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Why Do People Switch To Linux?
tadelste writes "During the last month, Lxer.com conducted a survey of readers who use Linux. They asked readers why they switched to Linux and received a plethora of answers. Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own merits. Anti-Microsoft sentiment comes from Microsoft's paranoia, which results in quotes like the one that had Bill Gates saying he'd put Linux in the Computer museum like he has other competitors." A respondent quote from the article: "It took me about a year to switch from W2K to Linux. The timing in the development of all of the Desktop elements has obviously been critical. If I'd tried any sooner, the whole thing would never have come together. Improved hardware support and equivalent apps have been a big part of the successful transition, and, I owe thanks to many in the Linux community for making that happen at an astounding rate and giving me my functional Desktop OS." Why do you think folks switch?
The ability to typeset sublime mathematics and papers based not on WYSIWYG, but form and content; both of which may be possible under MiKTeX, but it seemed most natural to migrate, if not to whose nativity, then to the least hostile environment for work.
They're not smart enough to download a copy of XP from Usenet.
I kid, I kid!
How many people switched because they were told it was simply 'cool' or '1337' or that it would help them 'h4x05 their friendz b0x', and then moved on from that but sticked with Linux.
for the freedom to modify and fix problems instead of being at the whim of any other vendor.
Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
I'm a long time IT guy. When I first played with Linux a decade or so ago, I couldn't get my Matrox video card to work with X Windows using a Slackware distro. So, I gave it up. Some time later, I gave Red Hat a shot. It installed this time, but then I just sat there and twidled my thumbs. Now what? I couldn't find anything practical to do with it. Windows did everything I needed it to. Years later I tried again, this time with Gentoo. I could get things to compile, so I gave up again.
This week I just installed Open SuSe 10.0. Why again? Because I really wanted to run Asterisk. I'm a total Linux moron, but it only took me a day or so to install the OS and compile and configured Asterisk. A few hours later, I had a full featured PBX system working and soon to be rolled into production for my small business, for free.
I was amazed at how easy both the OS and Asterisk were to install and configure. I really think that the usability of modern distros has improved dramatically. That isn't really what's keeping adoption down. In my case, and I suspect many others, it was internia. I didn't really want to use Linux until I found something it did that Windows didn't do, Asterisk.
I think it's time that many OSS developers stop trying to play catchup with MS; you're already there. If you don't set the bar any higher than trying to reinvent the functionality already present in Windows, the masses will never take notice. There seems to be this idea that people hate MS and/or Windows and are looking for any excuse to move to OSS (Lindows is a perfect example of this mentality). I don't think this is the case. I'm not looking for a reason to abandon Windows, I need a reason to move to Linux. And the best way to get my interest is offering me things that Windows can't.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
I switched from Windows to Red Hat out of curiosity and because I was tired of BSODs. It's one of the best decisions I have ever made. The next "switches" have been between linux distros, until I found the one I love.
Because it works flawlessly once installed.
We do alot of heavy duty database servers and the windows servers have a tendancy to start locking up anytime you patch something to close a security hole. The linux servers have no daemons running except for the database and ssh, there are times we go 6-12 months without needing a hotfix or patch. Even when they need patched it doesnt require a reboot, it doesn't take the machine down, and it doesn't change the day to day operation of the machine with new errors and new crashes. We use linux because it works.
End of story (I'm sure BSD would work as well, but our familiarity with a company is much stronger on the linux side of things.)
Shadus
it's just there. I just want to try something different. My view on life is to try and learn about everything I can. It's odd though. My university has Mac's, Windows, and Unix computers but as far as I know no Linux computers.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I switched because of morals. I felt guilty stealing software that people were trying to sell. I can't afford much of the software I used in Windows, and I felt better about myself using free software in Linux. That and, well, the stability, customization, etc that comes with the territory.
I switched for the games. I can play tetravex for hours (and I do).
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
They posted the question in a forum and gathered the responses. So...you're talking self-selected responses, which pretty well guarantees a non-representative sample, even if the responses are interesting. I wish they'd done a real live survey.
Power is the biggest factor it seems. No, not speed. Power over the system, flexibility. For all that Windows is easy, it comes at the price of limiting your freedom to mess around with stuff.
When asked can I do blah with Linux, the answer's pretty much yes out of the box. With Windows the answer's yes if you buy X, Y and Z.
Deleted
I've been using linux for a few years on my home laptop just to stay ahead of the curve. I'm a windows Sys Admin, and I want to be ready.
I'm not a huge fan though. I cant play half the videos I download, wireless in suse sucks. Fedora stoped loading KDE completely one day for no apparent reason.
IMO, linux is still 10 years behind microsoft.
Thats basically it for me.
What about evilwm or 9wm as a window manager ?
;)
And why do you need a bloated X server at all if you only need mutt and pork ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has a huge friendly penguin as its mascot.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Most users don't switch to Linux. Most users have never heard of Linux, and don't really care to have anyone tell them about it either.
As a college student, funds are tight. Migrating to Linux I found a plethra of free software that was very useable and worked well. I also found Linux to be easily used on old hardware, which I have alot of. That, and the lack of viruses, and spyware helped in the migration. I don't have to worry about keeping virus definitions upto date, nor spyware definition. I don't even have to worry about a registry! All the tools that I need are available for Linux, and very customizable. Linux supports everything that I need and more. And then customizing the kernel, and compile flags. Linux is the way I want, not the way someone else wants.
No one switches for just the operating system. It is the applications that run atop it that make the difference. In your case it was Asterisk. Glad to hear that you have crossed the bridge.
Jefe> We have had many answers for the switch to Linux!
El Guapo> How many answers?
Jefe> Many answers, many!
El Guapo> Jefe, would you say we have a plethora of answers?
Jefe> Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora.
El Guapo> Jefe, what is a plethora?
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
This is actually an insightful response. Linux's total real end-user marketshare has not increased since ~1998. The number of people using Linux to browse the internet seems to have actually declined since Windows XP came out. The truth is that no more than 1% of home users use Linux on the desktop, and only a tiny minority don't dual-boot with Windows.
The few people who do 'convert' to Linux, imho, often do so because they want to run Unixy applications, not because they prefer it as a desktop environment. Infact, I'd venture so far to as that many who use it either grudgingly tolerate or even hate its inadequacies, but still use it as a tool to access the apps they want like they do with Windows XP.
