways - like I said before I started rambling. I love to program and I'll never run out of possibilities with Linux so I love it. I'm like a kid in a candy store.

It motivates me to participate and grow.

BTW - I can relate to 'easier to diagnose problems' argument too.

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[NanoGator]

"Honestly, who at Microsoft thought this was a good idea: "Start / Settings / Control Panel / Add/Remove Hardware / Next / Uninstall/Unplug a device / Next / Unplug/Eject a device / Next / Select device / Next"...when the Apple engineers tell you: "Unplug the device from your Macintosh."

That's funny, when I eject a device, a little icon appears on my system tray. Double click it, pick the one you want to turn off, and a message tells you it's ready to go. How would anybody know that? If you unplug something without doing this, you get a nice little message explaining it to you, and it shows you what to do.

I doubt it's as nice as what Apple has, but it's nowhere near as dramatic as you're making it out top be.

Three words

[wildernessvoice]

Infantile, cumbersome and boring.

Windows is sort'a nice.

[ThePhilips]

Windows is sort'a nice, I like it much more than Linux. Really.

But it is just little things.

I'm using VIM very much. I hate VIM, I hate Emacs, I love MSDevStudio. But. But under VIM+Bash I'm at least three times more productive.

Windows GUI is good and consistent. To some degree. I'm as a person who designed for two years GUI applications for Windows and knowing every input/output/message/control available I can say that Windows GUI is most advanced GUI ever created. But. But M$ itself stopped following itsown GUI desing guidelines, and I'm not taliking about dumb so-called "VB Programmers" and other commercial software developers who have problems doing simple window with two buttons right. This is really sickening.

Error handing in Windows is just awful. It has nowthing comparable to /var/log/messages. Once I have spent 3 month being not able to run one of the my development tools. It was really bad situation and no one have ever had any clue what have happened. I have used other machine with devkit installed, where my tool worked Ok. But after sometime it stopped working there too. After two weeks of games with regedit/etc it turns out that this application was Win16 application (Win32 has no required system call - but Win16 subsystem does) and when and size of evironment was giong over some limit Win16 subsystem was just stopping to work. With no error message whatsoever.

I can go on and on. For a long time. I've being long-time M$ user and developer. But once I (actually bit forcefully) switched to Linux - I was really amased: some things didn't worked, but most of other things just worked. Without reboots, without crashes, without asking tons silly questions. Just worked. Breath of fresh air after 6 years of WinNT 4.0.

P.S. w2k/xp really didn't changed this balance much since early year 2000 - the time I switched to Linux completely.

Atari

[Nikademus]

Yes, I used atari from it's beginning.. I always disliked windows, which is user unfriendly and very buggy and unstable. At one time, I was kind of forced to use windows, cos linux was so primitive, and atari was a little bit underpowered for the time. So at about P1 133, I began using windows, without liking it much at all. When I saw there was an alternative that was customisable and useable graphically, I began to love linux.. Now I adhere to opensource philosophy. I must admit I used windows for 4 years or so, this was about the period I was nearly away from computing because I had not much interest in it. Now I use Linux and OpenBSD, and I have regained interest in computing as I am now working in IT...

Re:Atari

[tekiegreg]

Well, in between the maturation of Linux and the Atari systems was this little known, fairly stable OS available cheap for PC's called OS/2 *sigh* the OS that just could never really take off....or you can try BSD variants back then (or couldn't you? I'm not familiar with BSD history).

A Recent XP - OS X switcher's opinon...

[newdamage]

Mac hardware is what brought me to OS X, I love my 12" iBook, and it just works so much better than my brick of an XP laptop ever did. Battery life and stability overall are just better. But Mac OS X 10.3 has just been one huge surprise. I knew it was good, but I never realized how well it caters to both beginnings and power users. It keeps things simple enough to not have to worry about constant maintenance and tweaking, but allows people to peek under the hood if they so desire.

I also love the fact that just like most llinux distros, mac comes ready for developers. I have a native bash terminal, java, gcc, and xcode ready to go. I can't say that much windows.

Also, other huge surprise, there is a -ton- of freeware/shareware available for os x, and i find most of it to be of high quality (i.e. adium, transmit, subethaedit, colloquy, etc, etc).

Now that I'm on a laptop with OS X, I really don't see myself switching back anytime soon, even with centrino options maturing somewhat.

No More Windows

[Ridgelift]

I don't use Windows anymore because Linux is more fun.

Gut feeling...

[gillbates]

Many things...

Yes, I paid for Windows, so I do use it occasionally. After all, it is my right to. But when I use it something just doesn't feel right.

• It could be that I've read the EULA. I've never read a longer, more thoroughly articulated form of "Screw you!" than Microsoft's EULA.
• In light of the way their EULA is worded, I can't help but wonder if virus vulnerability was deliberately designed into their software.
• I hate the fact that HELP doesn't actually tell you how to solve the problem, but only re-iterates Microsoft's philosophy that a user shouldn't be able to configure or troubleshoot their own machine. Even should I want to learn about my own hardware, Microsoft does its best to hide as much useful information from me as possible.
• People sometimes ask me to fix their PC's. I'd like to help, but often times I'd have to reinstall the OS. Without them showing me their Windows license, I can't fix their crashed machine. I don't have to worry about this with Linux, but then, all of the Linux machines I've built for people have never come back to me except for hardware failure.

But I don't merely use Linux because it's _NOT MICROSOFT_. I've learned that there are some real advantages:

• I don't have to worry about security when I'm online with Linux.
• I don't have to spend my weekends downloading and patching an OS that will need to be patched again next month, and the month after that, and the month after that....
• I don't have to worry about opening email attachments from someone I don't know. I don't have to wonder if that attached Word document is a reply from a recruiter, or the next virus incarnation.
• I like having 4 desktops. I get a machine which is actually useable for development work.
• Linux is much more thoroughly documented that Windows. If my hardware isn't automatically configured, the more popular "drivers" will scan the bus and tell me the settings I need to get it working. Windows requires you to guess if it can't autoconfigure your system.
• I don't have the guilt of using software written by a company which takes pride in forcing others out of business.

And my last point is probably my best one. There's a certain joy in using something that someone else created for you, not for personal profit or greed, but rather, as an act of giving back to the community that has given so much to them. I've benefitted greatly from using Linux, and I really look forward to the time when I myself will be able to give back to the community that has given so much to me. Linux is almost sacred because it is free from the influence of money; it was created for the purpose of blessing the users, not exploiting them. Linux is software the way it was meant to be.

Microsoft won't allow me

[noldrin]

Microsoft refuses to allow me to run MS Windows. This is because I can't agree to their EULA.

Really ? I went free, then went back. way back.

[bmajik]

I "went free" a long time ago. I first used UNIX as an 8th grader and was running linux .98 when i was in 10th grade. I stopped using MS products as of Win 3.1 (and after dabbling with OS/2 2.1/2.11) switched completely to linux.

For a year or two.

Then i bought a sparc IPX with sol 2.4, then an SS10 with 2.5.1. Then i went off to college.

With these two real machines i had no need for linux, so i stopped caring about PCs in general. I had real hardware and a real OS that ran basically as long as i left the things turned on. At college i had 2 sparcstations but no PCs.

My junior year of school i bought an SGI i^2 high impact (i wanted a fast 24bit gfx console, and sun didn't have any available unless you got an ffb, which were very expensive and UPA only, or a ZX, which i bought, and was dirt slow)

Finally, in my senior year of college, i got a PC again. Why ? my sgi got rooted :) A friend gave me her old p166mmx machine. I bought two $10 ethernet cards and put openbsd on it. That machine is still my openbsd firewall/filter/"stuff" machine. In march of that year i bought a $400 machine and put win2k RC on it to compete in a windows CE development contest. (note i hadn't used any MS stuff in years, apart from a friends machine or the occasional lab computer).

In may of the same year (2 months later), i started work full time at Microsoft.

Not much changed at home - my main box was still my SGI for a number of years, with my ss10 doing web and mail hosting, the obsd box doing all firewall duties. I sold the sparc IPX back in college.

I built a duron 600 file server and put obsd on it. This was when UDMA 100 drives were fairly new; i put two in that machine and discovered a bug in the oBSD IDE driver, which i submitted a minor patch for (and which was subsequently re-written, but im in the comments somewhere :)

At work obviously i was using w2k, xp, server 2k3, etc. I had a linux box in the corner for some occasional tasks that were actually faster to do in unix even with the penalty of moving data over and back again (i am something of a fan of awk)

I found that W2k was refreshingly nice compared to 3.1, 95, and NT4. I'd say that W2k was the first real OS MS released. Usable enough to not get in the way. Certainly no more than dicking with linux sound modules got in the way.

Curretly, that duron 600 is my main xp workstation, the p166 still runs openbsd, and the ss10 has been powered off for 6 months. The $400 w2k machine still runs w2k as a dedicated machine that has daemontools images of the various car-repair and parts-db stuff i use (via terminal server).

The point of all this long windedness ?

everything post w2k is good enough to use as a workstation, IMO. For a given task, there's a number of tools that can accomplish it. In my case, i screw with computers enough at work that i'm just not interested in hassling with them at home. That means that my home technology choices tend to revolve around "easiest", where easiest caters to my current skillset and world view.

That means i use an XP machine for all of my web surfing and emailing, and putty from there to a unix machine to irc (i hate graphical irc clients). The oBSD machine hosts email and web (because both are super easy to setup there, and i have no fears about making an obsd machine internet-facing.. it just works like it's supposed to)

What's the point of all of this ?
I could really care less what OS i'm using. It either meets my requirments or it doesn't. I'll use the one that meets the operational profile for what i'll use the box for with the least amount of my effort. If i gave a crap about spending lots of time at home computing, i'd probably have something more modern than a duron 600 as my primary workstation.

The source code and the right to work on it

[chrysalis]

What I love with free operating systems is that :
- you're allowed to review the source code
- something doesn't work the way you want? No problem, change the code.
- you added a great feature that would be worth sharing? No problem, submit a patch to the author and it's likely to be merged in the next version.

There's nothing similar with Windows.
Have a look at Internet Exploder :
- the CSS support is totally broken by obvious bugs,
- this is known by almost every webmaster out there, and documented on a lot of web sites,
- plenty of people are skilled enough to fix the bugs. But they can't. And even if they could (technically, by disassembling), they aren't allowed to do so without breaking the EULA.

With Windows, you are totally passive. You can just wait and let Microsoft decide on the future of the software.

OTOH, directions taken in free software is mostly driven by users. By submitting suggestions on mailing listes, by sending patches, etc. Some software doesn't speak your native language? Translate it, send the result to the author and the next version will have your translation.

Send the same thing to Microsoft, it will go to /dev/null .

This is why I don't use Windows.

Re:Why I run Linux

[Jim Hall]

I'm going to reply to my own comment to remark why my wife currently uses Linux. I'm a technical person (sysadmin) but my wife has her BA in Literature and her MA in Theology. No technical background there. And she also is as non-technical as you can get.

But my wife asked to move off Windows. Why? Because she was tired of Windows viruses, of always having to apply updates to Windows (sometimes that would break her system ... usually when a paper was due the next day.) Generally, she considered Windows to be buggy, and Microsoft software (Office, ..) to be just as buggy.

Today, my wife is happily using Fedora Core on her 600MHz 128MB laptop. Try running Windows XP in that footprint. She runs Mozilla for her browser and to check email, she finished her thesis work on StarOffice (she felt a little better about using an office suite she had to pay for - no problem on my end .. whatever makes her more comfortable with Linux.) She's writing a book for publication using OpenOffice (after the thesis was finished, she decided to give OpenOffice a try.) She visits web sites that use flash or java plugins, and is able to see all the content.

As far as my wife is concerned, Linux is just as good as a Windows box. Or rather, Linux is even better. When she sees that another round of Windows viruses has appeared, she sort of cackles about those "poor Windows users." :-)

Missing topic

[Ra5pu7in]

What keeps you dual-booting your system? I have some software that simply isn't available to run with Linux or requires a long delay from the release of the Windows version, so I have a Windows boot. I can't stand the security risk of Windows so I have a Linux boot. When I am gaming or handling CAD/CAM stuff, I log in to Windows. When I am surfing the net or checking email, I log in to Linux.

Re:What keeps me off?

[corbettw]

Ahhh, so you are evaluating your software based on looks of the people in the company? Wow. Can it get any more closed minded than that?

Actually, I'd say it's ironic, not just close minded. I mean, have you seen some of the gurus of "open source" lately?

Doing my part to help Microsoft's decline..

[bADlOGIN]

It's a small thing, but I figure the less I use microsoft's products at all, the more I help enable them to fade into computing history where they belong. I make a point to promote non-Microsoft alternatives whenever I can to friends and family. I've turned a number of people on to Mozilla for browser and mail and WinAmp for music. I try to financially reward companies that support more than just Microsoft products. The reasons are first and most importantly security, and second an absolute disgust for Microsoft's business practices. For all they've done to screw over customers, competitors with 10x better products that they snuffed out, and of course "partners" (note: a good Microsoft "partnership" is when you get lube and a warning before they start on you).

