One can "live" without computers even, what to talk of Linux and Windows? Linux is a great free and open platform, under the sky. Windows is a closeted, enclosed,and often very irritating platform,and the world is crowded with windows.Each of us using windows need curtains to hide behind, peek from behind them, whereas those using Linux are free from curtains, live in open air, and enjoy the internet surfing with great ease of operation and speed of browsing. Just needs a bit of getting used to live in open air.

Come out of your Windows Shells and enter into the open.

Too bad Linux does not have anything remotely as good as Access with Visual Basic for Applications. Still hoping.

As good as Access??? ACCESS!!!! As GOOD as Access?????

ROTFLMAO!!! You are joking, right?

Access is HORRIBLE!!! I have advised clients for YEARS to steer clear of Access, and not because it is an M$ product, but because of how horribly M$ supports and maintains it.

It scales very very badly. Its networking capability is marginal at best and, when presented with a busy multi-user environment it chokes.

And worst of all, Microsoft can't be bothered to maintain compatibility across versions. If you upgrade your existing applications are just likely to break. Makes it into a maintenance and support nightmare.

Further, VBA is a "captive" macro language that is only good for programming Microsoft Office applications.

No, I certainly hope that Linux NEVER EVER has an application as "good" as Access with VBA.

Now, PHP or Perl with mysql or postgresql is just wonderful. Or there is squlite for the simpler applications.

For that matter, C or C++ using Glade and gtk+ and connecting with mysql is a nice system as well and not really any more difficult to build than a VBA app using Access.

as of about two weeks ago, i'm totally independant of windows.

my primary OS for the last 5 years has been Linux. the only reason i used windows is for audio production since i like using Steinberg Cubase and Propellerhead Reason.

last week, i installed a real time kernel and used JACK Audio (Linux's equivalent of Propllerhead Rewire) along with Rosegarden (Linux's equivalent of Steinberg Cubase) and i can now hook up my MIDI control surfaces and produce my music with no problem. it would be great to have the Linux equivalent of Propellerhead Reason but i can survive without it.

i just made my first track in Linux last week...the latency of the real time kernel is amazingly low compared to windows...performance in Linux for audio is SO much better.

now i can format the other machine that had windows on it and start practicing with RHEL5 since i want to get RHCE certified by the end of this year!

I became Windows independent when "Unetbootin" installed grub to my MBR and not knowing about SystemRescueCD, and not having a Windows Recovery Disc I panicked, pulled my files from the HD using Ubunut-8.04 and my USB.
Saying hell with Windows-I installed Ubuntu and was on "The Path".
Now, three months later I have 7 distro's installed and am learning linux rapidly.
Matter of fact-I would've never started learning programming,etc if I still had XP-Thanks Unetbootin!

I've made the switch to Linux as my OS in 1999. Since then Windows has been degraded to a gaming-system.
As I don't play much, and not many games that don't run on Linux, I see my Windows-installation just every few months.

I used win for many years. then i installed linux as a second OS (first redhat 6.2, then mandrake 8.1) there was always something i needed in windows, not because it wouldn't be there in linux, but because i didn't know how to use it. I didn't have internet connection back then, so i couldn't get help or find any tutorials except for man pages, which were a little cryptic for me, so it didn't last. However, i always planned to move back to linux as soon as i read some tutorials and learn how to use it. But i was to lazy to make that, mostly because of programs i was writing in delphi which i would not be able to finish.

About a year or two ago my winxp finally crashed and i didn't find my install cd (the happiest day of my life xDD). That was the final impulse i needed. So i am 100 % Slackware now. I have rewritten all my programs in C and there's nothing left to force me ever install anything MS again.

In linux i can do anything i can imagine. I use it for
browsing (firefox)
gaming (all non-linux games i play run smoothly in dosbox)
burning cds
communication
science - i study astrophysics and i need to do a lot of data processing (images, tables, statistics...). gnuplot, octave, starlink gaia, ds9 and other tools help me do what i need, while many of them aren't available for win platforms, so actually i cannot live without linux now

word processing - open office, or even better: TeX
i watch movies, listen to music
i have a little local network at home, and iptables provides me with more efficient and comfortable way to manage routing and NAT then i could ever hope for in windows

and there's always gcc, so if i need a tool i don't have, i code it))

i haven't seen windows for more than a year and i don't miss them.
i don't say windows is a bad operating system, but for me nice GUI(linux has a better one, anyway) and an animated character that would give me an advice i don't need in Word is insufficient.

Playing games on a computer is not computing.

Boring. Installing NVidia drivers is tres simple, trivial and easy. That you have used Linux for two days you feel justified in making comments like these. The mind boggles. What a troll is this.