I switched to linux about 4 years ago. At the time, I was one of those l337 h4x0rZ all into windoze kind of people, I really didn't have any reason to switch to linux except that a friend recommended it to me. I don't think that the majority of people switch because they hate windows, or even the cost of it. I think it's a whole lot more common that someone hear about it, or something that it can do, or something that it supports, and their curious and try it out. Just my opinion, but that's the way it was for me, and most people who tell me about their 'conversion'.
ignorance will killus all --eric
I used Linux because it was more convenient. I was writing a lot of code that had to run on UNIX systems, and it was nice to be able to write and compile it on my home computer. I also had better connectivity; the Windows terminal programs I had at the time were quite lacking. I did use Windows for a while in the summer of 2000, when I had a job writing code for Windows and Macintosh.
Qualifying the reason I switched back is harder. I had an interview with Microsoft in 2001, and although I didn't accept their offer, I was quite impressed by the people I met while interviewing. So after I got frustrated with the distribution I had been trying in 2002, I decided to give Windows a try again. Windows certainly isn't perfect, but overall it has been a much less frustrating experience than Linux was. A big part of that is Cygwin, which has helped smooth out a lot of the rough edges that Windows has. My regular environment now includes the Windows port of Vim, Cygwin/X, and VNC, but I still find that Windows is more convenient than Linux is.
I no longer have Linux installed on either of my home computers, but I still use Linux almost every day at school. The biggest reason is that rebooting annoys me, so since I completed the switch back to Windows, I've rarely used Linux at home. I miss it at times, not so much since the connectivity of Windows to Linux is good, but there are still a few things I can do better with Linux. For example, gcc on Linux is more compatible with gcc on Linux than gcc on Cygwin. I'd really like a low cost virtualization option so that I could run Linux without rebooting.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I agree - this describes why many people (myself included) switch. To paraphrase James Carville, "it's the applications, stupid". After years of using OS/2 and Windows 9x, I watched my brother-in-law scroll through a list of free debian apps until he found what he needed to solve an engineering problem.
Wow!
So I set up debian on an old box, and proceeded to duplicate all of features I used in our medical practice. I was sold, and although I use Slackware now, could never go back to "I need $functionality, so I'll need to go spend more money to get it".
If I use software at work, I support the people who wrote it, too. Applications sell the OS, which has worked in Microsoft's favor for years. Increasingly, this is working for Linux
Using plain ol' text since 1968
...is a series of interviews with users who switched to Linux then subsequently switched back to either Windows or OSX. Or, alternately, users acquainted with Linux from a development or support perspective but who refuse to migrate. I probably fall into the second category, though I've been contemplating giving SuSE 10 a whirl.
I switched to linux because windows wasn't user friendly enough...
I switched because I work on MS servers, MS desktops, and a network powered by MS. When I come home, I want something that's not going to 'hurt my eyes,' that 'just works,' and that doesn't require all the overhead required to pamper a windows box.
I think this brings up a general problem in that Windows is generally supported first by software and a lot of hardware where Linux is either an afterthought or it is supported soley by the community and therefore there is a lag time for getting the functionality I want.
Maybe it has been a while since I used Linux for "consumer" activities. Maybe it has improved enough to use. The fact is that most customers don't want to write device drivers or software for the problem that isn't yet solved.
I switched just for the operating system. I was tire of not knowing what was going on with my windows box. Things would be running in the background that I had no idea what they were, and it takes a bunch of third party tools to figure it out. There was no easy way to tell exactly what was going on with my system. I would see a lot of rundll's a lot of svchosts, and various other processes that are part of the operating system, but aren't invoked by the operating system itself.
Windows has a way of hiding what is going on inside. I didn't like that. I didn't want to have to buy a bunch of tools to tear down my computer just to see what was happening. I also didn't like the registry. Some things are fairly easy to distinguish what they are, but other things are just plain cryptic. And if you decide to remove the wrong thing, you might as well just re-install.
So I did switch because of the core os. The applications that run on Linux are a bonus.
For people of my generation, brought up with the 8-bit computers of the 70's and 80's, it isn't so much a question of why we switched from Windows, but why we picked Linux as our PC platform.
Myself, I never saw a GUI as something useful beyond desktop work. For remote servers I find Windows cumbersome, bandwidth-hogging and prone to popping up some mandatory modal pop-up upon reboot before my remote control software kicks in- leaving me 5000 miles away with no access.
Servers, IMHO, don't need a GUI.
For my desktop, sure, I use Windows, because that's what my company supplied by default and that's what my games run on at home. But my desktop doesn't matter - it isn't where the real work is done.
I "switched" to Linux - for the stuff that mattered - because it was the most comfortable, familiar server OS that fitted with my commandline heritage and ran on hardware I could afford. I could have quite easily been a *BSD chap too.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Switching to a GNU/Linux distribution because you're anti-Microsoft is not a long-term reason to switch. I switched because GNU/Linux was the only stable OS I could run. I got sick of Win95 crashing, Win98 crashing, and WinNT crashing, and being a new computer user, figured *something* better had to be out there. I heard about RedHat, tried it, and never looked back. Because it was *stable* (or more so, relatively speaking). I started using computers in 1997 and was on GNU/Linux by 1997.
It's the apps and the freedom, that's why people switch.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I was a Mac user for a long time, only switching to Windows for financial reasons (cheaper to build a cheap PC than buy a cheap Mac).
I tried Linux off and on the past few years, finally moving to Linux full-time a year ago. First with Mandrake 10.1, now with SUSE 9.3 (probably upgrade to OpenSUSE 10 in the near future).
I switched for three reasons. First and foremost, I got tired of spending more time dealing with spyware and viruses than actually working. Second, I'm developing a Java3d-based web game, and wanted to ensure cross-platform compatability. And, third, the free-as-in-beer software eliminates the guilt due to pirated software (Office and Photoshop are frigging expensive).
About the only thing I miss is game compatability. If a native Linux client ever comes out for Civ3, Civ4, BF2 or GTA:SA, I'm screwed productivity-wise.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
I'm a non-coder professional who recently moved my office desktop to linux from Windows XP. (i.e. I don't know much about much when it comes to the mysterious boxes my office needs to do its thing.) I was able to madk the change by installing Open Office on Windows and practicing with it.
