Why do threads like this keep popping up, or getting bumped?

(1) If you like Windows and if it serves your needs, then by all means keep using it. That's what it's there for. The Gates Foundation would not have $30 billion to give away if people didn't like and didn't use Windows. It's not Linux, true, but it's certainly not a bad system, either!

(2) Many people complain about Linux when they encounter "software configuration management" for the very first time. Issues crop up with the installation of software, or with keeping applications running after some kind of system update, or something unexpected happens. Or maybe it's just that they are installing a new and unfamiliar (operating) system for the very first time, having never before actually done such a thing throughout their (perhaps limited) career. I can tell you that the experience can make you feel like an absolute dolt with twelve thick thumbs and no fingers, but that's not Linux's fault; nor is it, particularly, yours! Some parts of this business are hard, and as Billy Joel once put it, some folks "can-not han-dle pres-sure!"

(3) If your experience is "exclusively Windows," then you may be very surprised to discover just how much you know about that system, and just how hard it can be to abstract that knowledge toward a totally-different one. You boot up that same ol' computer you've used for years, but under Linux now, and blam! it's turned into something you have never seen before and you have utterly no idea what to do. That used to be "the norm," but it's much harder to find that experience now. This is why I believe that it's so important that you create that experience for yourself: take a "spare" computer and blow it to pieces. Several times. Linux is an excellent learning tool in addition to being a sophisticated production-grade operating system in its own right. Gaining an in-depth (or even moderate) understanding of Linux will help you considerably in knowing more about Windows.

(3a) Your "in-depth" experience, in Windows or in anything, is actually full of holes. Linux will find them, every single one. And it will be impossible for you to do anything but to confront them; you just can't "fake it." That can make people extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes it comes out as an attack on the unfamiliar system. Just remember: Swiss cheese tastes good, and people buy the stuff for the cheese not the holes.

(4) "Watch your back." In the next five years, imho, it will be tremendously important to know more about Linux (and about Unix in general). As the number of hardware environments that are in everyday use continue to proliferate, it will be impossible for the software (which is vastly more expensive to produce) to keep up except by using .. open source. Linux. Under these new conditions, Windows cannot and will not maintain the "monopoly" position that it once imagined that it held. (Nothing personal; nothing for or against that system; it's just economics.)

(4a) Maybe you secretly view Linux as some threat to your "pole position." You need to recognize first that you do feel that way, then that you need not feel that way. People who grew up with computers that were made of transistors are still employed, with their "punch-card saws" artfully placed in their offices so that newbies will ask them what it's for. (Go ahead, ask... )