I am a staunch supporter of A.B.M. (Anyone But Microsoft). If I am in a situation where I "must" use Windows, I use it only in the only way that can do the least harm to the world: as an insecure application launcher. I use it to run Cygwin, GVim, Eclipse, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and whatever else. I run the McAfee Anti-Virus, Spy-Bot Seek 'n Destroy and run Windoze update regularly. No windoze media player, IE removed from the desktop, always saying no to the .NET framework crap, and absolutely _NO_ Outlook garbage!! I run OpenOffice and tell people that I have an older office version if I can't open files and make them re-save and re-send them. If they gripe, I tell them to complain to Microsoft.

And of course, I make sure it's behind a firewall.

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[nahdude812]

Dragging the disk to the trash/recycle can always seemed like a strongly counter-intuitive practice to me. The trash can is for deleting things. Why would I put my 4,000 page thesis document, that I just completed after 6 semesters of hard work, which I'm keeping only on a single floppy in to the trash can? When undocking my laptop, I don't stick it in the local waste recepticle.

Much more intuitive IMO would have been an eject icon over which you can drag items (similar to how OSX's recycle can appears while dragging a disk). Better yet, what about a button on the case labeled "Eject?" I understand that purely mechanical ejects aren't feasible for performance reasons (floppies on PC's have to write immediately because of this), but why not have one that sent an eject request to the system, performing the same internal tasks as when you drug a disk to the trash?

Why do you eat vanilla ice cream?

[NitsujTPU]

Why not chocolate, or some other flavor? ...it's about the same question unless you really have a reason. I use Linux because, as a student, I needed a lot of the things that it gave me, and now, I just find it more convenient. What keeps me off of Windows is the fact that I use Linux, and that I'd have to buy a license for my computer. ...since I'm going to graduate school in the fall, I'll be skipping that license.

It's a Hostile Platform

[NickFortune]

I'm a coder. I like to develop. MS doesn't want that, because MS wants to be the only software vendor on the planet. Hell, they don't even want me writing stuff purely for my own benefit, since that means I won't be buying solutions from them.

Consequently, they make developent difficult. They obfiscate. They change the rules to mess up 3rd part software (1st party as well come to that) so that existing software will break.

It's a hostile platform.

Also, of course, there's the expense, the forced upgrades, the DRM, and the corporations staggering absence of anything resembling ethics. But mainly it boils down to one thing:

Windows is a hostile platform.

Reasons, oh reasons

[Luyseyal]

• Linux is cheap. Though, even if Windows were distributed gratis, I would probably only use it for my son's games.
• Linux applications tend to have a sort of orthogonal stability where if something breaks, it's easy to tell what broke (and possibly why). It's also trivial to find the developer or bugzilla and complain.
• Windows isn't cool.
• About the only things I noticably miss are:
  1. Shockwave,
  2. decent cross-platform multimedia websites, and
  3. children's games
• tuxpaint -- my kid loves this one
• It does IP masquerading, loadbalancing of multiple Internet connex, and intelligent firewalling, while still managing to run my desktop.
• Client Access Licenses for home users, experimenters, and tinkerers? You're kidding, right?
• There is a proven, reliable license authority for OSS software. If I wonder about a license, I go to OSI and look in its list of OSI-approved licenses. With Windows, I have no clue what I get or don't get, what's enforceable and unenforceable, etc. and as a home user, I'll be damned if I'm gonna hire a lawyer to install a damn piece of software.

There are probably more, but that is sufficient to keep me off Windows for the foreseeable future.

-l

What makes me wanna leave Windows?

[Anonvmous Coward]

Okay, I'm a Windows user who somehow got a magic computer that runs it just fine. I'm more or less happy. I'm productive. Maintaining it hasn't been a problem. Stability hasn't been a problem. All my software works. I can do my job. Etc. I kind of thought some of you would find hearing from somebody with this experience kind of interesting. I can't answer the question "What's keeping me from Windows", but I can answer "Why would I want to leave?" Simply put, as my work load goes up, my time to tinker with computers goes down. I have reached a point where endlessly tweaking everything I've got is no longer fun. I've got my basic needs, now I want a appliance-esque machine that's ready to go and never need configuring.

So where do I want to go? Not Linux. Sorry folks, too much tinkering and looking up how to do basic things. I've tried, lots and lots of times. Instead, I'd rather go Apple. I can go buy an Apple laptop right now, have everything ready to go, and get just about all the software I want to run for it. No more Windows rot. Installation of new toys such as iPods or wireless routers etc is painless. The stand by mode doesn't rot over time. I could keep going.

Windows is working just fine for me. But I am sick of being paranoid about making backups. I am sick of knowing I have to reinstall Windows every 6 months or so. On top of all that, I'm tired of explaining to people that I don't have the problems they've had. Most of all, I'm tired of going into over-analytical mode when the minutist thing happens.

Windows isn't the worst thing in the world to me by any stretch of the imagination. Moving to Apple would be a nice luxurious move for me. I can't really say that I'm being forced in that direction, though. Maybe one day the Linux community will figure out that usability really is an interseting aspect to pursue and I'll be able to be more 'luxurious' for free.

Re:What makes me wanna leave Windows?

[NanoGator]

"Huh? If everything is running so smoothly why do you have to reinstall it every 6 months?"

The fundamental back breaking flaw in Windows is the registry. Every few months, it gets so bloated that even simple tasks take a long time to get through. Why? Because Windows has to scan through it, find the data it wwants, and load it in. It eventually becomes such a tangled mess you MUST start over with it.

Even the most dedicated MS Fan boy will acknowledge that.

I can't find the "I am not an idiot"-button

[rainer_d]

It's as simple as that.

Far more to it than that

[AllenChristopher]

Competition also opens up new markets. The whole online music thing was really kicked off by Apple, right? There were others first, but Apple made it a daily reality.

If Microsoft had CRUSHED Apple years ago, that wide-open market wouldn't be there for Microsoft to grab... they'd have to have thought of it themselves, implemented it, gotten it to sell.

The advantage of competitors is that your competitors do some of the foot-work for you, take some of the risks for you. What you want to do is wait until the copmetitor has made a new product work, then beat their product.

Of course, that's what Microsoft is so good at...

Re:Far more to it than that

[shaitand]

"The advantage of competitors is that your competitors do some of the foot-work for you, take some of the risks for you. What you want to do is wait until the copmetitor has made a new product work, then beat their product.

Of course, that's what Microsoft is so good at... "

Umm well yeah, what you want to do is wait for the competitor to make a new product and then beat it.

What Microsoft does is the same, except that instead of beating it, they leverage their monopoly (given by ibm, not earned on their own merit) to push into the masses a competiting ALMOST compatible product that is just different enough as to not cooperate with the competitors whatsoever in ways that make the competitors product appear broken and buggy.

THAT is what Microsoft is good at. I've never known Microsoft actually release a superior product in order to take over a market.

branding

[jcupitt65]

One of the things that annoys me about windows is that your machine becomes part of a very open and highly competitive marketplace. Every application you install wants to take over as much of your space as it can, and does its best to elbow out any competing applications.

For example, my Mum has an XP machine. She has a flatbed Epson scanner, but her Lexmark printer can scan too. Plus I got her a Canon digital camera. If you install the bundled software that comes with all these products (and you have to install at least part of all of them) your machine is a total pickle. Sometimes images pop up in one application, sometimes in another. They fight over who is going to control the printer. They all have a simple image editor, these editors are all completely different, and worst of all, they all have elaborate skins to emphasise their branding. The Canon one was the worst: my Mum is 70 and has trouble reading buttons where the button text is a fixed size rather small bitmap in an unreadable "futuristic" font and is (wait for it) dark grey on mid grey. In fact even working out which bits of the screen are buttons and which are decoration can be pretty challenging.

By contrast Macs are a delight to use because (almost) the only software available is made by Apple and actually (gasp) cooperates. And Linux, erm, well it's not a delight to use, but if you enjoy tinkering it can be OK, and at least most projects try to rub along discreetly.

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[doodlelogic]

And who was it at Apple who thought users couldn't be trusted to hard-eject CDs and floppies?

For a basic level user, there is considerable confusion between ejecting your floppy/CD and ejecting the device (assuming an external drive).

Apple's GUI, even in its OSX form, is generally, I find, easier to use than Windows (a reason I switched for home purposes), but not in this example! In XP you can safely dismount a device simply by right-clicking on its icon in My Computer.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

UNIX Command line

[Hyperbolix]

Having worked for an ISP for some time now, I have grown accustomed to using vim, sed, awk, grep, and a variety of other tools. I utilize command shells for practically everything (force of habit,) and I am actually more error prone in a drag/drop environment than using a command line. I'm extremely unhappy with the quality of the Windows 'cmd' command line interface. At this point, the only use I have for Windows is to play the everpopular first person shooters, for which I dual boot. I dislike the lack of remote control in windows. I'd really like to be able to SSH in and do everything from a command prompt that I could do with the normal interface, but the Windows XP Telnet interface is crippling. There is something quite inflexible about Windows, and I find it disturbing. When I leave home, I must check to make sure my dual booting system is running in Linux (the default,) or I won't be able to access it from elsewhere. Diverse filesystem access is also lacking, as I can access my NTFS partition read-only from Linux, but I cannot access my EXT3 partition at all from Windows. I think that just about sums it up.

Windows free for 3 years

[bryanthompson]

I've been off of windows for 3 years. I have 3 Redhat machines and just bought a PowerBook last week. The main reason for me to not swtich from Windows was that I couldn't give up all of the games. These days I have one windows machine that I use for Battlefield.

The main thing keeping me from going back to windows is that I realize that I don't need windows to do what I want. I'm happy coding java in vim and NOT having lockups. The alternative software is getting better, and for most everyone OpenOffice or AbiWord will do whatever they want. Evolution is one of the best email apps I've used, except for Mail.app now. But, it's just that I know I don't have to use windows that's keeping me away from it.

I bet there's a lot of people here who would seriously switch completely to Mac or Linux if they could give up their games, or get different games. Frozen Bubble is only really entertaining for the first few weeks. As far as doing real work like websites and java, anything BUT windows is the way to go.

I would blame....

[vwjeff]

Would you blame Ford if your friend borrowed your car and wrecked it?

No, I would blame Firestone.

Claustrophobia

[rongten]

What keeps me out of MSWindowsTM is
mostly a sense of claustrophobia, of having
the walls closing on me.

When I am put in front of a windows machine I
feel umconfortable, like somebody switched my
keyboard layout and messed with the mouse.

I have to change mindset: I am not the master,
but I am the slave, I have to abide to the
"logic" of the computer, if there is a problem,
I can very well not be able solve it, simply
because I cannot see where is the defect.

Computers should be a symbol of man ingenuity,
of his progress, not a tool to enslave them
instead..

I do not want the computer to think for me.
I have already the politicians and the TVs that
try to convince me they know better.

The simplest tasks become impossible.
The DOS prompt makes me want to scream, and the
programs, with tons of toolbars and options make
me dizzy.

I guess my past of heavy Amiga user helped me to
know what a real machine and a real OS could do,
but in general I can have the occasional wish to
use a program, like dictation software, or a game,
but it does not last long.

I can have Tribes II and NWN on my Linux Box, and
I can try out sphinx.

In general, I see MSWindows like an invaluable
tool that created the idea of the Personal
Computer in each home (now more than one), but
a tool that now has is time due.

It is time to move on. We cannot keep our
keyboards being modeled after some long
disappeared mechanical typewriters.

Is time to look forward, try at least the dvorak
layout, and spare money for a keyboard with
no staggering, install Linux on our family
Pcs, whenever possible, and support the OSS
community actively with financial support.

Best Regards

Re:What keeps me off?

[killjoe]

Maybe no looks but it's a metaphor. Balmer, Gates, Alchin etc are very slimy people who run a slimy company that does slimy things.

To me the fact that MS paid ADTI to write a book sliming Linus and open source is reason enough to shun them. Add to that funding SCO, paying the likes of Enderlee and DiDio to publish bogus research and the thousands of other sleazy tactics.

To me It's important to support companies who act ethically. I realize that every dollar I spend can either make the world a better place or a worse one. I don't buy GM modified food, I don't buy Microsoft.

The four S's

[the_rev_matt]

Stability
Security
Scalability
Source

If MSFT could provide those in any consistent manner, I would consider them an option. Until then, it's not even worth discussing.

Fear

[nwbvt]

I've got a dual boot but I've been using Linux 99.9% of the time lately. But because of that, I've haven't had a chance to apply any MS security updates, antivirus updates, firewall updates, etc. Now everything is probably horribly out of date, and I'm afraid if I log back in I'll be vulnerable to every virus developed in the past few months.

Oh well, its not like I really miss anything on Windows.

*Concerns* About Security?

[SpamJunkie]

I don't think concern experesses fully the issues that Windows XP's security has. That sounds as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat worrying about black helicopters.

The issues with XP's security are factual: try installing XP on a computer you intend to connect to the internet. Go to windows update as fast as you can, and try to download the RPC patch as fast as you can. I can confidently guarantee that your machine will try to reboot itself well before you can even download it, let alone apply it.

I cannot fathom what horrible hoops people unfamiliar with computers must go through to get a new version of windows installed. Even worse, a machine sold with a 6 month old version of XP preinstalled. Unless they are blessed with a computer-savvy friend nothing less than a $50 or more visit to a computer store would help them.

Why don't I use windows? Because I wouldn't have any problem letting my parents upgrade OS X. Because I like to spend my weekends using my computer, not fixing it.

And damn it, because I prefer computers that don't have a boot process that still uses decade-old DOS graphics.