After I was comfortable with it and had moved over all of my many, many forms and other documents needed to run my office, I moved the rest of the way to linux. I chose Mandriva with a Gnome desktop. Though I have not found an open source counterpart for every proprietary application I used before, with Open Office I could make it work.
Why move to a linux desktop? Lots of reasons, but, at the top, I guess it felt to me that every time I turned around, another sales rep was billing me for another upgrade or another license.
If it wasn't that type of bill, it was a bill from technical support to fix a problem that did not exist before I made some vendor-mandated change to my office system. My old documents don't open any more. The formatted is messed up. That feature I need so much has been moved. Etc.
I'm embarrassed by how much money I spent for a technical support providers that ended up talking on the phone with the technical support provider of another vendor. To my mind, that's a ridiculous situation that is largely remedied by the open source approach.
It has been a long, steep hill to be sure. I am never going to look back though.
There is a lot more to say on this subject, but these reasons are at the top of my list.
I'm laughing at clouds.
I picked it for the same reason I chose to study computer science: money, women, power.
But then again, I've never been good at making decisions.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
For me it was because I wanted a Unix-like OS on my PC. Why not *BSD then? Well, in January 1992, *BSD wasn't available at any price a teenager could afford.
/24 subnet, but it worked. Since then, Linux has gone from strength to strength.
But Linux was, however barebones it was. Unlike DOS, there was no 640K limit on the early release 80386 machine with 2.5MB of RAM I bought cheap from a mail order house selling surplus computers (this was the early 80386, complete with bugs). Instead of all the nastiness of DOS/Windows 3.0, it was a nice, smooth flat memory model. With a proper VMM. Demand page loading. Etc. In January 1992, you had a boot floppy and a root floppy. To install this "distro", after making your hard drive partition, you just did a cp -a from the root floppy to the root of the hard drive. Then you used a hex editor to modify a couple of bytes on the boot floppy to tell it the root device was the hard disk. There was no LILO - it couldn't actually completely boot strap from a hard disk, you still needed to put the kernel on a floppy!
But it was a real *nix like system on my PC with many of the limitations of DOS gone. Very quickly it gained LILO, a proper init/getty/login and a TCP/IP stack (before Microsoft even had heard of the Internet). The NET1 TCP/IP stack was *extremely* basic - it could only work on a
I learned C on that machine. In 1993, when I upgraded to a '486 with a whopping 80MB drive, I could install X as well - and learned all about Xlib. I wrote a media player on that 486 for playing Amiga MODs (basically a pure Xlib based playlist editor, complete with a VU meter for visualisation!) Wish I still had the source. In 1993, a 486 with 16MB of RAM could compile the kernel _under X_ without touching swap. I used that machine to learn about sockets, C++, NFS and all sorts of things that would have cost me thousands I didn't have in the proprietary world. My humble 486 was better than the Solbourne S4000 (Sun compatible) workstations at university that cost an order of magnitude more money!
I have had Linux on my PCs ever since because I like it. I've usually also had a Windows partition too, but a couple of years ago, I realised that I was only booting Windows once every three months and decided to blow it away when I got the then new Fedora Core 2.
Currently, my home is home to three architectures and three operating systems. I have a 333MHz UltraSPARC system running OpenBSD, a PowerBook running OS X and an Intel PC running Fedora Core. Linux still gives me the freedom to tinker - that's why I like it.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"Mostly hard drives..."
Are these like partly soft drives?
Saying anything works "flawlessly" once installed in absolute BS. I've had plenty of "flaws" on my "Linux" sytems. I've had kernels crap out while compiling a module, daemons mysteriously shut off without leaving a log trail, one of my monitors in a dual monitor (Xinerama) setup come up with goofy vertical lines after a reboot which worked "flawlessly" before I shut down the system and with no xorg.conf changes whatsoever, only to reappear perfectly fine after another reboot... The list goes on.
There will ALWAYS be flaws in a complex system. It's just part of the game. However, the goal is to minimize the downtime due to those flaws. Windows "flaws" tend to be easy to fix because so many people use Windows and you can do a quick search to find 8 million other people who've had the same problem. Linux has a lot of that, too, but you have to know where to go to get the right answers sometimes. What makes Linux nice is that it comes free with a plethora of debugging aids and the source code as well.
I'm tired of seeing the "Linux works flawlessly" argument. NONE of the major OS's run without a problem. OpenBSD has only had 1 remote vulnerability, but then again, it comes out of the box with basically NO services running. The more services you introduce into the system, the more flaws you expose.
My first Linux install in, oh about 1993, was largely because I was running a BBS and 486SX-25 with a whopping 8mb of RAM and 200mb of hard drive space was being rendered useless under Windows 3.1 when somebody dialed in to my WaffleBBS background DOS session. In return I got full blown UUCP, sendmail and a whopping load of great stuff. Of course, it only furthered my sad, pathetic addiction to the command line, so that even in Windows, I still go to cmd.exe or install bash.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
.. and thats no flame, nor troll. you don't have to look far to find fascist, dictator-like, dogma-driven personalities, especially in the corporate world. it embues the psych of the body politic. humans instinctively resist this, and it is when the desire to avoid such scenarios has its bit flipped, that a person 'switches'. whatever flips it, it flips; you become a welcome participant in -a society of doing things openly- with linux, rather than 'one of masses serving the hidden master that cannot be known'.
this flip turns a computer use scenario into productive use no matter which stick you shake, and your mindset rapidly becomes 'knowing as much as i can and need to know to get my system doing its thing'. this can go deep, or it can (thanks to the work of bridgers and gluers in the distribution world) be a very shallow experience, the huge choice is yours and depends strictly on what you specifically care to know, or find out, about how your software works. the more people do this, the better the software gets 'on a mass scale', because its only being done by people who can do it because they care to know, and for whom ignore stuff i don't know isn't really as fun as it sounds.
if you are sensitive to those things, and you 'give it a go' just to see where so many of us have gotten under our own efforts it doesn't take long before you realize that your bit is flipped. you don't over-fascinate, you just learn by doing, both activities which improve themselves when actively paired with each other.
and in linux, and within other open, free, software development efforts, we get a chance to prove, in the face of the worlds apparent toil, that humans can actually get along, do something big together, and make things work out. its a very human thing, to run someone elses code, build upon it, and do cool things because of it. its what the world needs more of right now, this peaceful working together, stripped of its hunger and greed, instead promoting more noble ideals of cooperation and improvement over toil..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I appreciate *nix because it's built from the bottom up with science in mind. M$ builds their windows from the top down with business in mind. Also, I like the Open Source Ideology in terms of Philosophy, it's comparable to organizing everything into a standard and putting the methods used straight into a science book for all to see. It encourages collaboration and standards. I doubt M$ could ever open up enough of their code (without being embarrassed) to actually get some real programmers excited about contributing their time towards some sort of betterment for them.
