So I guess its fair to say that most of us are in it for technical reasons and not philisophical?

MM

i use winXP for gaming as its the best platform out there for games.

at my school i run a win2k server and a winXP workstation and until a few weeks ago also had a win2k pro workstation that i converted to RH9.

i am doing the reserch and learning the skills with linux to move to 100% *nix at my school. few things i have to overcome.

1. access to QuickBooks 2002 and 2004. this can be done at roughly $100 USD for a port program, but that is a 1 time fee.

2. ensuring my all in one HP printer will run on *nix and work properly from a server stand point.

3. making sure that all my workstations, both local LAN and remote WAN, can access QuickBooks as they need via some kind of GUI interface and be secure with at least 128bit encryption.

once i can comfortably resolve those issues ill move my school to 100% *nix and drop all semblance of Microsoft from my school. that is purely a finnancial choice and business move plane and simple.

*nix has better uptime, runs faster on less hardware, is basicaly virus and spyware free. those things alone are enough to make me want to move over to *nix vs M$. i spend roughly 4-10hours a week just making sure my M$ computers dont have spyware or viruses on them. i currently have to deny any and all attachments coming to my business as i was getting hammered with virii left and right. this makes life a bit more challanging to get files that i need from some of my customers, venders, or suppliers.

at home i will, untill *nix gets more, keep winXP on a few systems so i can have access to my games and games for my daughters and sons computers.

id go 100% *nix if i could still play my games without an extra monthly fee. 1 fee is bad enough let alone 2 fees. so ill stick with my windows for gaming until that day comes. personaly i dont see gaming porting much over to *nix until *nix gets roughly 30-40% of the market share in home and business use.

that i do not see happening any time soon sadly. i do see *nix getting more and more servers and workstations as that is what it is good for atm.

for a home user it sucks to be blunt. it is not intuitive, it is cumbersome to those who dont know anything more then turn it on and clicky the little buttons. so i see it having a hard time breaking into the homeuser market until more games are made for it, and that wont happen until it gets a larger share of the market... see the catch 22 there.

anyways. that is me and has been for some time, but only receintly have i started really taking the steps to accomplish my goals.

maybe by this time next year ill know enough to move to 100% *nix at my school and not worry about lost data or downtime in the conversion.

1. linux does install drivers for most hardware as much if not more so then windows 9x/2k do and at least as many as XP does.

2. for ALL drivers reguardless of the OS you should ALWAYS go to the manufacture site and pull down the latest drivers to get rid of the bugs and increase the performance of said device.

3. what are you talking about with the IP address? linux tcp/ip management is far suppirior to windows any day. always has been and will be for as far as the eye can see with reported documentation from M$ and the GNU commmunity.

the only time i have had an issue with a NIC under linux was when the NIC was not detected, thus no drivers were installed. that was off a test(beta) distro that did not detect my laptop built in NIC. otherwise from as far back as RH4 i have never had a NIC not take right out of the install.

how many times can you say that with win9x/2k and heck even with a fair amount of winXP there are still NICs out there that do not work out of the box and require drivers to be installed after the comptuer gives you that nasty yellow ! in the device manager with unknown device.

with ALL microsoft OSs not only do you have to install the drivers, but you have to reboot at least 1 time, if not 2 times and with some devices as many as 3 times.

linux, new device found, = add drivers and device works. end of discussion.

so what you are talking about is A. complete lack of knowledge in both M$ and *nix OS when it comes to hardware. B. just ranting for sake of ranting.

if its A, then go learn.

if its B, then go away.

Well started to use GNU/Linux because i wanted to se something else, and now I plan to soon get rid of xp on my laptop, and install something else(perhaps debian) and when i do that, i will also get rid of all non-free software on my computers. so yeah im in for the idea of freedom.

For me, it's both. I was attracted to Linux partly because Windows was not "power-user" friendly, but I also agree with Stallman's philosophy. Except for MoneyDance, all my critical software is free.