Windows users...

[cks3]

I've been working in tech support for roughly four years. I have a G5 sitting on my desk and I run two computer labs that are filled with peecees running XP and the only way I can keep everything locked down and protected is thanks to a program called DeepFreeze that prevents the users from mucking everything up. All I do is restart and the machines are fine again. That being said, in my experience, 90% of Windoze users are the most ill informed lot of computer users out there. They expect the computer to work like an appliance, or they are frightened of it and think some how it will reveal to everyone else that it is in fact smarter than they are, or they are antagonistic towards it and look at it as an evil force working against them. On the other hand, there are about 10% that are uber-users who actually know what they are doing and enjoy the platform. Linux users tend to know Windoze inside and out and smirk and laugh at the uninitiated masses who haven't realized how nice it is to get free software that works, but they also tend to not realize how much time they have spent learning linux compared to the masses who still want that easy on appliance that hooks to their internet and their email and helps them write papers. Mac users are divided into 3rds. One third of them are power users who know Mac inside and out classic to OS X and as a result of living in a Windoze world know PeeCees well enough to get around. Another third are very capable of troubleshooting their own macs but have no idea how to work windoze and get confused when they encounter the lab computers, but they usually aren't afraid to learn. The final third know only what they know on the Mac and nothing else; they are fortunate that nothing goes wrong that often with their macs, but they are also oblivious to how seldom things do go wrong, so that the smallest thing is made to be a HUGE ORDEAL. The last two crowds are generally easier to deal with than the Windoze users, and that is why I personally don't do windoze. That, of course, and because Micro$oft is a scum-bag of a company that eats the souls of everyone and everything it can.

upgrade path

[cyb3rsonik]

My upgrade-path just somehow did not include Windows. From Commodore 64 to Amiga to Apple, which seemed to make a lot of sense back then considering the way especially Amiga worked - stress on interface and usability. Please note: I didn't say Amiga ruled. It wasn't perfect. It just was more perfect than anything else back then. Also, I never was much of a gamer, so I guess that explains something as well.

Even though I am forced to work with Windows at the job, I just can't help smiling when I turn the Mac on at home. It's absolutely fun to work with. It's even fun to solve problems when they occur. And when I cannot solve a problem, I know there are helpful communities out there who share my enthusiasm for the platform and are more than willing to help, no questions asked. Compare that to the Windows world, where it usually is every man to himself.

Anyway, Windows never gets that smile on my face. The only expression Windows gets ony face is one of utter disbelief: how people can continue to use the products of a convicted monopolist, a company where quality and contents of products are dictated by the marketing department. A company that pretty much all the time lies to its customers - it would basically do and say anything to keep you as a customer. A company that innovates by aggressive takeovers, and manages to totally screw up the bought product while they're at it (got to love Frontpage). A company that is not afraid to use references to terrorism and nationalism to fight a competitor that they label is "free" without even understanding what that word means. That and its track record of bugs, security issues, and the malware and spyware that seem to thrive on it.

It's a strange in a way, though: I do not know how many times I cursed the Amiga back then when another bootloader virus had killed a set of floppy disks. I still loved it for all its faults.

I use linux because of the guitar software.

[paperclip2003]

I use effects software (distortion, flanger, recording and etc) and this software would cost a bundle to get it all on windows or the mac. Also, I have been able to configure my machine to run on a fairly minimalist setup (Kdrive X Server) and a shrunk down kernel and found through trial and error that the deadline schedular is the fastest hands down for audio. (uses less than 32megs of ram) I use creox, ecamegapedal, gtkguitune, ExEf, Audacity, Xmms, Kguitar ... and several other pieces software. I would say for a garage band with little $$, linux is the best way to go. It also seems to have a larger software selection than OSX and windows when it comes to guitar software that is cheap or almost free. I also get the best responsiveness and least latency compared to windows or OSX, even though the kernel still has some nasty bugs that I can make my system crash(took a lot of kernel customization though). I think the customization aspects scare the non-savy people away. But if you don't mind a little frustration with getting things working right, linux is the best platform hands down for a budget musician. All and all it just works the best if you are into audio and sound tweaking. I did not take linux seriously until about a year ago and it was always just a hobby platform and now I never boot into windows. Even word processing with Microsoft Word or Open Office seems to work great (thanks to the folks at winehq). Linux is more like hardware was in the late 70's and early 80s. It is sort of like building stuff from kits and making it work. It has rough corners, but once it works, it always works. -Ron

Investment in reliability.

[hellfire]

I'm not a linux geek, but I wish I was. Unfortunately I don't have time to invest as much as I would like to learn the system.

Which is exactly why I don't want to use windows. Windows is an investment just to get it to work reliabily. Put in the CD and it works, but a week later something goes wrong and you have to troubleshoot that. Then you have to troubleshoot this crap and that crap.

These two reasons are why I have always used Macs at home. I don't have time to invest in my machine. I pay a premium up front, but then it magically just works. It always works. It will continue to work. I don't have downtime because my internet connection hiccups. I don't have to update things every 30 seconds to prevent the next worm from bringing down my machine. I don't gradually lose performance because spyware chokes the processor.

Games? Bah... I gave up on serious gaming after Diablo 2. I play Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds by myself along with some hearts, spades, cribbage, solitaire and a few other minor games. someone's always making new versions of card games, and I can play them online thanks to a Safari browser that's more reliable and up to date than IE for the Mac.

Business software? Bah... I find my own tools from shareware and freeware, which are more reliable and easier to use than Microsoft's tools. Plus it's easy to find software that's free, and is compatible with Word's format if you need to find it.

The Mac hardware is an investment, but its an investment in reliability I'm willing to make. Yes would it be nicer if it was cheaper, but wouldn't everything be nicer if it was cheaper?

Norton ghost will solve that problem

[mirror_dude]

Simply install windows, all your apps , and make a disk image. Every time windows fucks up re-image.
My friend does this every month, and he keeps his data on a network drive so its still there after he re-images.
Although linux might be a better solution :-)

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[as400tek]

I am with you on this one. I still have a windows PC, but it rearly gets used. I have to use one at work, but that is changing. MacOSX is right on, I am not going to say bad things about MS, I am not going to go and tell you they crash and suck, I just like MacOSX more, and that is all I have to say about that.

Wrong question?

[john82]

Rather than ask amongst Slashdot users "What keeps you off of Windows?", perhaps we should ask the rest of the computing public a much more interesting question.

What keeps you off of Linux?

The first question merely allows us to puff out our collective chests and bleat for the rest of the assmbled throng. Then we nod appreciatively at our confirmation of the "obvious". Tell it brother!

But why don't more people use Linux or BSD (and their collective assortment of redheaded step-children)? What aren't we doing right that there isn't greater acknowlegement of the beneifts outlined in countless posts here. The question is not that far removed from the ease with which some snake oil salesman from the land of de Tocqueville is able to con the masses about Linux and Open Source.

Open Source and Linux need a really good PR guru that can get our voice heard. A few shouts in the wilderness ain't doing the job.

Then again, maybe we need to spend more time on improving this mouse trap so the world will beat a path to our door.

Re:Wrong question?

[nametaken]

Actually, there are PR reps working on just that (IBM, RHAT, etc). Currently they're more focused on nabbing big companies, but that's not a bad thing. If people end up using open source stuff at work, and hear that it's free... they'll switch. Honestly, I would have guessed a year ago that Linux wasn't going to be making huge inroads into the desktop market in the following year. It will take time, and the continuted efforts of people working for both love and profit.

Re:Wrong question?

[SplendidIsolatn]

What keeps me off Linux, I'll tell you, and no, I'm not trying to put this off as flamebait.

I have been a computer geek type since I was old enough to sit and type. I have been working with computers for over 20 years in one fashion or another, so while I might not be a guru on them, I know what I'm doing. So when I built my own computer in the fall of 2002, I decided to install Mandrake Linux (what was available at the store) to give it a whirl. Biggest mistake I ever made.

First off, the 'easy' installation took me hours to do, then it decided to keep freezing once I got it running. Then one thing stopped working after another, and I was spending more time trying to figure out what was wrong than spending time using my computer. I deleted the installation, put Windows XP home on the PC, firewall, anti-spyware, hell, I'll even download firefox or something. My windows PC WORKS FOR ME AND DOES WHAT I NEED IT TO DO. Nothing anyone could say about Linux after my experience with Mandrake will change that. I have a working PC that maybe crashes once a month. I can live with that and buying WinXP rather than spending hours cruising through message boards to figure out why my modem drivers weren't working correctly (and yes, I had to do that)

In short, Linux might be right for some people. For me and what I wanted, it was wrong, and I don't plan on going back. To the Linux zealots (not Linux users), add up the amount of time that you've spent having to 'tweak' something that you wouldn't have to do in Windows (and downloading patches doesn't count -- I do that while reading Slashdot). Multiply those hours by whatever dollar emount you choose and see what value you've had to spend on Linux. It's probably a lot less than an XP install.

Sorry if this offends any Linux people, but my experience is my experience and I can't change it.

Peace

Re:Wrong question?

[jonastullus]

What keeps you off of Linux?

disclaimer: i am actually an ardent linux user, but obviously i have my issues with the "free" operating systems. here are some pointers:

1. necessity of a deeper understanding: in linux/bsd no matter what kind of tool you use for configurations, you sooner or later will come to a point where an unrealistic (for "aunt tilly" that is ;-) level of understanding is taken for granted. although this leads to an overall better grasp of how your system works (which is often cited as a positive side effect), most people will not want to invest this kind of time or simply aren't interested.
(and i don't either. for example when figuring out how those printing services are SUPPOSED to work!)

2. configuration madness: after having configured a complex application, I often ask myself whether it was worth the time invested. prominent examples of such applications would be: exim, postfix, cyrus, mutt, apache, ... i'm not saying the complex applications should be configurable in a jiffy, but sometimes you just don't WANT the complexity and would be OK with some (and especially FEW) sane default options!

3. drivers: of course it has become less of a problem during the last two years, but still there are problems especially with accelerated graphics drivers. this is more a problem of vendors not supporting their hardware for "minority" OSs, but it is still a pain in the ass being "forced" to use those binary nvidia drivers!

4. fragmentation: the flexibility and modularity of linux/unix/bsd which is such a huge PRO on the console and when scripting, actually becomes a drawback when looking at the desktop. the lack of a unified GUI style (including drag-and-drop, gtk-to-kde-bindings) especially in the how-to-do-things paradigms is often annoying. don't get me wrong: for me as a power user that is less of a problem, but for average joe having to figure out, exactly how burning a cd in xcdroast is supposed to work or why dragging mp3s into xmms won't work, will be a negative experience!

5. choice: in my opinion we should get rid (i.e. disadvise) of certain programs that are known to be unsafe but are still present in many distros. a prime example of how too much diversity can be detrimental is ftp clients. almost all ftp clients are unsafe and a "newbie" has a good chance of picking the worst in the pack, consequent to his inability/reluctance to look into all advisories and exploits of all available clients!

rest assured that i am a convinced linux user, but still with the above arguments can partly understand why non-power-users will feel uncertain about a switch although basically with a good distro many of the problems can be more or less successfully hidden from them!

Re:Wrong question?

[digitect]

My family uses Fedora Core 2 at home as the sole OS. Here's a list of broken things that would keep me from convincing my work (Architectural firm) to use it:

• Broken printing. I always feel lucky when printing Just Works. Using it with image viewers and file manager thumbnail collections seem a distant fantacy.
• No CMYK support. (Yeah, it's related to printing, but there aren't apps that can even managing it for authoring, let alone output.)
• Poor/non-existant GL support. (Even possible given proprietary hardware?)
• No serious 3D CAD application. This is a huge industry hanging out in Windows before it can adopt Linux. IMO, PythonCAD is the best Free CAD software effort at the moment, but it is hardly Alpha and at least five years away from serious CAD work.
• Slow GUI. Linux still feels slower than Windows, regardless if the processor work is twice as efficient.
• Flakey sound support. Like printing, I'm always pleasently surprised when my sound works across applications and levels seem balanced.

That's the big item list for me. If all these ever get solved, the Windows platform will either be down for the count or headed there.

Re:Wrong question?

[debest]

You're not wrong. Linux, as much as it is developing quickly (and it is, if you're feeling the urge just download a newer distro sometime and try it again), it still doesn't stand up to your criteria. You still have to hack with your system to a degree that Windows does not require.

Your comment on the time required to tweak something is also spot on, in so far as these activities are generally rare in the Windows world. The tweaking, however, is *exactly* what most Linux users get a charge out of. Using an OS which is infinitely customizable, with dozens of options for most any type of application you can imagine, is appealing to many people (present company included).

Re:Wrong question?

[Krach42]

You raise good points. People use what works for them. I'm able to setup Windows, Linux, and MacOSX just the way I want, and then get on to using the machine.

I've spent many a man-hours trying to get things working with Linux, and at the time I was enjoying it. Now, I use my Mac, and I'm happy that it doesn't crash, and things work even easier than in Windows.

I still use Windows for things that I just can't do in either Mac or Linux, but when you think about it, that means "Games". And even then, a fairly limited subset there of.

Re:Wrong question?

[Averron]

Next time you retire an old PC, dont give it away -- keep it around and mess around with Linux. If you want an easy experience, try SuSE 9.1. I am very impressed with it.

Re:Wrong question?