I read Stallman's essays when I was younger {he's written a few more since then} and thought This is great, but it doesn't go far enough. We need to take by force what is rightfully ours. So I went about my way, exercising Freedoms 0 and 2 with or without anybody's -- but, it has to be said, towards the end, mostly Microsoft's -- sayso.
/CLI=SHELL to your username when logging in}. I had even tried Linux -- with plenty of help from someone else. It must have been about 1992 or 1993. He booted a floppy in a PC in a lab, and it came up with a Unix login prompt. You could telnet to it {it was safe to send a plaintext password in those days} from anywhere in the world. And run vi on it. Vi was not as nice to use as EVE -- but you could run vi with just about any terminal that supported even rudimentary cursor positioning.
However, as I grew up I also realised the importance of Freedoms 1 and 3. In the 8-bit days I had dabbled with BASIC and machine code. The 16-bit years seemed somehow as though something was missing. I had this wonderful spanky new machine and yet I couldn't make it do exactly what I wanted it to do! I was all ready to pull out my old BBC model B from the loft, when it hit me. I wasn't hurting the software industry one iota by illegally copying their products -- I was just as dependent upon them as any paying customer. I needed Freedoms 1 and 3, and that meant I needed the source code. In the Beeb days, it was enough to disassemble a machine code game to make silly changes, like changing the keys or adding extra lives or disabling collision detection {with 32K of ram, and a framebuffer eating 20K of that and the OS eating another K or so for itself, the game was very hackable}. Or, of course, there would be listings printed in magazines, to be typed in over the course of several days; and these often could be improved upon. I realised I was missing Freedom 1 in a big way.
I had used VAX/VMS and UNIX at university, some years before. Though I actually preferred the former, because it used words instead of symbols, the latter was the direction in which all things were going {and VMS even had a "unix emulator" -- append
When a friend of mine gave Linux a serious try, I decided that it must be worth a go. In the end I set up an old machine running Linux -- Debian slink; or it might have been potato, I think -- as a "modem sharer" so that my Windows 95 box and any machine I borrowed could both use my single, 56K dial-up line. When my ISP of the day introduced individual cgi-bin directories, I set up apache and perl on my "modem sharer" so it could be used as a testing environment for my scripts.
And when I bought an Athlon XP 2000+, I knew I had to make a serious decision. Would I dual-boot Linux and Windows, or single-boot Linux? The Windows 98 SE installer disc answered that for me. It didn't believe there was such a thing as a whole gigabyte of memory on one motherboard, and barfed. I ended up installing Mandrake 8.2, got for me by a broadband-enabled "warez n pr0n d00d".
And I never looked back. One day I picked up my e-mail using kMail. There was a message from my erstwhile ISP asking if I knew anybody who wanted a job doing a bit of programming and system maintenance. I said "yes, me!", and got the job.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I switched because the Linux kernel is released under the GPL which respects my freedom. It can be combined with other free programs to make a complete operating system respecting my freedom. There are other reasons why I switched but they are all trivial compared to having freedom.
My father is a programmer. One of those whitebeards that learned programming using stacks of punchcards. There was always technology at home, usually in pieces, laying about to be studied and tinkered with. His company (a telecom) used unix quite extensively. CLI was the way to get anything done. When he heard about Linux, he brought it home and tried it out. I think it was kernel .99. If you wanted a driver you had to write it. There wasnt much it could do out-of-the-box. Hell, there wasn't even a box! But that was the greatness of it. You had to get under the hood. You had to understand the mechanisms behind the curtain. My father taught me his craft. It was a bonding activity. Some people build canoes in the garage. We built a server.
:-) /RANT
I was hooked...then I discovered girls. I took a break for a while.
When I came back to linux, I was in college. My roomate and I needed to share a dial-up connection. Being poor, we cobbled a underpowered machine from the scraps at school. Red-Hat 5 was new, and some disks were laying around the lab so we used it. I finally made the switch in 1998. Not because I hate windows, but because I love linux. I take pride in the fact that the community built it. We supported ourselves, and fashioned an OS that has the largest software company in the world threatened.
The absolute best part about linux is the code distilling process. It is Darwinism for computers. Rather than a company developing to meet a business plan/schedule, you have a community tweaking and patching and improving the code everyday. cood code gets passed to the next version, the badly structured sloppiness gets dumped.... most of the time
I haven't fully migrated off of Windows yet, but more and more of my day to computer time is spent on Linux.
For me, it is the applications and the general look and feel upgrades that continually get better and surprise me. I'm currently using Suse 9.3, and have experimented with Ubuntu 5.10 which was a very pleasent surprise.
Main experiences that are moving me to Linux:
1.) I know that about every six months i'll see a new Suse, Ubuntu and OpenBSD distribution,
and I know that there will never be a financial cost to upgrading (unless of course, i choose to donate to companies supporting open source software, by purchasing their retail products.)
2.) Firefox. -- It has a very comfortable feel similar to the same version under Windows.
3.) OpenOffice. -- I've recently used the spread sheet and drawing program as at the moment, i didn't have access to MS Office or Viso, and I was like "hey, this is slick. and it just works!" I was also very easily able to export my document to PDF so that i could email it to somebody in a format that I knew they could view easily.
4.) K3B. CD/DVD burning is just easy, powerful, and included in the distributions.
5.) USB support. I recently attended a class using a Linux laptop where the instructor passed around a USB mini storage drive as a way to hand out materials, i was nervous that I may not be able to use it, but again i was pleasently surprise that "it just worked". I popped in the USB device and a window appeared showing the contents of the drive.