Linux is the Internet, oh - and the local net, perhaps with the exception of Solaris. Ipso facto Solaris and Linux are the internet. Windows started it's life as a DISK operating system. Linux began as a NETWORK operating system. Windows networking was an add-on - as was everything else Windows needs to function properly - except that even then it never functions properly.

FUD. They are lying to you son. Linux is on way more than 5% of desktops. Linux has more applications than Windows. The community that develops Linux, it's distro's and it's plethora of softwares is gargantuan besides Microsoft. This is to say there is nothing I need Windows for except to show-off to my friends that it runs faster as a VM on my Linux desktop than it does on a native system.

If you are a sucker for buying into expensive applications every other year, if you're a sucker for trojans, viruses, dodgy websites and browser hijackers all so that you can play a few stupid games then you should stick with MSwindows. You are too immature, as yet, to appreciate all the benefits Open Source brings.

:-) Peter

This is my Linux situation:

Graphics/Gaming: I don't really care if I can't play most Windows games under Linux, because my gaming habits are pretty casual. One exception is OpenArena...IMO that's an awesome Linux-compatible FPS (and it's not just Linux either, it's cross-platform ). I haven't had any problem with OpenGL in general, either. Installing the NVIDIA drivers for my card wasn't too much of an issue (the command line isn't really all that hard after you get used to it), and 3D works fine for me. I've even got Compiz running smooth as butter (yes, I like purdy visuals. What of it?)

Web browsing: Firefox is great. The only problem I have with it so far is the fact that scrolling is sooo slooow when it has to render static elements (e.g. position:fixed or static JavaScript elements, like the status bar on Facebook).

Text editing: Haven't really messed around too much with OO.o, but it seems to be pretty comparable to MS Word...and gedit is like Notepad on steroids

Video/Movies: All I know is that I apparently have the right codecs (downloaded them automatically when Totem asked if I wanted to search for appropriate codecs), and I can smoothly play DVDs, with working menus and everything.

Programming: This is probably the only real beef I have (so far) with Linux. I got so used to using M$VC++/Win32 that I'm almost completely lost when it comes to Linux programming. I can still write basic console stuff (that's C/C++ standard), but when it comes to GUI programming, well, let's just say I have yet to wrap my head around GTK+. I know, you can use Glade to design a GUI, but that's just it, it designs a GUI. The buttons and menus and things won't do anything until you write the guts of the program, and I've no experience with how the GTK+ messages (or "signals" in UNIX terminology) work.

Note: The one exception to the above is this one GLUT program that I had written in M$VC++ and ported over to Linux. But that's GLUT. It does most of the (native) GUI-related work for you...

Just about the only reason I keep Windows is because I'm too chicken to delete it...that is to say, I'm afraid I'll really need it for something that absolutely cannot be done with *nix. What, I don't know (can't think of anything yet ), but I just know that when the day comes to finally wipe my machine of Windows, there'll be some new file format or some new popular program out there that is M$-only and has no chance of being ported to Linux...

The original question was asked seven years ago. In 2002 I used Slackware Linux exclusively at work and at home for two years. I still use Slackware Linux exclusively.

In the meantime I had two episodes involving Windows. First in 2004-2005 with invalid ThinkPad T41 (I suspected buggy BIOS so I used Windows to update BIOS from time to time) and second in 2008-2009 with Canon PIXMA iP3600 (I was unable for a few months to configure Linux to use that printer so I used Windows to print documents).

As for gaming... I don't play games usually. For all those years I played three Linux games: Frozen Bubble, Pingus and World of Padman.

I asked similar question in two threads: Why you use Windows? and Why I don't use Windows?.

I'm still using Gentoo Linux and nothing else. I have yet to buy anything M$ and I have no plans to buy anything M$ either.

Heck, I just got me a LG LCD TV. It runs Linux too. I was looking at the Vizio but it runs windoze. I ain't having a crashing TV.

I run OpenSUSE and FreeDOS, no windoze at all.

I could mostly, I tried anyway and I'm eager to try again.

I just couldn't get my controller to work with my emulators

and getting some Doom, Wolf, and Duke...and some Aleph One, to work is a nightmare of confusion.

In windows I was able to just install shove everything in a folder in program files and when it asks me what I want to open, I find it again and it works.

In ubuntu for some reason that method just didn't work...

But for office use and web browser Linux works find for me.

Huh? TV's have OS's now? Pretty soon toasters will be making DHCP requests to the frig...

Apparently so. It uses the 2.6 kernel, busybox, lzo, uClibc, and Nanox. I was told that Vizio is made by a subsidiary of M$ so I would suspect it has winders on it.

I did get my new dish installed the other day so that the HD part would work. That thing has a awesome picture. Most shows are in 1080p but some are in 720p. Of course, older shows are still in 480 which doesn't look anywhere near as good.