[Feztaa]

You're right in that linux requires a higher degree of maintenance than windows in some respects... but it's not that simple. I constantly do things with linux that are difficult or nigh-impossible with windows. Working on the commandline and scripting things with perl mostly. When I think about all the scripts I've written to do my work for me, I shudder to think about how much work it would have been to do it all by hand in the windows GUI.

For example, there was a recent article on groklaw where PJ was thanking somebody for writing her a script to automate some HTML sanitizing that she has to do... reading through huge messy HTML files trying to pluck out bad stuff is a huge pain (I was on the web-design club at my jr. high school, and I spent a lot of time cleaning the HTML generated by MS-FrontPage in notepad). Nowadays, writing a perl script to just pull out all the bad stuff is like second nature, it makes me cringe to think of all the time PJ lost because she didn't have that script sooner...

I wouldn't give up linux for the world. It's just too powerful. Every time I use windows, I find it to be frustratingly limited in it's capabilities.

Re:Wrong question?

[Quince alPillan]

And who said you couldn't write perl scripts in Windows? When I had my laptop up and running on Windows XP (Lightning strike, unrelated to the issue at hand) I had several perl scripts run on startup that would back up my files to the laptop. Perl is just as easy to use in Windows as it is in Linux. It just doesn't come installed straight from the box.

Re:Wrong question?

[dustmite]

Your comment on the time required to tweak something is also spot on, in so far as these activities are generally rare in the Windows world.

In my experience this isn't true - what is true is that people just tend not to notice when they waste a day "tweaking" issues in Windows, they just accept it as normal, but become very 'aware' when having to spend a whole day on some issue in Linux. Often our jobs require using Windows, so when something doesn't work right in Windows we just accept having to blow hours or even days getting it to work without a second thought (e.g. it took me hours of googling for info and fiddling with obscure registry settings before Win2K would finally set the MTU for my 3g wireless connection, but because it's just part of the job, hey, that's how it goes). Once my Windows boot sector just corrupted itself somehow (no trojans/worms/viruses and no abnormal crashes or unclean shutdowns, no idea how it happened), I spent several hours trying to get it to repair the boot sector using the repair tools on the Windows CD, but the fixes wouldn't "stick", I could get into Windows in a round-about way but the next time I rebooted, it wouldn't boot again. I ended up spending several days reinstalling Windows and all my applications. But hey, it's all 'part of the job', so I take it in stride.

But when I spend even just a few hours on a weekend struggling with some issue on Linux (or e.g. trying to get my coLinux installation to see the Internet because my VMWare network devices are somehow interfering or because Windows can't give me a local IP if the network cable is unplugged and coLinux needs it), well, that just damn irritates the hell out of me, because it's my limited weekend time that's being eaten up.

And so we apply this double standard. When we have to waste time tweaking or repairing screw-ups in Microsoft's products, it's OK, but if Linux isn't 100% perfect and run 100% smoothly all the time, it's immediately crap.

Many of the hassles we have with Windows we have years on the job learning to work around, and become "experts" on 'tweaking Windows', so purely thanks to all that experience we know exactly where to go when we need to e.g. modify the virtual memory settings, configure the display refresh rate, etc. We also learn a lot of these things from our colleagues, gaining from their experience and long struggles. We know Windows so well, we just think that Windows is easier to use. If things were switched around, and I had as much experience on Linux, and all my colleagues had as much experience on Linux, I guarantee you that we/they'd know how to get around and set things up very quickly in Linux, would not think twice about blowing a whole day at work on setting up something, and would hold the "foreign, strange" Windows OS to different and unreasonable standards, complaining bitterly every time we had to spend a few hours figuring out to set the MTU size, while knowing from experience exactly where to do the same in Linux.

Re:Sparky the Penguin replies

[CowboyBob500]

I bought a machine for my parents and insisted that I didn't want windows on it. They did the deal and I got 100GBP off the price. That's $183.75 according to XE.com. That a little bit more than $50 don't you think?

Bob

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[ratsnapple tea]

There is a button on the keyboard labeled Eject, and that's what I usually use. There is also the Eject menu item in the Finder, and if you have a second mouse button, you can right-click the media icon and eject it that way.

Seriously, the trash-becomes-eject thing is a nonissue. It's just a shortcut that you don't have to use.

Pretentious sounding reason but true

[inkswamp]

My reason for steering clear of MS can be summed up with a saying. I have no idea who the original author is, but it reminds me of MS's unethical business practices:

"Every consumer decision is a political statement."

Says it all.

I'm trying...

[coene]

I would love to stop using Windows. Problem is, I can't - on my desktop at least (15/17 servers run Open/FreeBSD).

There are some simple reasons why the desktop switch won't work for me:

1) Application Support!

The work I do fits into 2 categories, artistic/creative and technical - mainly for the web, homebrew intranet apps, and the oddball video production.

I need Photoshop (Gimp, while mature, is not a good replacement). I need Premiere. I need IE (for testing purposes, I swear!).

I need to be able to encode to Windows Media A/V formats (the best in streaming for 90% of any web author's target audience - Quicktime doesn't have the install base, and Real is... well Real is Real!)

2) Game Support

While I don't play games much for Leisure, I do need them for work (www.gotfrag.com).

If they would all run under Wine easily, legally, and the first time without and screwing around, I'd be game in this dept - but they dont, and therefore I'm not. There's been a lot of progress here, but there are those of us who can't spend hours to get a game running.

3) Desktop Support

No matter how much I try, I still can't get used to KDE/GNOME. It's not that I'm adverse to using something without a start button (haha.. well, nevermind that in this case) - I love OS X, but the feel that KDE and Gnome exhibit is, well, a bit rough around the edges. Not to mention the problem of having to choose one and live with all of the repercussions of not being in the other.

In my opinion (as the average user), here's what Linux/BSD needs to be king of the desktop:

1) A standardized UI/API that the developers can get behind. Sorry, but someone has to champion this thing. Microsoft is GREAT at getting developers behind their UI design choices, KDE/GNOME haven't done so well. Apps need to feel right to all users regardless of settings, etc.

2) Commercial software developers have to have reasons to port their software. I don't have the answers here, but 9/10 software companies won't devote the engineering resources to port software unless they see the money in it. I think that one real shot here may be to work through distributors/VAR's to put the pressure on here, and show the sales potential (hopefully it exists).

3) DirectX. Native. OpenGL (and other fringe, unrelated libraries) are no longer useful. DirectX is the platform, and rightly so - it's the best out there. Linux needs it in the worst way, and having it would make porting games incredibly easy. Not to mention that many multimedia related desktop apps are using DX components too!

4) Developer Environment and tools support. Linux/BSD are doing well here. Eclipse is where it's at, everyone should rally around it with the proper plugins to make a fully universal IDE. It works on Windows, perfectly. It will allow more Windows developers to work at porting their software to other systems, because they can jump right in without re-learning the tools and techniques.

That's about all I have, but there's a long way to go. We're making good progress though.

One important note, Linux doesn't have to have a 70% desktop share to win, not even close. What does need to happen, is for MS share to drop significantly. If MS were to drop to around 50% of the market (with Apple, Linux, BSD, WHATEVER!! eating up the rest), it will force developers to port software, OR it will force developers to standardize their users on a single platform. While the 2nd will be messy, it will make them consider what platform to standardize on. Linux does have a lower TCO in most situations, hopefully by that point the masses will be more educated about it's requirements, and the do's and dont's.

Anywho, I can't leave Windows yet. Soon maybe?

Re:I'm trying...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

3) DirectX. Native. OpenGL (and other fringe, unrelated libraries) are no longer useful. DirectX is the platform, and rightly so - it's the best out there. Linux needs it in the worst way, and having it would make porting games incredibly easy. Not to mention that many multimedia related desktop apps are using DX components too!

OpenGL "no longer useful"? You need a good, long talk with a certain mr. Carmack, methinks. OpenGL is the platform where the bleeding edge features first emerge.

And, please, don't believe the MS BS about DirectX being "The Platform". OpenGL is still widely used, because it's good.

Take a look at the top ten list of online games from gamespy.com/stats:

1. Half Life -- has OpenGL support (and the OpenGL renderer is far superior to the D3D renderer)
2. America's Army -- has OpenGL support
3. Battlefield 1942
4. Call Of Duty -- OpenGL only
5. Wolfenstein: ET -- OpenGL only
6. Neverwinter Nights -- OpenGL only
7. Battlefield: Vietnam
8. Unreal Tournament 2004 -- has OpenGL support
9. Quake 3 Arena -- OpenGL only
10. Soldier Of Fortune 2 -- OpenGL only

8 of the 10 most popular games at the moment use (or can use) OpenGL. 5 of them are OpenGL-only.

Some musings..

[schmiddy]

I was at a LAN recently.. brought along an old Linux box to fiddle with, like I normally do. Got a chance to play a lot of fun games on other boxes though, like BF1942, Diablo, etc.

Anyway.. I started musing about going back to Windows after seeing everyone else's tricked out Windows-basesd gaming rigs. I realized just how -nice- a good desktop OS like win2k can feel. (I despise the eye candy in XP, and most people don't know how/why to turn it off.

First off, I think Firefox looks nice in Windows than Linux. I could never get anti-aliasing to work right, and for some reasons my fonts usually look crappy, even when I install the Windows TTF fonts.

Windows is, I still think, a good OS for a few things -- word processing (I use OpenOffice, and it's good... but I wouldn't want to have to do more than a few papers here and there with it), games -- no question there. As well as using p2p software.. just download eMule, your favorite BT client, Kazaa Lite. (Yea, there are equivalents in Linux. ) Put everything you want in the quickstart bar, maybe add some skins.. etc. And it will all look quite nice, and behave responsibly. You won't ever have to worry about hacking around text files to get a program to compile, messing with dependencies. gpoing through a 20 step process to get binary-only drivers fron Nvidia/ATI to work so that you can play a few games like UT natively, or a handful under Wine. Don't even get me started on Wine.

Having said all that.. I'm still on Linux. Here's why. First of all, I don't mind messing around a bit in Linux to get stuff to work. It's educational. I feel like I'm really learning stuff when I set up Apache the way I want it. On that note, I think Windows is a terrible choice if you're thinking of running an FTP server, web server, etc. I honestly have no clue how I would go about setting up IIS, although I imagine it's probably easy. I honestly don't know much about the guts of windows, because you're not encouraged to. On the other hand.. Linux encourages you to be able to mess with stuff like init.d config, all the config files in /etc, and so forth.

And here's another point. I can only begin to imagine how many Windows users have spyware and other crap installed. Any sane Linux user would consider this a serious problem.. it's essentialy a root-exploit from installing malicious software as root (i.e. Admin).

The free software paradigm in Linux works wonders. I trust every open source program I download, even though I'm not going to personally check the source. Yea, I'm sure it could be possible for some knucklehead to hide some malicious code in a program, but I can't remember the last time (ever?) an OSS project had that happen.

In Windows.. it's easy to do things the wrong way. Click on those popup ads telling you your computer is broadcasting an IP address, accidentally clicking "Yes" when some popup ad asks you if you want to trust software from Foo Company. Having a hole in IE exploited, and your browswer homepage changed. Being constantly forced to revert to Administrator, if you're smart enough to be running as an unpriveleged user. In Mandrake, when I made the mistake of logging into KDE as root, I was reminded many times, both by KDE and the programs (i.e. xchat) that I was doing the wrong thing.

A final note. I think every "power" Windows user needs to pirate many hundreds of dollars of software in order to have a working system -- FlashFXP, WinRAR, Newsbin, maybe AdAware/ZoneAlarm Pro,BPFtp server, CloneCD, Nero, the latest games, etc. In Linux.. you actually feel good about just using the software that some kind soul has made for you.

One word: Slackware!

[Lispy]

Two more words: Dropline Gnome

'nuff said. ;-)

What doesnt keep me off windows?

[thegraham]

I made the move a while ago, and I now have my linux desktop doing everything I want, including syncing my iPod and palm. It crashes less often (I have some hardware problem that I've yet to figure out), and I can't copy without select 'n' paste. Of course there is always that its free and legal (unless you believe sco) and I can use it with a clear conscience. The support that opensource communities offer is unparalleled through forums and mailing lists.

Also a major factor is innovation. Windows seems to do very little, whereas linux is constantly evolving adding new features etc.

I also like the die-hard attitude. It's not a case of it doesn't work, oh well nevermind. It's it doesn't work, I know, I'll rewrite/port/hack it until it works.

Plus you are given decent control of your system and don't have to put up with menus etc. if you don't want.

Thomas

Unstable power management and unsecure internet

[Anonymous Writer]

I don't mean to sound like an Apple switch ad, but I got jealous of seeing people on Macs never have the problems I did on my PC laptop. They were never the computer-savvy types either. They never had to bother with any technical issues, while I found myself constantly fixing my computer instead of using it. One of the Apple switch ads had somebody saying they got tired of "the operating system always getting in the way", and I was sold. I'm desensetised and numb to advertising like everyone else, but that line really snagged me.

My old laptop would constantly hang whenever I tried to shut it down or put it to sleep. I would have to unplug the AC power adapter and pull out the battery because the power switch wouldn't work. Now that I switched to a PowerBook, I just love being able to wake up my computer and be on the net, using a broadband connection, literally in a second or two. I can turn it on, get on the net for a brief moment, then turn it off.