6.) Misc applications. Almost anything day to day task that i would do on a computer (even if i personally haven't done it yet.....I could probably find an application for it in my full Suse distribution. There is just an enormous amount of applications available for the platform that are "good enough" for most things that a person wants/needs to do.
7.) Suse Installation -- Just easy. Nice graphics
8.) New Ubuntu experience. Nothing I can put my finger on, but it just like a well laid out product that is awesome to have for free. I was a bit confused at the no root password thing at first, but now quite like keeping it password free and using sudo.
9.) Network configuration has always been a breeze for me on Linux (with exception for wireless).
10.) Backups. It is fairly easy to do automated but simple tar/ssh based backups across multiple machines where i can set it up, and basically never touch it again. (and there are plenty of documented backup solutions available on the internet as well). Windows solutions don't seem as easy or automated. Even if i have to just push a button, i'll forget at some point, and that'll be the day the harddrive fails and i'll lose some important data.
11.) Remote access. Doesn't matter where i am, i can usually find a computer somewhere to download putty, and log into my machines.
12.) Server capabilities. I run a family website, web based mail server (Qmail/Horde), FTP server on my servers, and will be installing mythtv shortly. Its just cool that the mail server that my family uses is better than the yahoo/gmail/hotmail service that is available, because of all the addon packages that are available.
13.) Development environment. I'm a software developer, and it is cool, that I can setup my computer at home to have a near identical development and deployment environment to the one we use at my place of employment. So much of my education at home is relevant to my work, and so much of my on the job training is relevant to my personal hobbies at home. I can replicate an as reliable/robust family website as my companies web site is, using the same development tools and server software that we use at work. That is just cool that an individual has the capability/capacity to do things like that.
14.) VNC. The new VNC client/server software packages allow me to full-screen my Linux desktop on my Windows OS (or vice-versa), and allow me to have access to my linux boxes, like my monitor was attached to the box. This allows for a s
Surprisingly, anti-Microsoft sentiment had less to do with the choice than one might imagine. Linux stands on its own merits. Anti-Microsoft sentiment comes from Microsoft's paranoia, which results in quotes like the one that had Bill Gates saying he'd put Linux in the Computer museum like he has other competitors.
I don't find this surprising at all. You don't run a business on emotion -- you run it on what works. Linux works. And well. And I can do things with it I can't do with MS.
Linux proponents do themselves a huge disservice by posting "M$ sux" posts everywhere. The whole '[they] doth protest too much' thing comes to mind.
I choose Linux for Linux, not as a slap in the face to Mr. Gates.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
I remember the day that I realized I could use my computer to record my weekly radio show, encode it, and move the whole thing to my iPod before I came home-- automatically! I was just totally floored. Now I'm building a system to monitor the temperature of my homebrew in my fermenters.
Sure, Windows has pipes. But most programs can't take input on stdin and require user interaction. Useless to me!
(And for clarification... I don't actually use Linux... I use BSD. But for most uses, they are essentially the same.)
The primary driver for me was boredom. I don't just like to use computers to get things done - I like to play with them, understand how they work and generally tweak and fidget. So, I got off windows and onto a series of Linux distros until I found one that was the right balance betwwen usability and tweakability.
I'd like to know how many people have been caught by what happened next. I've got servers, desktops and laptops. I got sick of the noise and clutter. Apple announces the Mac Mini and I've always loved Apple's displays. Why don't I just buy a mini and "X" into my other machines. I'll put them in another room. Hmmm, this is very cool. Silent, full access to my machines. OK, I'm bored. let's play with the Mac a little. Wow, this all works pretty nicely. Wow, this is all Unix under the covers. Cool, I can install just about whatever new software I want. Sure does work well with my camera, iPod and flash drive. Maybe I'll just swich over my mail to the Mac - seems easier. I just need to write a one page document - maybe I'll just do it here. Jump on the web? Why open X - I'lll just do it here.
Two months later the Mini has been retired to the TV room, I am the proud owner of a shiny new maxed out Powerbook with an attached 20" display and, for the most part, my Linux systems are sitting in the backroom being file and Popfile servers. I was captured by the Mac interface, lack of hassle and integration between components.
Any other switch (then switch) types out there?
No big surprise, but virtually everybody who has commented in this forum, and in the "survey" has something in common - they are tinkerers who like to play with computers and/or write code. I am not terribly surprised by the lack of expressed anti-Microsoft sentiments. First of all, that group is smart enough to couch their reason in a positive way (Linux is great!) since they know how the former would be perceived. Second, I really believe that for tinkerers Linux is a strong alternative to Windows. Stuff is free, the hardware is cheap (thank you Microsoft) and there are plenty of tools and lots of "help" in the form of sample code, open source, etc. However, that population only covers about 0.5% of the overall computer-using population. The big question is, how many of the remaining 99.5% are using Linux, and if so, why did they switch.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
...it gets chicks!
The point that I was making, was that there wasn't a make or break software package that made me choose linux over windows. Everything that I would use on wondows, I have a comparable item on linux. The difference is that Microsoft's operating system makes it much easier to hide exactly what is going on. I have very little control over what is going on with the system. There really isn't a way for me to just sit down without any third party tools and tell you exactly what is going on. Linux' coreutils package gives me that. I trust my linux box. I don't trust my MS box.
I *run* Linux because I want to run Linux.
..."
I *use* Linux because I want to use Linux.
I don't advocate Linux unless someone asks me.
I don't bash WinXX unless someone asks me.
I *bash* WinXX because people are always calling me asking: "Can you fix this?" "I've got a problem with my computer..." "My PC crashed..." "I opened this email and now my PC is so slow..." "My Internet is..." "I can't
So, while fixing, or more frequently of late telling them to get someone else to fix it, I bash. If they ask for advice, then I advocate.
So far, I have seen two 100% converts thanks to live/demo CDs and application maturity. Both are happy and don't *ever* call to tell me their PCs are broken anymore.
'Nuff said, just do it!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I switched because I was used to DOS and I was taking to UNIX like an otter in a river. I wasn't happy with Win95's problems and when I found out I could get Linux for a reasonable price, including an introduction book.