With my old laptop, I would turn it on, go to the kitchen and start to prepare a meal, come back and hit return, go back to the kitchen to make sure I'm not burning whatever I'm cooking, then come back to browse the net. I remember timing it once and it was something like 15 minutes. That was average. Turning it off would be a similar experience. I couldn't just get off the net and leave the flat. It was like waiting for someone to get dressed to go out. I would shut down the laptop and wait a while until it would hang, because I wouldn't want to interrupt the power in the middle of a disk read/write process in fear of damaging the hard drive. And then I would unplug the AC and battery.

I also got tired of worrying about security vulnerabilities in software I used to hook up to the net. I was really glad to be able to stop using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. I knew there were other browsers, but I didn't have enough hard drive space to use more than one, because of the bloat-ware factor involved with upgrading to Windows 98 on a Windows 95 laptop. I couldn't get rid of IE because I was using Visual Studio, which required it. The security holes in OE were ridiculous, with email viruses able to infect your computer without you even having to open up an attachment. But I do miss being able to place hyperlinks in an email.

However, I can't say that I'm totally satisfied with OS X. It has great features, but doesn't have the technical feel of previous Mac OS versions at the filesystem level. I keep encountering strange bugs- garbage for permissions names when doing a get info, gigabytes of missing hard drive space on my external drive after using applications, and now the help viewer application won't launch in the Finder. I would know what files to replace on a previous OS version to fix these sorts of problems, but now it is more complicated with OS X. The OS arrangement on the hard drive resembles a Windows system more now, with the graphical front-end feeling more like a superficial facade, rather than a view of the computer's internal workings. It feels like a blind-fold. Application install processes place tons of files all over the place, making them difficult to remove. I remember the old days when, if you installed software that caused conflicts, you could just manually drag out a file in the extensions folder and re-boot. You could remove software and feel secure in knowing that you would end up with the same amount of free space that you had before you installed it. Now you just don't know.

And I preferred it when the file type was separate from the file name.

Good God

[Noexit]

As if we don't get enough of this on a daily basis already.

Its simple..

[naelurec]

From where I am sitting, it costs more and offers less.

• Significantly reduced command line
• Lack of many modern GUI interface items (shaded windows, customizable task bar, mouse gestures, advanced hot key support, ability to define certain windows to stay on top/below others, yada yada)
• no centralized app management (FreeBSD I can have it notify me what apps are out of date, easily install new apps, etc.. how about Windows?)
• Limited hardware compatibility (particularly 64bit systems, non i386 based architectures, etc..)
• Restrictive EULAs
• Bastardized versions (Ie XP Home having reduced network functionaility)
• Spyware, Viruses, Adware, ad naseum..

Granted, thats the short list. Ultimately though, for me, I have realized that Windows simply restricts what I can do.

Using basic tools found on *nix, I have been able to create lots of very useful utilities that interact with me via email. Its great as I routinely check email so it makes sense to have as much information delivered via email as possible. Virtually everything can be redirected to email which is very nice -- how bout Windows? Seems like I have to check a handful of different application GUIs to collect the information.

Bottom line -- the flexibility is the key point. Granted, I'm sure if I spent a few hundred more on development tools, I could probably do many of the same things on Windows, but why?

Well.... As long as you asked...

[Eric Damron]

For me it is a plethora of things that keeps me away from Windows at home. (I am forced to use it at work.)

First of all I work as a programmer and so I'm fairly in tune with IT issues. The amount of effort spent to protect our users from viruses, worms, trojans, etc is enormous. The staff can barely keep up. It feels like we're playing ping-pong. No matter how many times we hit the ball back over the net we know that it's always going to get returned and it's only a matter of time before we miss.

The expense of the never-ending licensing fees is another. Server licenses, client licenses, Software "Assurance" fees for software that we aren't ready to upgrade but have to pay a big fee now or pay an even bigger fee later.

But mostly what keeps me away from Microsoft at home is their total disregard for the anti-trust laws. They put people in the above position and then keep them there by stifling their competition though endless sleazy tactics. They don't follow standards in an effort to prevent others from writing software that can interoperate. They make backroom deals with companies in order to fund bogus litigation while trying to hide the fact that they are the ones behind it. They lie about their competition. They pay politicians to write and/or support legislation that would kill their competition. The decision to break the law is just another financial calculation for Microsoft. If there is a big enough payoff they're willing to break the law. We don't need corporations that feel that they are powerful enough to disregard the law and play by their own rules. I think it would be much better for innovation if we were dealing with three smaller companies that had to abide by the rule of law like the rest of us.

Several reasons

[Angst Badger]

1. Money. Windows is expensive. It's an operating system, for crying out loud. Why should I have to pay for an operating system?

2. Security. I don't mean security from "hackers". I mean I want to be sure that my OS isn't reporting information back to HQ.

3. DRM. Don't want it.

4. Power. Linux comes with an amazing array of development tools. I know this probably doesn't matter to Joe User, but when I got into computers, "user" and "programmer" were synonymous. I'm still a programmer. And I still don't want to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for compilers.

5. Stability. Frankly, Windows' bugginess doesn't bother me too much on a desktop. You get used to it. But I wouldn't want to run a server on it.

6. Efficiency. I don't like to buy new machines any more often than I have to. To quote Bill Gates, "What do I look like? The queen?" If I have to upgrade my hardware, it better be because of an actual application, not my freaking OS.

7. Accountability. Closed-source companies are accountable to no one. If they close up shop, I'm screwed if I need their app. With open source, that can't happen to me.

All Windows has that I can't live without comes from Adobe. When Adobe sees the light or WINE supports Photoshop, MS can kiss my skinny white butt.

I straddle both sides...

[mwillems]

My laptop is a Windows machine, and my desktop is a Linux box. So I think I see both sides, and no religion drives my decisions, I think - just the facts as I see them.

WINDOWS:

I need the Windows box - no way around it - because I need applications like Adobe Photoshop (not an option to do without); Pagemaker; and Outlook to synch my Sony/Ericsson P900 phone (it has no PIM). Not Office: I use OOo only. Anyway, no way around the other apps. Also I quite like the integrated desktop: a font added works in all apps rather than in just some. The control panel is great. Media work (no "no quicktime" errors etc). The HP printer (Grr) needs a Win box. Etc.

Dislikes: I just had to reinstall Win on the laptop to bring running processes down from 38 to 19. Typical Win issues. Registry hell.

LINUX:

The desktop is great - a Redhat 9 box. No re-installs. Fast. Multiple desktops. I can (and do!) shell into it from work (using putty). Proper multitasking. Opensource so it is free (as in speech). All the usual Linux advantages. Very few virus attacks. Can you say "ROCK SOLID STABLE".

Dislikes: I never know how to set screen res (unless I go into Xfree86.conf manually). Fonts are haphazard and never work in all apps. Cut/paste is always a gamble. Installing a new app can take an entire evening and often does (can you say 'dependency hell'). The typical Linux desktop issues.

So there - each have their place.

Michael

Re:The only reason I have a WinXP partition is GAM

[Assmasher]

Yeah, WINE is impressive technologically speaking, but the reality of the situation is quite different ;). I wouldn't want to run Far Cry on it, lol.

I've always thought that if Linux created a competitor to DirectX (sort of a super SDL) it would easy things, especially if it worked on Windows (thereby gaining instant acceptance and at the same time making porting Win games to Linux MUCH easier just like the PC to XBox conversions.)

Re:Question about article summary

[jedidiah]

As much as some people like might to whine about the theoretical security problems of Linux, the fact still remains that it is WinDOS boxes that get rooted and turned into spam gateways.

End users shouldn't have to be neurotic about applying security patches and they shouldn't have to fear email attachments.

This is strictly the Microsoft engineering mentality at work.

Fortunately, we have Linux and Apple.

Re:Question about article summary

[Rei]

There are some serious security problems inherent in the windows style of user operation; windows users are "Always Root", so to say. This is a BAD THING. Even if Linux were the most widely used operating system out there, few virii would exist for Linux. A trojan (the most common type of virus) cannot infect programs as an unprivileged user.

Isn't this sort of ironic?

[mark-t]

... that an operating system called "Windows" would lack something called "Transparency"?

How about....

[msoftsucks]

Confusing and distorting stardands so that only M$ products work. I refuse to purchase applications that will only work with IE. I will tell any ISV who does this that they are automatically cut from the selection process because they aren't following open standards. There are web standards - follow them. Don't like them - change them officially so we can all use them.

All the security holes that M$ has known for over a year and have yet to fix

All the spyware that I get due to ActiveX

All the viruses

The licensing extortion.

The phone-home spyware installed by M$

Requirement to be an administrator to do anything useful. On a Linux box, I rarely run as root. Keeps my machine totally stable. With Windows, I need to reinstall every 2-3 months because something has corrupted my machine. I have better things to do than constantly having to reinstall the OS.

Making money. M$ has pretty much taken the oxygen out of the Windows market. They leave no money on the table for their ISVs. If an ISV does have a big hit on their hands, they buy them or they release their own crappy version that competes with the ISV. Within a short period of time, that ISV is dead. Being a M$ partner is deadly to your health.

Why not windows?

[Rei]

Well, lets see. Just this weekend, a friend decided that, since I'm their only computer literate friend, that I would be doing the tech stuff for their nonprofit artists co-op. ;) Well, in Windows, I could have paid tons of money for an NT license and paid for all of the different services I needed, and if I encountered a problem (if??), I'd have to call MS tech support.

Instead, I tweaked my sendmail config, setup pop3, created them user accounts, made a simple cgi script to enable them to create more at will, installed and setup majordomo, created them a new directory for apache to serve, and didn't spend a dime. All they had to schill out was 10 bucks for the DNS. And the same weekend I setup a streaming radio station so I can listen to my home music at work, using icecast and mserv (ah, mserv... if only they'd iron out the bugs and make it easier to use...)

That is what keeps me off Windows. I'm bloody cheap. ;) Every so often I have to use Windows, and almost always I run into the "I-Need-Some-Capability-But-I-Would-Have-To-Pay-Ex tra-For-It" scenario, and not only does it frustrate me, but it blows my mind.

Wow, 1084 comments and counting.

[What'sInAName]

Wow, I haven't even bothered to read any of the other comments, and I'm sure I'm going to add nothing new here, but the reasons keep growing by the day.

I started my computing career on an Apple //c, an incredibly open archetecture, and I just got used to being able to twiddle with things any way I wanted. I still remember a few of the hex codes for assembly lang. instructions (Ex: 0x20 = JSR, 0x60 = RTS,...)

My Apple broke and for a few years, I didn't have a home computer (gasp!) Of course, at the time I was working as a programmer, so I got plenty of computer time. I quit my job and went back to grad school and decided I wanted a computer. By this point I had heard about the *BSDs and this thing called Linux, and since I decided I loved Unix so much, I thought that I would give Linux a spin.

Of course, I had a dual boot machine at this point. I liked playing with Photoshop (this was in the days before GIMP) and a few other Windows apps, but I couldn't help the feeling of being... restrained. W95 was fun to play with at first, but I was frustrated by the fact that there was only so much you could tinker with. I was a math grad student, and so the fact that TeX was installed by default helped me to stay in the Linux environment most of the time. I played a few games in Windows, but for the most part, Linux was my choice. Viri were around at that point, but they were a relatively minor nuisance, compared to today. And spam? Hadn't really been invented yet. Ahhh, to be able to go back to those days....

Well, to cut a long, rambling post shor.... well, never mind, way too late for that. (Note: Quantity of single malt scotch is directly proportional to length of posts/e-mails.) At this point, it works like this: Every time I turn around, I find another reason not to use Windows. At the end of the day, as much as I love Linux, I'm still not one to slobber over it and denounce Windows; it just seems so childish to do so. On the other hand, I love Unix/Linux so much, and administering said systems, that I've decided to make a career switch to system administration, despite all the outsourcing/bad economy/whatever.

Linux is great technology, and it isn't just the technical part that is great. It's the people. The people I know who are into Linux and Unix are , by and large, enthusiastic about what they do, and that just makes it so much more fun for me. There are of course Windows admins/users like this, but I've met so many pissed off/frustrated ones that it just brings me down.

Oh well, that's my 2 cents (ok, more like four bucks) worth.

me? it's just dumb luck

[0divide]

I've been working in computers and IT for the past 12 years and I have never had to work on a Windows machine. I've been using a Mac since 1985 and have been able to eek a living based on that alone.

The few times that I have had to use the Windows OS I get so indignant and pissed off that I embarrass those around me, so I try to avoid it. This utter disdain of Windows that I used to evangelize and now just imbue has kept me from honestly evaluating it and, for the most part, I honestly just feel badly for people that have it forced on them, which seems to be the majority of PC users.

However, this same reliance/insistence on the Mac OS has limited my exposure to Linux and BeOs, but thankfully, OS X has helped me appreciate the wily ways of the terminal...

0

Reboot chimp too expensive

[gad_zuki!]

When you factor in diapers, care, and feeding its just not worth it.

Quote that nobody on /. will see

[INeededALogin]

but it is too awesome

"Never ask a man what sort of computer he drives. If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?"

Tom Clancy

Re:Question about article summary

[rizzo420]

so you are in favor of security through obsurity? that's exactly what you mentioned. your reasoning suggests that the only reason linux and apple machines are more secure is that less people use them. while this is true, it's not a good form of security. i know someone who installed a red hat box and within a couple days, it was rooted and used to run ddos attacks on several major machines. the fbi contact the university about this box. that's because they did a standard install of red hat. it might have changed since then, but the fact remains that you can do a standard install of any linux distro and end up with an insecure machine unless you (1) install patches or (2) be sure to install only updated versions. seems to me that either option is similar to a windows install. and once your linux box is installed, you have to be sure you install any patches because there have been many very serious flaws in linux or the common software people run (apache, ssh, telnet, etc) that allow an attacker to gain root.

and i don't neurotically install patches, i have them automatically installed. i also don't fear attachments as i just delete the ones that look suspicious. there is no microsoft mentality at work here aside from the security through obscurity that you used as your reasoning for linux's and apple's lack of viruses.

What keeps me of windows?

[Snaller]

Gravity!

Flexibility, freedom, philosophy

[VE3MTM]

I use Linux for three main reasons:

- Flexibility: I can configure my computer to work exactly how I want. In addition, I use Gentoo, which allows further control. Yes, this adds complexity; it doesn't work "out of the box", so to speak, but that's fine with me. No one dictates how it looks or feels. For the record, I use parts of GNOME with Enlightenment.

- Freedom: I am a programmer. If I can't make a program do something I want it to, I can always open the source (another advantage of source-based distros, by the way: it's easier to modify the source for programs than with binary distros, because you have the headers for everything). To date, I have patched 4 programs, and submitted the patches for 2 of them.

- Philosophy: I can't explain why, but the whole philosophy behind the open source movement appeals to me.

I would say "price" as an advantage, but that's really a non-issue, since *ahem* I have never bought a copy of Windows (Microsoft tax excluded).

Stability, cost, ease of use, programming ease...

[javaxman]

1) Stability.
I have a windows machine. It just stopped booting one day. I couldn't get it going again without re-installing the OS. It's done this before. So I stopped using the windows machine, even after taking the time to re-install the system. I still have a mess of drivers I need to install to get the thing working right again, but why bother ?
2) Windows XP broke a chunk of win32 app compatability. I don't feel like buying new versions of those apps, or paying for XP, for that matter. Microsofts' inclination towards per-machine licenses and subscription-based licenses are spooky, too. I'd like to keep my costs down once making a hardware/software purchase.
3) Windows has improved in ease-of-use, but it's still a patchwork of utilities in many ( most ) ways, and there is a bare minimum of inter-application conformity and support.
4) Unlike many people, I want a computer system I can program without spending a lot of cash for a set of libraries and compiler.
5) It's not my first consideration, but the business practices of Microsoft make my stomach churn. I'd like to see at least a _few_ viable software companies out there, rather than one monopoly.

That said, (1) stability is my main reason. If my PC had never hosed itself to the point of requiring a system restore, I'd still be using it at least occasionally.

As it is, I've gone on to OS X with the purchase of a flat-panel iMac, and I haven't looked back... programming Objective-C with a powerful, freely provided IDE beats the hell out of Visual Studio .NET... a *free* ADC account beats the hell out of MS developer program prices. Most apps I need ( and some I just want ) come for free with the machine, which is bundled with a complete OS. The machine is so easy to use, my two-year-old navigates the desktop, web browser, and filesystem. It's easy enough to admin that I've been able to provide him with an account that he can't screw up.

Linux just is "better."

[stevenvi]

The reason that I use Linux instead of Windows as my primary operating system is that Linux just works better than Windows at the tasks I do. I think the deciding factor in it all though is the fact that no matter how hard I try, Windows just can't in a million years handle my cheap built-in sound card. When I run any program that plays sound it will always give cruddy playback (including going out "randomly" for no apparent reason at all.) Running other programs while using sound is a definite recipie for problems with sound playback. In Linux both OSS and ALSA have worked beautifully for me and never given me a problem (other than a bit of initial trouble setting up ALSA.)

Then there's the fact that I run many servers on my desktop computer and don't quite do "desktop computing" with it. Word processing? I certainly don't need that, just need Vim. Anyone with a good distro gets automatic updates of their software, or at least automatic notification. That way I can get security updates the day they're released instead of having to visit each server's page daily to check for updates, were I to try to use the programs in Windows. Besides, I'm sure there's something that I use regularly which lacks a Windows port (I know my webcam software which I wrote myself wouldn't work under Windows.)

I like to see my computer as the "ultimate setup" where everything I can do it so easily accessible. One of the few reasons I used to boot into Windows was to burn CDs and use Paint Shop Pro, but I've since learned that PSP runs fine with Wine and once I get off my lazy butt I'm gonna figure out how to configure this system to burn CDs :-P.

Tools should do one job and do them well.

[ron_ivi]

What keeps me on Unix is the idea that lots of little tools (dd, sort, cat, cut, perl, awk, etc) all do pretty much one job and do them well; and you can string together lots of them to make much more complicated systems. With windows these would probably be all merged into some monolithic GUI that is far less flexible.

Same for programming environments. My editor (emacs or vi) edits; may syntax checker (lint) checks syntax; and my complier (gcc) compiles. This ends up being a far more flexible environment than any of those GUIs that do one thing well (set a breakpoint) but suck at everything else (editing, etc).

Freedom

[FridayBob]

I can't stand the fact that everything about M$ is designed to keep users locked into Windows with little regard for anything else. The system is unstable, unpredictable, insecure, inflexible, outdated, badly designed and far too expensive. It wastes everybody's time. What's more, the license agreement is incredibly restrictive and M$ takes no responsibility whatsoever for their product. After having used M$ products for far too long, I switched completely to an Open Source system three years ago. My only regret is that I didn't do so earlier; the experience has been nothing short of a liberation for me.

Profit vs. Production

[Brown Line]

There are, in fact, two models of business. In one model, a company generates profits to execute business. In the other, the company executes business to generate profits. The owners of the company choose which model they follow.

For example, many of the best book publishers from the first half of the last century made money to execute business. Victor Gollancz published the Lord Peter Wimsey books to make the money with which he underwrote his Left Book Club. In this country, Random House and Scribners were publishers that used the profits from their bestsellers to underwrite books that they wanted to published - some of which have become the classics of our literature. Nowadays, of course, those once-superb houses have all been gobbled up by corporations, and it's all astrology, diets, and self-help.

Obviously, it's easier for a privately held company to re-invest its profits in doing work that the owners feel should be done; but it's not impossible for a corporation to have a conscience - or a sliver of a conscience, in any case. The much-maligned automakers, I think, do have a commitment to building high-quality vehicles, however, bad they are at it; if they didn't, they would get out of the business altogether. And there are others as well. Perhaps fewer now than there once were; but they're there.

As for Microsoft, I find it hard to believe that its management gives a rat's ass about software; if they did, they wouldn't ship the crap that they do. But I'm not a billionaire, so what the hell do I know?

Re:Profit vs. Production

[Sepper]

Another example of 'less profit is better': Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is ALL about market share. They cut their own profit to boost sale with lower prices...

Of course, it's still not a 100% moral company (far from that actually) but it's a better philosophy of Buiness than what Microsoft is doing...

Re:Profit vs. Production

[1u3hr]

As for Microsoft, I find it hard to believe that its management gives a rat's ass about software; if they did, they wouldn't ship the crap that they do.

I recall the scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley:

Steve Jobs: 'Our product is better. We make better stuff.'
Bill Gates: 'You don't get it, do you? It doesn't matter.'

I switched because...

[NeoBeans]

....licensing costs and the infamous "OEM install disks" scared me off.

At the time I bought my first Powerbook (Fall '01), I was thinking of buying a Sony VAIO and dual-booting Linux and Windows. However, it became obvious from the way PC laptop vendors supported Windows that having support for a Unix-like platform that could also be a multimedia "workstation" wasn't likely.

Microsoft Windows licensing, for the home user with multiple PCs, is very expensive to maintain legitimately. I know I'm the exception, but I actually bought Windows for each machine I installed on, and with three PCs, the prospect of buying a fourth machine and paying that much for Windows licenses was a major deterrent.

In fact, when Apple started updating OS X on an annual basis (which they won't do after 10.4 "Tiger"), I was worried I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire, until I saw this and realized that growing the population of Macs in my home wouldn't be cost prohibitive.

Obviously, with Linux, it would be even cheaper.

That said, I can also add the following reasons why I haven't "switched" back:

1. the iLife applications. For $49, worth every penny, and while they don't offer features beyond what I had on my Windows boxen, they really do make working with multimedia simple and effective. I spend less time learning the tools than I do getting things done.
2. Java. As a former Sun employee, the first thing I did when I was checking out my first Powerbook was type "java -version". Having a contemporary flavor of Java on a non-x86 platform was interesting, and having used Apple's Java for almost three years, I can say that while the releases are not as frequent as Sun's reference implementations (for obvious reasons), the platform is fun, and I have been able to run Weblogic 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x on it with no major headaches.
3. Halo and Unreal Tournament 2004. I can play the two best FPSers (IMHO) out there, and in the case of UT2004, it only required waiting three weeks after the PC release to get the Mac version. Given the glacial timetable for UT2003's port to the Mac, I was a bit concerned... but UT2004 more than makes up for that.
4. Viruses. Honestly, every platform has holes in it... and without some "biodiversity" in the ranks of the computing platforms we use, when nasty viruses circulate, the odds of getting nailed on Windows are just that much higher.

Overall, the question now is... having invested now in two Powerbooks and a dual G5... why would I want to switch back to Windows?

hey, down here

[mugnyte]

I've read all the 4/5 posts so far, and I haven't seen anyone comment directly about this, but I've seen it stated emotionally:

Under MS, people have a loss of controlling free and independent programs that they've chosen, written or can wrap their minds around. The NT kernel is documented (not freely), but the services, runtime dependencies and so on, are still a mystery to people. Most of them cannot be replaced with a better version you or some other smart programmer changed and released.

Under Linux, due somewhat to the novel time we're living in, there is a wealth of question/answer documentation about many daemons, programs aor options. Config files can be hacked and rehacked. This doesn't mean there's less complexity, but I think the complexity is more componentized under Linux. Linux may be a monolithic Kernel, but if you look through the history of MS's OS progression, you'll find many many things going into the "OS" that simply don't need to be there (culminating, famously, with a simple web browser being "an integral part of the operating system").

Today, MS strives to have one of the most "approachable" OS's on the market. They provide a platform for market dynamics with their OS. This is to allow endless vendors to install and provide additional services - some before you know it. They suffer, however, from a chosen userbase that then doesn't know what is on their box or how to manipulate it. So one of the myraid of issues is the "install", "play nice with..", "uninstall cleanly" cycle that MS leaves up to the user and vendor. Some past endeavors (think "plug and play database") have tried to cure this, but wrapping your arms across an entire living market is a moving target.

Linux, coming from a technical birth, strives to be approachable, but in the end it caters to the tinkerer in each of us. Even finding the "ps" command in a manual can be a world of discovery for the newbie tinkerer. Even without knowing how the guts work, one can ps for processes and look them up by name. In this way, it harkens back to "computer as tool" instead of "computer as appliance".

MS wants to sell you an appliance that has the largest set of behaviors to provide this market: Vendors selling goods / users consuming services / playing games / advertising channels sold to the market / digital rights management to allow any set a procedures to deliver content. MS wants to build the market and decide how users/businesses participate in it.

Linux provides none of this. It relies on its users to participate in the market by writing free tools, but not really define such a market. PGP didn't make a revolution, nor PNG images, nor any pretty desktop display. However, they are all great tools to allow people to get stuff done - without succumbing to a vendor-decided ruleset. The Linux movement strives to allow people or businesses to participate in the market without any vendor acting on their behalf.

Re:What keeps me off?

[krumms]

I mean, have you seen some of the gurus of "open source" lately?

Whatever can you mean?

Re:What keeps me off?

[krumms]

From the links in my previous post, I learned two things:

a) Alan Cox, you are a scary, hairy man; and
b) I now know why Perl is such a mess: clearly larry couldn't see the code he was writing from behind that moustache.

No offence, you're all smarter than me and I love you, but by the law of the school yard that makes poking fun of you okay.

Easy. Windows is the bane of any system admin

[saha]

As a systems administrator for my department, the year 2003 and early 2004 was the least productive with worms and viruses galore. My own work PC is now switched off most of the time and so is my home PC (since May '03). I administrate all the Windows PCs, Macs and Unix/Linux boxes from a single G4 Powerbook. Life is sweet and I'll never go back to a Wintel box, unless OS X flounders in the future and Longhorn becomes the utopian computing environment 'Valhalla'. Which is unlikely.

Now on my non-Windows rocking G4 TiBook computer:

No more DLL hell

No more registry labyrinth

Strong security

Less administration

A GUI with elegance and easy of use

Power of Open Source tools and BSD

Things work out of the box

Great industrial design and sense of style.

Finally, ONE computer to control PCs, Macs and Unix/Linux computers, contained in a sleek portable laptop.

A system administrator's dream. It was tough to get the laptop during budget cut's, yet everyone who's seen me use it will agree it was worth every penny. I get a LOT of work done on OS X

Pick the right tool

[Vornzog]

Everyone I work with uses Windows - it's what everyone knows, and quite a bit of the (proprietary scientific) software that we use is Windows only. It suits me fine for basic graphing, presentations, etc.