Now I stay with Linux because of the power I have over the system. It does my bidding, not Microsoft's, Apple's, Sun's, or anyone else. I can find out every process that is running on my system nearly instantly, and I can kill almost any errant program (The only exception is if it hangs while waiting on the kernel which is hung waiting on a device driver). It hasn't crashed since April, and that was my bad. I can do everything I do with a computer (browse; e-mail; IM; rip, stream, and listen to music; watch, transcode, and master video; edit images; wordprocess; work on spreadsheets; balance my accounts; and sync data between devices. And let's not forget that I can program in practically any language used by more than 50 people.
The only thing still lacking is a large selection of video games (The kind I like anyway), but I'm so busy with other projects that I haven't even had time to re-install Windows 2000 (WinXP has never touched my hardware) on my games partition since I upgraded the guts of my workstation back in June.
... And so it comes to this.
I record live music (Jam bands ie WSP, The Dead, moe) and I bought a Sony PCG-K13 laptop to use for this purpose,while recording and transfering dat tapes using Windows XP Home edition, Cool Edit 2000 would lock up for no real reason that I could find and it was just a pain in the ass in general I had a gig of ram and freshly defraged hd lots of hd space but it would still lock up at the worst of times I dont think I made 10 full recordings out of 50 tries. Well one day at work the hard drive quit I got a message that the Operating system was being recogized or some thing similar to that , to make a long story short I didnt get very far with Sony support and I didnt save any codes or numbers under the windows deal so I didnt get very far with MS, a guy at work always talked about how happy he was with linux (he runs gentoo) and that a hd wouldnt cost very much and Mandrake was free. So I replaced the hd and downloaded mandrake 10.0 official . In less than 1 hour I had my laptop connected to the internet and in less that a week I had this laptop doing all the other chores I do with music (ie converting shn and flac to wav and editing,recording) It has done this flawlessly since the beginning. One day I thought how nice my laptop worked with linux and what do I even need windows for anymore so I installed linux on the desk top . Im not a computer genius by any stretch of the imaginiation but I was able to find real solutions to all of my problems fairly fast,and I was never able to do that with windows
I use Linux because: -I prefer it as a desktop environment -I can spend more of my time being productive rather than eradicating spyware and defragging my hard drive -The tools and apps available are at least as good as those for Windows with very few exceptions, all of which fall outside of the scope of my needs -The stability is amazing Note: I hadn't run a "unixy" app in over 15 years prior to my complete switch and I had used MS products since MS-DOS 3.0 all the way to WinXP. I don't hate Windows, Bill Gates or anyone/thing associated with them. I just wanted to offer a counter to the parent's last paragraph
(2) Work. Linux lets me be as smart as I always was; Windows forces me to be slow and stupid. Linux comes out of the box with more tools (tools, I say. Not frou-frou doodads and games!) than you could buy for Windows if you had Bill Gates' bank account. Yes, I tried MS-Visual-Basic and Visual-C++. Say what you will. Say you love it. That's your opinion. My opinion is, they're retarded. My apologies to any retarded people offended by this.
(3) Innovation. Let me second the idea put forth by several others in this thread: the stupidest thing you can do with Linux is follow in Window's footsteps in the interest of getting more people to switch from Windows. Forget trying to make "I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Windows(TM)". Continue to blaze Linux's own trail as it has always been, and let everybody else catch up if they can.
So: innovation: Live CDs. Linux that can run from floppies, USBs, old computers, everywhere. A true multi-tasking system (new to me, anyway) able to compile in one desktop, render 3D images in a second, download in a third, and let me play a game in the fourth without a bit of lag - it's like being four people on four computers! The variety of having my choice of 1000 different distros, so I can have it my way, and choice of different desktops (Fluxbox is my favorite, and I had a chance to shop around for a while to get there).
(4) Free! Free forever! Hundreds and hundreds of distros to download free! All the software for it free! Read the source code for free! Roll your own for free! Release your own for free! Even the games are starting to improve - every time I find a Supertux, an ArmegaTron, a Tower Toppler, or a Metal Blob Solid, I'm doubly happy with it because I didn't have to pay $10-70 dollars for it.
PS Save the standard, flaming, aggravated responses this time, willyah? If you can't tolerate reading other people's opinions, you're at the wrong website. If you love Windows and hate Linux, good for you! But we're asking me.
I don't know. I've been using Linux for awhile (3 years now) and I gave Ubuntu to a friend. He had some questions, and I was fooling around with it. Does it go against convention often (like the whole no su, sudo for everything)? If it does that unneccesarily, it seems like it's just going to make the person not understand Linux, but understand Ubuntu.
I know there are differences between distros, but that seemed a little drastic to me, and I was afraid more simple conventions like that would be changed for seemingly no reason. Personally, I'd rather initially have a hard time, but in the end, be able to operate, for the most part, a *nix box without too much trouble.
If you take out Country Kitchen buffet, old people won't know what to do.
I've been using only linux at home for about 6 months now. It's actually been pretty helpful not having the games, because I get a little more work done, and get to spend more time with my family. (Although I have been spending a disturbing amount of time lately with gnugo.)
While I run Linux on all of my machines, I must maintain win32 machines at work. You can use teTeX and LyX both natively and under cygwin. You can use JabRef on any platform.
I'd toyed with Linux many times, and dealt with the usual gripes: missing h/w support, disto overload, lack of app replacements, etc. I had no great love of Windows, but it worked for me. Linux was a lot of fun to play with, but there was no real outstanding feature to drag me over, once Win2000 was stable enough to run for weeks at a time.
I'll freely admit, I pirated as much software as anyone (and I've never met any long-term computer user who hasn't), but it started to bug me after a while. First, on a practical level, trying to find a crack/serial for the latest version of something was a pain. But mostly, I just started to realize this is NOT something that I wanted to do. Especially as I was moving more and more towards an IT-heavy career. I went on a personal crusade, only to use free software if at all possible, and buy what I needed otherwise. School gave me the free student copies of Windows/Office, and the free software movement was rapidly filling in the holes. I could set up many machines entirely guilt-free, and importantly, HASSLE free. Eventually, I assumed that OEM copies of Windows and/or more income would provide the replacements for free Windows CDs.
Then, Product Activation happened. It initially annoyed the hell out of me on principle, but I did it. After all, it's just an extra step in an install. Then I started reading the horror stories. Calls to Microsoft when you've changed more than 2 pieces of hardware. Begging to be "allowed" to re-install your OS. Booting up a second computer built from spare parts and not being allowed to put an OS on it. Granted, in 2001 you wouldn't exactly use a 5 year old PC to run XP, but the writing was on the wall. I looked to the future and realized I most definitely did NOT want to be trapped this way. So early in 2003, I switched.