For heavy duty data analysis, bioinformatics programming, compiling data from several sources into one sorted file, intensive modeling, or any other problem that would take hours by hand but several minutes with a script, I maintain one linux installation. It didn't take my coworkers long to figure out that they could do a few things much more efficiently on my machine, and that for some things, they should just come and ask me if I could write the program.

As I get better at admining it, I'll open up SSH so I can do some work from home, transfer files, provide accounts to coworkers who are already savvy enough to still use the old university unix servers to check email, and probably build some sort of network jukebox in so I don't have to tote my CDs up to the lab.

The point here is that I pick the best tool for the job. Neither Windows or Unix fits the bill all the time. Sometimes neither does - there is some really nice Mac only stuff out there. Fortunatly, since OSX came out, I can sit down at a Mac and pull up a unix prompt - I know what to do with that...

Why use Linux? Total control

[defile]

Here's something I can never do on Windows:

$ ps ax
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
1 ? S 0:04 init [2]
2 ? SWN 0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
3 ? SW< 0:00 [events/0]
4 ? SW< 0:00 [kblockd/0]
5 ? SW< 0:00 [khelper]
6 ? SW 0:00 [pdflush]
7 ? SW 0:00 [pdflush]
9 ? SW< 0:00 [aio/0]
8 ? SW 0:00 [kswapd0]
112 ? SW 0:00 [kseriod]
116 ? SW< 0:00 [reiserfs/0]
593 ? SW 0:00 [khubd]
1266 ? S 0:00 dhclient -pf /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid eth0
1488 ? S 0:00 /sbin/syslogd
1491 ? S 0:00 /sbin/klogd
1522 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/cupsd
1543 ? S 0:08 /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t autops2 -Rms3 -s
1636 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/postfix/master
1639 ? S 0:00 qmgr -l -t fifo -u -c
1652 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
1663 ? S 0:01 /usr/bin/X11/xfs -daemon
1667 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/X11/xfs-xtt -daemon -user xfntserv -port 711
1758 ? S 0:00 /bin/bash /etc/rc2.d/S20xprint posix_sh_forced start
1763 ? S 0:00 /bin/bash /etc/rc2.d/S20xprint posix_sh_forced start
1764 ? S 0:02 /usr/X11R6/bin/Xprt -ac -pn -nolisten tcp -audit 4 -f
1767 ? S 0:00 tee -a /dev/null
1768 ? S 0:00 logger -p lpr.notice -t Xprt_64
1779 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/atd
1782 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
1789 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/X11/xdm
1817 ? S< 2:05 /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp -auth /va
1848 ? S 0:00 -:0
1868 ? S 0:03 /usr/bin/WindowMaker
1909 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent x-window-manager
2449 ? S 0:02 xterm +sb -bg black -fg gray -e ssh foo.bar.
2450 pts/9 S 0:01 ssh foo.bar.com
2613 ? S 0:00 pickup -l -t fifo -u -c
2627 ? S 0:21 /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin
2655 ? S 0:00 xterm +sb -bg black -fg gray
2656 pts/17 S 0:00 bash
2659 pts/17 R 0:00 ps ax

Lets pick one of those processes at random, oh, gpm! Now what the hell does that do? man gpm gives me some information. Oh, it's not enough? No problem!

apt-get source gpm and I've got the source in 30 seconds, beckoning me to change it. Why change it? Well, call me crazy, but I think it'd be neat for gpm to kill every process straight up to init on a given terminal if I hold mouse-1 and mouse-2 for 5 seconds -- this way I can be sure that a trojan isn't capturing my login information next time I type it in*.

Total elapsed time: 10 minutes?

I could not do this on Windows, certainly not in under 10 minutes. I don't mean the end result, I mean the process. Microsoft thought of this problem and Windows NT makes you ALT-CTRL-DEL to login (which can be compromised just like my gpm security feature can be compromised). But the point is that I added this feature to my system in 10 minutes.

I could just as easily be annoyed at, oh, every time I try to su to root and mistype my password, su sleeps for 3 seconds and catches CTRL-C so I have to sit and wait (or ^Z and kill -9 $1 which isn't as convenient as ^C or just having it reprompt me). I can change that in the time it took me to write this. Under Windows, I just can't manage this level of control.

* Yes Linux provides this feature via SYSRQ but I don't like all of the other side-effects of enabling SYSRQ. OH WAIT, I CAN CHANGE THAT TOO!

Still using Windows

[masonry]

Actually, I still use Windows. I have two headless linux boxes running RH, as firewall and server. They never go down and I don't worry about them. They are in use every day, 24x7.

I have been using Linux for the last 5 years, servers and desktop.

However I still use XP on occasion cause I find that some of the (paid for, commercial) software is still light years ahead of Open Source. There is no comparison between Quanta or Bluefish, and Dreamweaver. GIMP is a great tool, however the UI is still a long way behind Fireworks.

Although I know I would save many hours of effort in the long run, I would still not put my parents through attempting to use linux. My girlfriend has enough problems with it!

Basically, Linux is very good. I know many people that use it exclusively, however somethings are still slicker in Windows.

me: started with Xwindows (openwindows)...

[EvilSheep]

started with x windows
I cannot stand the ms-windows environment.
It doesn't work right.
You can't maximize ONLY vertically xor horizontally.
Your current task MUST be the one on top.
No virtual desktop.
No choices/configurability.

Basically, I've always found ms-windows to be confining. I get claustrophobic.

The only time I spent any length of time running ms.. I was typing into a terminal window onto a unix box.

Granted ms-windows xp has fixed some of the problems I have with ms stuff. The problem is, they've not done enough, and they're trying to charge me 5-10 times the worth of the environment.

using unix is still a no-brainer.

You don't know how to use Windows

[Nailer]

All the IP addressing, routing, DNS tasks can be accomplished with the netsh command that's been around for the last four years.

net and echo and telnet have been around for longer.

So your complaint comes down to: Windows lacking a command line packet capturing tool. As a Linux user I personally prefer to be able to drill down into the contents of the packets, and see lots on screen, which I can do better with a GUI packet capturing tool like Ethereal or the one Windows comes with (if you want one, make like Linux and install ethereal).

The reasons are legion II

[Allnighterking]

Ok I hit the wrong button (dumb dumb dumb)
Myr reasons for avoiding windows.
1. Poor quality of UI.
2. Inconsistant UI
3. Age of the technology
4. Number of security holes
5. Lack of applications (Ok the big names are here but the range of applications and things I can do are really small.)
6. Spend more time getting things to work, vs time working to get things done.
7. Two words, Memory Hog
8. Slow as molasses.
9. Poor interoperability with other OS's
10. Poor interoperablility with Windows OS's
11. Poor networking ability.
12. Too many things done autmagically that I can't control or turn off.
13. Too many decisions made by Bill as to what I want.
14. Controls and commands that do what they want despite what is claimed or I want.
15. Preponderance of ancient technology. (IE and Outlook for example)
16. Lack of knowledgeable support (it costs more to get to your problem, than it does to solve your problem. (Yes my monitor is turned on, how does this make Outlook crash?))
17. High cost of hardware. (I have to replace to keep running, not replace when EOL is reached.)
18. I don't like renting software. (or cars, or clothing, or or or.)
19. Lack of configurability.
20. I don't like communism and I don't like M$ for the same reasons.
21. Poor inter application communication.
22. Did I mention that it is butt ugly?
23. I'm sick and tired of Blue and Grey.
24. Poor language support. (If it ain't MFC or C# they don't want it to work.)
25. Forced upgrades.
26. Gates and Balmer support the shrub
27. Lack of control of what my computer is doing.
28. Poor Quality control
29. One size does not fit all (are you listening RH?)
30. Because applications install and run like leaches hanging on a hikers leg memory control is lacking.
31. No true multi-user environment.
32. Poor multi-tasking support.
33. Poor or no documentation of commands available.
34. Poor Double Byte and Unicode support
35. Poor Memory management.
36. And on and on and on and on and on.

Re:Question about article summary

[jedidiah]

"obscurity" has nothing to do with it.

Viruses will even propagate through the current Atari ST community, as small as it is these days. The nature of malware is that it propagates itself. What you are pushing is a Microsoft apologists fantasy.

The security problems that "plague" Linux and Apple are considerably less critical and tend to require human engineering to be a part of the "exploit".

As a Linux user, I have to be wary of problems that a PERSON might use to gain entry to my box. A fresh install of Mandrake, Red Hat or Debian doesn't have to worry about being immediately rooted by the latest bit of malware floating around the internet.

Also, the "common software" you refer to are all VERY optional and treated by current distributions as such.

Why I am migrating my PCs to Linux

[cyclocommuter]

1. Cost - I can't afford to buy 5 XP PROs, 5 Office XPs, and renew 5 Norton Antivirus licences every year for the 5 PCs I have in the house. I do have 2 out of the five running XP PRO (dual booting to XP) so me and my son can still play DirectX games.

2. Product Activation - this feature has really soured me to Windows but at the same time opened my eyes to Linux and OSS (OOo, Evolution, etc.).

what sticks me on unix ...

[pikine]

First of all, a little introduction to my environment. I primarily use Mac OS X (TiBook G4), and keep a Linux server running on the Internet somewhere. I use Solaris 2.6 at work (though it is now more or less a dumb-terminal for the Linux server).

What is unusual about me is that I actually grew up in the world of Microsoft. My first programming uses MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) 2.0. I hacked the internals of MS-DOS, hacked the internals of Windows 95 when it came out (for the record, I also hacked Windows 2000 a bit later on). The internals (things like how to override system interrupt tables) were secrets that you don't find in many places. I read books written by other people who reverse engineered, and followed their examples to reverse engineer a lot of stuff. However, doing so violates the EULA. But what did I know? I was only 16. A stupid age.

I didn't find out anything about Unix (other than the fact that MS-DOS filesystem somewhat resembles it) until much later. I started using Cygwin on Windows 2000 and gradually became more dependent on the command line tools. One time, I messed up the system so bad, but I did fix it without reformatting my hard drive. It was more hacks through the registry and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. But then I decided to switch to Linux for something different.

At first, I kept a dual boot, but I just never switched back. So I eventually reclaimed the disk space too.

Linux was a very pleasant surprise to me, because everything I want to know (not necessarily I need to know) is available to me. I think that's a great beauty of free software. It's all about freedom of knowledge. I've spent too much youth doing reverse engineering, and I'm sick and tired of it (*). Also, as a yongster, I spent too much time on Windows downloading warez. We didn't have KaZaa back in those days. On Linux, everything I use is perfectly legitimate. And it's good enough for me.

(*) Incidentally, nowadays you can find more developer documentation about Microsoft products on MSDN website, which I would have very much liked earlier.

Now came Mac OS X. It's a nice hybrid of what Windows and Linux have to offer, at the same time. It has a nice UI, and it has the power of command line tools. You can configure a personal site using Apache through point and click (default in localhost/~user), or you can customize /etc/httpd/httpd.conf using vim or emacs. You can configure or compile a program from the command line, or you can use Project Builder (now Xcode) for a nice integrated development environment.

Nowadays I tend to use a lot of remote services like ssh (with X forwarding) or web applications, particularly because I usually keep my machines online, and then I go from one place to another without bring any computers with me. And it's a nice thing (very convenient) that I can use my computers without bring them around. It's what I call ubiquitous computing. I can do that without signing up to some ad-supported and soon-to-be-bankrupt free online services. I can setup whatever service that suit my purpose, instead of what some company thinks I need. Linux does that. Mac OS X does that. Windows is not quite there.

Even if you can run Apache on Windows, you know it never runs as good as on Unix because Apache is not designed for Windows. Even if you can run sshd with Cygwin on Windows, too many things just can't be done because Windows is not designed for sshd. There is Terminal Service for Windows, but you need a Windows Server edition to run it. But hey, I still want to use my machine as a desktop when I get home!

So if you want a punch line ... I use Mac OS X and Linux just because they work for me. I haven't used Windows for a good 3 years now, except where Windows machine is the only kind available to use, and I don't miss too much from it.

P.S., my friends are surprised when I'm able to remotely use my computer running Mac OS X or Linux from their Windows machine. I thank Microsoft and some third pa

Many reasons... here's just 10 to start...

[Eggplant62]

1. Constant crashes -- programs that crash should be programs crashing... not taking out the entire machine.

2. Active Exploit scripts that install spyware behind your back.

3. The inability to see what's going on behind the scenes, without decent process logging. Lack of logging capability for any/every service/process imaginable.

4. No opportunity to see the source code.

5. Spyware, viruses and exploits, OH MY!

6. License fees on a "rent as you go" basis.

7. Bill Gates has too much friggin' money already.

8. Microsoft killed Netscape, Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus, and is guilty of anti-competitive behavior to boot!

9. FAT and NTFS file systems.... need I say more???

10. Windows 98: We fixed the bugs. Windows 98SE: We fixed the bugs. Windows 2000: We fixed the bugs. Now, more secure than ever. Windows XP: The most secure MS OS ever!! Right.

Try these...

[ylikone]

Most important items:

1) Make sure you are running the correct / best driver for your particular video card
2) Make sure your partitions are all something like ReiserFS with optimally tweaked settings (distro's like mandrake do this automatically for you). DO NOT RUN EXT3, it will cause your whole system to run super slow!

Other things you can do....