What was funny was, most of my complaints/issues with Linux had gone away by about RH8. Installs were a breeze, apps aplenty, it seemed like Linux had matured enough for me. So I spent the next 2 years always trying the latest and greatest, and every time it's been amazing what "just works".
Meanwhile, every few months I get asked to work on someone's Windows box. And every time it just feels older and older. XP has had no significant updates in 4 years now, that I'd notice when actually using it. Half the hardware you have to download drivers for. It can take hours to patch, reboot, patch again (because the first patch had to be installed separately), reboot, etc, etc, etc just to get a working system. Yes, you can spend the time building your own slipstreamed discs - or you can just download the latest Linux distro, all up to date. And updates happen ALL AT ONCE. For all software.
The last straw was the other day. For fun, I tried to get 2000 back on a spare box. Fully legal disc.
Windows Update wouldn't work unless I installed their "genuine Windows advantage" software. Sure, I can manually download dozens of patches and apply them manually. Or, I can take the chance that Microsoft might think I'm a criminal, and then have to beg my way to forgiveness.
Screw it. Linux is far easier to use for me. That's why I switched, and stay switched.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
LaTeX is not limited to Linux. LaTeX is NOT a reason to switch.
So... wanting to use Latex is not a good reason to switch to Linux because similar applications are available for Windows...
...but wanting to use Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer is a good reason to stick with Windows even though similar applications exist for Linux?
Double-standards anyone?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I switched because of my interest as a developer. Even in the MSDOS world most of the code I played with in my early days was in the public domain. When a found a plethora of powerful development tools and a free way to follow the unix way of things, the choice was obvious.
.CreateTextFile method still haunts me to this day.
The reason I never switched back is more important, I think. I've found windows interface to be cumbersome, and I find features common to X11 desktop environments to be things I can't live with out...Features, such as multiple work spaces, window shadowing, window grouping, and auto-configuration (pekwm !) and placement of windows I struggle with not having access to in Windows. As well as that fancy global copy on select clipboard.
In addition to my actual use of the environment itself, which is almost emulatable in windows these days (but not really to my satisfaction) I have found programming in windows (as well as more often than not just with priorietary software that never gets good code review) to be increadibly painful. The API's are nonsensical, cumbersome, and downright ugly even for the most basic of operations. The
These are just the surface reasons, for a developer such as myself, to not only make the switch but buy in whole heartedly. I'm not even going to get into the fact that when they made me start running Windows 2003 Server on my dev workstation at work I started spending a lot of time dealing with issues such as my desktop crashing, my second display failing to function at random, and so outlook siezing up at random.
- I can't afford to buy a new computer everytime a new version of the operating system comes out.
- Windows scripting languages *suck*. (I don't usually use that word, but this is one of those times there is nothing else appropriate.)
- Neat tools I keep finding to do things like create PDF from images/text, or nmap.
- Viruses don't target Linux as much, so I don't have to worry about updating McNorton.
- Better control over my networking.
- Better documentation, believe it or not.
- I keep finding restrictions on how I can use the software (whether or not it came from Microsoft) in the licensing agreements, like the "no benchmarking
.NET" in something I installed for my wife recently.
- Commercial software vendors think it's okay to stick ads or nosey bundled software in their products.
There may be more. The short answer is that I'd be an idiot not to switch."Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I switched, not because I had any idea how incredible using a well-designed, mature (excepting some areas of drivers), and customizable Operating Environment (to give credit to the authors of GNU tools and all the other software that makes my system worth using) because I, like most people, was content with 'good enough,' and not willing to put the time in to switch the underlying method of doing every single task I perform on my computer. I certainly appreciate the strengths of Linux now, and can't imagine living without them, but I didn't choose for that reason.
I switched for the same reason a lot of people switch: One single issue with Windows (or MacOS) was so completly crippling to my experience, I was willing to put up with any other flaws to resolve. For me, it was a crippling terror of trusted computing (obligatory wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing) invading my work, which, as a CS major, will exist primarily on computers. My dad is chomping at the bit to get Linux on his work machine for much the same reason.
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
1. Programmers were agnostic - they can write code on anything
2. System Admins were non-religious about OS
3. Management could multiply 2000 with 0
4. I put my ass on the line for this
Oh! BTW all these were done back in 1995. We just did not tell anyone since we felt that it was a strategic advantage over our competition--have them use MSFT!
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
1. Free-ness. Free as in beer, free as in food, free as in do-whatever-the-heck you want with it free.
2. Package management. I prefer gentoo for this, and there is something poignantly beautiful to me about the concept of 'emerge sync' & 'emerge world'. Windows update somehow makes me want to grab a weapon and get medieval (though to be fair, so does/did the red hat update network, but see the next reason).
3. Choice. If there's some software application I need, it probably can be found on sourceforge or via my package manager of choice. The biggest difficulty is choosing which of the many alternatives to use.
4. Community. I read slashdot mostly because I find opinions of people like me whose opinions don't match mine. Nerdly as it may sound, I use Linux because Linux 'gets' me, it works for me in most of the ways that Windows drives me insane. Linux users by choice form a club, and I find that generally, the people in that club are the kind of people I like to hang with, or at least can hold a coherent conversation with. Amusingly, this doesn't hold for me and the Mac, but that's a post for another day.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
It didn't take much to make me switch from MS to Linux.
In college I used Unix, DOS, and Mac. (I was ok with using DOS when it came packaged with GW basic to do your repetitive tasks in a quick and dirty way. When they removed that, it was a rip-off.) I have never had any partiality toward any MS product, but damn many experiences pushing me away from them. I college I studied C in a Unix environment. It worked. That's a good thing to my mind. When I went on to take a second semester of C, the school had switched to MS Quick C. I had used Boorland's Turbo C, and it was fine. I had used the C compiler with the Unix install that we had. Then I had the most bug ridden piece of crap that I had ever seen land in my lap. The examples in the Official MS manual would not compile! I had never before seen such a dreadful piece of software in my life. That soured me against MS, the company a bit.
In that same era, if I wanted a word processor, I headed to the Mac labs, not the MS based labs. If I needed to program a robot, and directly control I/O, I was in the MS realm, because control of RS232 was well documented, and part of my curriculum.