- go thru your startup services and turn off unnessary services (also remove from boot time)
- buy more ram, the less swap space is accessed, the faster your system
- use only 7200 (or higher) speed hard drives
- don't use KDE or Gnome, instead go with fast (but familiar looking for windows user) GUI's like IceWM

There's probably more.

why I don't use MS Windows

[belmolis]

I started using Unix in 1982 and have found it preferable to everything else I've encountered. I have always had Unix available at work, and since I first installed GNU/Linux in 1995, I've had it on my personal machines as well. So basically I've only used MS Windows (and before it, MS/DOS) on personal machines before I knew about Linux, and occasionally when I have used somebody else's machine or had to write something in MS Word or something like that.

Unix gave me a powerful, flexible system. The command-line is much more powerful than a GUI, with history, aliasing, shell scripts, file globbing, completion, shell variables, loops, and i/o redirection. The Unix philosophy of combining lots of little programs each of which does one job well is extremely powerful. The programming environment is superior, as are many of the individual tools, such as emacs and awk. X Windows from the outset was vastly superior to MS Windows, both because it ran over the network and in its configurability and lack of idiotic restrictions. As I recall, until fairly recently in MS Windows child windows were constrained to be positioned within the parent. Awful! All in all, I have always found Unix to be more powerful and flexible and generally easier to use.

The superiority of Unix documentation is also important. The five volume BSD manual set may not have been as easy going as "Windows for Dummies", but it provided the information I needed to do my work. The various books on Unix internals and programming, starting with the Lyons book, provided real insight that was impossible to get for MS Windows. Most of the time I also had the source, first with BSD, then with GNU/Linux, which both provided the ultimate documentation and allowed me to make modifications.

Being used to a stable and practically bug-free system, I was simply appalled when I discovered how unstable and buggy MS Windows was.

An added attraction of GNU/Linux is the associated community and the ideals of the FLOSS movement. Naturally, there is no such attraction to Microsoft. (I should note that merely being commercial and proprietary doesn't necessarily turn me or other people off. I'm sure that Im not alone in having fond memories of DEC, a company which we felt was on the side of technical people and willing to work with us. For example, when the Microvax came out, our DEC rep gave me a copy of the architecture manual. When a senior researcher from Xerox PARC saw it on my desk, he commented that he, a senior Xerox employee, could only get access to the comparable Xerox manuals on a need-to-know basis.)

Microsoft's disgusting monopolistic behaviour has certainly added to my unwillingness to use Microsoft products, but that is a relatively recent development and just adds to my long-standing technical dislike for MS Windows.

What's most amazing about this thread...

[mabu]

is that with as many comments as people have posted, they aren't nearly as repetitive as one might think. It's utterly amazing how many legitimate issues there are with Windows, and I'm certain we haven't even come close to touching on them all even after 1000+ comments.

A few that come to mind for me include:

* The help system is downright insulting. How many times have you been presented with a checkbox of options and pressed the help key only to get instructions on the proper procedure to click a check box? Is that what Microsoft intended to dedicate the F1 key for? "To select one of the options click on the box" - Jesus!

* With few exceptions (i.e. Eudora), most applications take a Borg-like approach towards installation, assimilating themselves so deep into the OS that you can't ever remove them, and you most certainly can't copy an app from one directory to another (a common and painless procedure in Unix) without making the whole thing break, or worse, crashing the OS.

* And of course, every person who installs any new program has the added anxiety of wondering if the new application:
a) Will even install properly without freezing up
b) Won't disable or break other applications
c) Run rampant with unrequested file associations
d) Install some unnecessary "startup agent" that hogs memory and contacts the mothership

* I don't know a single Windows user who hasn't had to run Windows at least twice to get a proper installation, or any Windows user who hasn't at one point or another had to completely wipe their hard drive and start over when some ill-behaved application took the whole OS down with it. I have NEVER had to do this with any flavor of Unix.

* Users even live in fear of Microsoft Update, wondering if the next patch to fix their system will actually break it.

* Two words: memory leaks! They're everywhere, and nobody really seems to ever be able to fix things to the point where any decent continued use of the system doesn't eventually require a reboot to make the system not run like dog shit after awhile.

* Speaking of reboots... why? You don't need to do reboots with Unix except in the most major/dire of circumstances. Under Windows, 95% of most software, plugins or anything require a reboot.

* No symlink. Such a simple, wonderful feature of Unix that would obviously make Microsoft's OS's explode and throw shrapnel at the user.

* No respect for software autonomy. Microsoft's desire is to be everything to everybody. As a result each new iteration of their OSes tends to be more bloated and bundled with tons of crap you don't want, don't need, or can't extricate from the OS to make it run efficiently.

* No respect for develoeprs. Any developer for Microsoft OSes has to safely assume that each new version of their OS might completely put an end to their software's ability to run, versatility, performance and everything else. There's a reason why there's better quality software for the Unix community: no self-respecting developer that really cares about the future of his code wants to subject his work or himself to the uncertain future that lies ahead when developing apps under Windows platforms.

Myself and a friend of mine both came from the DOS world. We both developed commercial software. When Windows came along, I went to Unix; he went to Windows. I have systems I configured 8 years ago that are still going strong and doing their job; I have software programs that were written 9 years ago that are still viable and marketable today and in use online. OTOH, he's had to completely rewrite his code countless times; he's constantly battling with customers over tech support issues that are beyond his control, that don't have to do with his software. Sounds fun. ... sigh... I could go on and on, there really doesn't seem to be any end to the issues of this OS. I think the biggest problem is most users today simply do not know how much better things could be because they've never seen any alternative.

Re:Question about article summary

[rizzo420]

and the same goes for a windows machine. sure, windows users generally run as administrator, but the malware that goes around now doesn't do any phyiscal damage to the machine. like i said, it just propogates. it spreads and spreads and spreads doing nothing more than that. the latest worm/virus to go around was the sasser virus. what did that do? what harm did that cause? nothing. some PERSON found a security hole in windows and used it to run code, which could have been run by a normal user on the machine (the shutdown -r command, which just restarts the computer). this can easily be aborted by running shutdown -a.

in the same way that a PERSON found this hole, PEOPLE find holes in linux. now say you have a kid who's extremely good with linux and programming and finds this wide open hole. this kid, rather than thinking "let me post a fix or report this hole" decides to go and make use of the whole to gain root on several (or even just 1) linux box. or worse writes something to bounce through several linux boxes and use these linux boxes to cause damage to a network or another computer and then self-destruct after the big damage has been done. let's say this kid is so good, he can hide it completely. it starts off and does all the damage, maybe not causing as much "big" damage as he hoped, but ending with the self-destruction of several linux boxes, much to their owner/administrator's surprise. how is this different than windows? you have no idea how many holes exist in linux. you won't know unless (1) you look at the code yourself or (2) someone else finds them. while i admit that there is a much better chance of someone finding the hole and patching it in linux than there is with windows, the fact remains that there are still hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands or millions of these unpatched linux boxes out there. this can cause jsut as much damage as any hole that exists in windows.

i want to know how you figure that linux and apple (or any other non-MS OS) requires human engineering to exploit a vulnerability, but the windows vulnerabilities do not require this. even if it can't gain root access to the machine, most linux users have access to the internet, have access to run stuff. so the virus runs itself, it sends itself to any unpatched machines it finds. how is this different than sasser or blaster? they infect unpatched machines as soon as they're found.

and how can you say that a fresh install of mandrake, red hat, or debian does not have to worry about being immediately rooted? say you install from CD. you are plugged into the network but don't have time to download the patches that were released since the time the CD was created (or the distribution was bought, doesn't apply to debian). i would think that if a vulnerability was found since the time the CD was created, you do have to worry. the only thing that saves you is the fact that there are fewer users and people are less likely to write linux viruses. you have just as good a chance at being infected as someone installing windows xp from scratch while being plugged into the internet.

and the common software i mentioned is pretty common software. i know it's all optional, but they've all had major vulerabilities in recent years, especially ssh. telnet is also (at least last time i checked which was a while ago) automatically turned on in many distros, especially red hat, one of the more common ones.

and for the record, i am by no means a windows advocate. but i do work in a windows environment, i am a primarily windows user, and i do not fear getting viruses on my own machines. i do, however, work in a college where students bring their own machines from home. so i deal with the viruses. do i worry about it? no. does it make me feel that people shoudl stop using windows because linux is superior? not in the least. i don't consider linux superior by any means. maybe as a server, but on the desktop for non-savvy users, never in a million year

Re:Why not windows?

[jonnystiph]

"I-Need-Some-Capability-But-I-Would-Have-To-Pay-Ex tra-For-It"

Yeah, like ANYONE pays for windows software. haha.

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

[Mirkon]

Of course, being this far back, no one's going to see my comment. But I feel like pitching in my two cents anyway. Or ten cents, if you will (I'm an Apple fan).

I could talk about Microsoft's business practices, which are sure to bring an end to software innovation if successful. I could talk about security holes and the downfall of the Internet as we know it. I could talk about intellectual property concerns and the death of 'sharing' material.

But my bottom line is that Windows, and everything else Microsoft makes, is just plain shoddy. Obfuscating and lazy UI, shitty operation organization - and this is to say nothing of unintended problems.

Why do we have to "choose"

[ccdotnet]

I've been using DOS/Windows since MS-DOS 3.x and BSD since the early versions of FreeBSD.

I use BSD on my servers, and WinXP on my desktops. BSD does a better job of hosting my domain names and web sites, handling my email, and securing my perimeter. XP provides a dead easy to use desktop, with wider peripheral support (and game support).

Nothing I've read in this thread has convinced me that Windows would do a better job on my servers, nor that BSD would do a better job on my desktop. That's for today, who knows about tomorrow.

I think I'm fairly typical of tech-literate computer users. What makes me atypical of /. users is that I can't get sufficient rabid about one platform or the other.

No-one twists your arm to religiously stick to a PS/2 or GameCube or PC for your gaming needs. Why then do we have to choose a single platform to host our other applications and services. Horses for courses.

Why, all of the above, of course.

[BishopBerkeley]

After well over a decad on PC, I became a minor Windows expert. It made me a useful guy wherever I went. Then, I experienced OS X. All of a sudden all the time I spent maintaining my PC (and the cohort of PCs at work) seemed so stupid. So, I bought myself a Powerbook, and my PC has been collecting dust since. OS X offers a vastly superior GUI, infinite tweakability, a rational design, a Unix implementation that allows me to run oodles of useful software (LaTex is great for equations). And, thanks to Fink, I don't have to do much work to install the *nix software. iPhote, iMovie, and iSync are all great. iTunes and my iPod have essentially supplanted my Harman-Kardan stereo system. I have MySQL and PHP running flawlessly on my Powerbook, and this allows me to keep nice backups of everything I put on the web. The list of reasons is endless. In short, in comparison with OS X (and with Linux and BSD), Windows is just primitive. P

Why I am off Windows

[AndyCanfield]

You buy two computers, A and B. Each comes with Windows. A dies, you buy computer C. Can you install the Windows for A onto C? Legally? Don't know? Well, you'd better, because Bill will send you to jail if you get the wrong answer. Can you install Windows D onto computer D using the product key from Windows E? Guess again! Threats. I can live without the threats. I live a deliberately low-stress lifestyle and I don't want to live with Bill pointing a gun at my head.

Should be: What keeps me on OpenSource

[esbjerg]

It's very simple: choice

Linux/BSD gives me the choice to do what I want with my computer. Nobody can EOL my software and nobody decides how things should work on my computer.

In other words: I'm free to paint the bikeshed whatever color I want.

Though I do tend to like the color on the FreeBSD bikeshed ;)

The reason that beats all others by lengths (imho)

[Qbertino]

OSS OSes, Linux in my case, are free, open, stable, secure and allways give you the possibility to solve problems. We all know that. Yet there is one thing that comes with OSS that lots of people don't think of conciously, one which I think weighs in bigger than all the rest. Linux is open and thus there is no comercial interest in making it obsolete. On the contrary.
Entry: The single biggest reason for embracing OSS/Linux and never touching Windows again:
I never again will have to learn a new OS and how to handle it.
I repeat:

I will never again - in my entire life - have to learn a new OS and it's wayabouts.

Or the other way around:

All I learn now on Linux will most likely never become obsolete.

Just think about that one for a minute.

Thinking about it, this could be a reason why MickeySofts death may even be inevitable in the end.

Re:You must not be a Perl programmer...

[AviLazar]

Isn't Perl that thing that's created in a shell, is connected with strings, and then sold on the market? ;)

Printing and Gaming on Windows

[SKarg]

At home I run 3 linux servers, 1 linux firewall, 2 linux desktops, and 1 windows desktop PC [games]. My main desktop was a Windows PC running mostly free software so that when we switched to just Linux on the desktop, it would be easy for my wife and kids. We made the switch to Linux on that desktop a year or so ago.

I still have to go back to Windows for printing color photos to different types of photo paper [HPDeskJet712C]. We also have to use Windows for most of the purchased PC games and educational software. My wife misses the HP Copier application [scanner->printer] and PrintMaster [greeting cards].

I mainly like Linux and free software because I am frugal and because I don't believe in pirating software. I also like the filesystem choices and the rock solid stability that Linux systems provide. I also like being immune to the myriad of Windows viruses and worms.

Re:Mac OS X - quality which Microsoft can never ma

[Bombcar]

Actually, in OS X when you begin to move the icon for something like the iPod, the trash can in the dock disappears and is replaced with an eject icon.