Fast forward many years. My husband and I were buying computers. (Plural, as we don't play well with others...) He got a 60 MHz Intel box, I got a 60 MHz Mac. (Yes, I know, ancient history here, but we are leading somewhere here, I promise!) We had our machines set up. My Mac just worked. I used it. I worked, I played, and it simply worked. My husband is far more geeky that I could ever be, but he could never get his MS box to do quite what he wanted it to do. He extolled the virtues of his more documented software and hardware, but still his machine had failure after failure. It lead to my anti-Windows saying, "It's Sunday, time to reload Windows!"
My husband kept incrementally upgrading hardware on his Intel box, not a luxury that I had on my Mac. I held on to that 60 MHz machine until it was way out of date. I started using some of his discarded hardware for some kids software. Eventually my old Mac was put out to pasture, and I was migrated to faster hardware, and buggier software. But, as I couldn't afford the Apple upgrade path, I considered myself lucky for having been able to use a stable OS in my own home for as long as I could. (In all of the time that I used my Mac, I never caught anything. There may be Mac viruses, but they weren't prevalent on the BBS's and later the Internet. I have no first hand experience with them.) Once I was using MS for daily use, I cursed the BSOD multiple times per day. I dreaded the bloody thing. When I was offered a FREE version of *nix, I thought I had died and gone to heaven! I was rid of the MS nonsense.
Fast forward a few more years. I was editing a print media newsletter for a 300+ family home schooling group. (As this is a group with many educators, there was a disproportionately high percentage of Mac users. Our group was roughly split 50/50) Despite the submission guidelines that always specified plain text email, people routinely submitted from whatever they had, be it from MS Word for Win, MS Word for Mac, or any other word processor that they had lying about. The previous editors all warned me of this. I was using Star Office. It was great for importing from other formats. Though in theory Word for Win was supposed to open in Word for Mac, and the reverse, in that era, it did not in fact work. Whereas, here I sat with Sun's Star Office, and I could read both. That really made for a positive experience with the Linux world for me. It didn't matter what the data was, or where it came from, I could read it.
Fast forward a few more years. The kids needed Windows software for some educational software. (They had to log in to the system with IE running under Windows.) Take into account that they had a machine far newer and faster than mine. I am not a computer user, I am a computer abuser. Normally on my Linux box, desktop #
I just add to my collection of tools. I have several boxes and run more than one OS on them. I use the tool that fits the job rather than waste my time trying to make the tool fit the job or making the job fit the tool. I have no OS religion and all OSs are lacking in some area or another.
I've been a computer programmer for a LONG time - by 1984 I was making at least part of my living programming. Ive seen stuff come, and stuff go
What usually makes people adopt an OS (I'm NOT talking me in particular)
1)The Killer Application - an application that runs on YOUR OS that runs NOWHERE else. Honestly, for at least 2-3 of the transitions I've seen, it was (at least partly) the "Next great spreadsheet" - Apple II - VisiCalc - IBM PC - Lotus 123 - Windows - Excel/Wingz/Word for Windows
2)The OS does something itself that the competition does NOT - In the case of Linux, It's generally things like firewalls/stability etc - THIS "something" generally has to be a bigger "something" than #1 - or it leads to slow adoption
3)Cost - and I'm NOT talking $$$ or even TCO as measured in studies, although they are certainly PART of the "Cost" I'm talking about, and in fact, in a corp environment, TCO aproximates the "Cost" I'm talking about. In my case, talking about individuals, it's more $$ and effort combined. For a person just starting in computers, there is little "cost" in moving to Linux - but to the person who has spent a lot of years learning to use Windows and it's applications, there is a "Mental" cost of re-learning how to do things. For us geeks, this is fun, and the cost can be negative (hey, we LIKE playing with new stuff), but to most people, any skill set change is real, and a bother. Why do you thing the average PC doesn't get patched/have it's anti virus updated - too much bother. They run the PC until it breaks, and then get someone to "fix it" - and in fact, often the "fix" is to buy another computer!! I've seen perfectly good PCs thrown out, because the owner doesn't want to bother - they spend the $500 or $1000 on a new PC, move their data, and get a new toy, and have fixed their problem. Doesn't seem to make much sense, until you figure that for a LOT of people, if you figure in their time as money, it's actually cheaper to do this - let's face it - if you earn even $10/hr, if you save 50 hours over the life of the PC by NOT updating, etc, you have paid for a new PC!! (which has all the NEW toys...)
It comes down to - we are not normal users (thank goodness)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find Linux to suit me for the very same reason. I'm not 100% converted, yet, but I just find Linux easier to install, upgrade, repair, and figure out than Windows. When all hell breaks loose due to a bad install in Windows, I'm absolutely lost, despite using the environment for a long, long time. I've been using Linux for a few years now, and I can actually fix lots of stuff when it goes wrong (but not always). When I can't, I can usually find help from somewhere, whether in a forum, newsgroup, or IRC chatroom and get it fixed and without all the snobbery I get from Windows "experts". Many Linux gurus are actually interested in helping your figure it out without demeaning you in the process, though there are a few jerks out there in the Linux newsgroups.
Also, I hate to sound cheap, but I can download a good quality free Linux distro like OpenSuse, Mandriva, Fedora, or for more experienced users, Mepis, Debian, Ubuntu/Kubuntu or whatever and have just about any application I'll ever need. I do, however, believe in supporting my distro and OSS in general, and tend to buy my distros. But even then, you can get Suse Linux for about $60 US and have just about everything you want. You'll spend more than that for Windows, and you don't even have a single application to work with. When I built my last Windows machine with a fresh, legal copy of XP Professional and got updated versions of all my favorite applications, and even new ones that I wanted, as well as armed it with utilities like Norton's Internet Security, I'd spent nearly a grand on software alone. Now, to top that off, all that software has EULA's. The only EULA I got with my Linux installation is to agree to the GPL.
Another thing I like about Linux is the excitement in the platform. Linux is constantly under a state of improvement. So many hands are involved that the backbone of Linux, as well as all the shiny bling-bling you see on the desktop are under constant development and improving all the time. Windows XP came out in something like 2001, and looks and feels about as tired and old-hat as the Chevy Cavalier did when they (finally!) put it to rest.