I started with Linux because I just got frustrated with Win98SE. Windows has improved greatly and now does a very good job. The thing is, once I got fairly comfortable in Linux I couldn't go back. I am currently dual boot Win Vista and pclinuxos and spend over 95% of my computing time in pclinuxos, going to Vista for 1 game I enjoy and web sites that are Windows only. I'm not a fanatic by any means. Linux just suits me better now.

I think that many people (myself included) TRY Linux because they want something other than Win-D'ohs....but they end up sticking with Linux because they then want Linux. (And who wouldn't want something that works better; has less annoyances and is free?)

I've used linux for 15 years and am very productive with it. I stuck with linux when it was young and barely supported anything.

Linux is all I will ever use on my desktop -- past, present and future.

As far as window$ goes, I never like it.

I still have plenty of annoyances with linux. The difference is that I don't have to reboot or reinstall to fix them. For me it ultimately comes down to freedom and not just free as in beer. How many versions of windows are there now, and what do you do when you buy one version but later find you need/want features that have been removed from the version you've purchased? With one copy of Slackware I can take over the world, or at least all the machines in my house, for each of their uses, from a general purpose family machine, to a work laptop, to a server, and my personal favorite, the tweak-it-till-it-breaks-then-tweak-it-to-fix-it machine.

I'm not sure about the most part regarding people from windows that try Linux. I'm certain though that not all. Me for example only tried Linux because I saw it (before trying) as a more powerful / more challenging alternative though I haven't left windows. It's unfortunate that many people that came from windows think this way; that they are being endorsed or something. Why not just use Linux if you find it as a good alternative?.

Also, I didn't want something other than windows,.. I wanted something better than cmd.exe and DOS.

With things like these happen I really always remember the favorite quote: "Real hackers depend on their brains, not on their machines."

And does it matter if you use either? Why fight for?

Oh I forgot, there's the EULA. But anything else?

I've found that to be very true- there are still annoyances and problems with Linux...but not quite as many as with Win-D'ohs- and with Linux, your machine isn't on a perpetual course of going ever slower and slower until it is no longer functional and needs to have the OS reinstalled.

With Linux, I turn the computer on in the morning...and turn it off before bed- with no0 rebooting or slow-down as the day goes on; and no memory drain, etc.

I really came into Linux with an open mind. I was disgusted with Win-D'ohs....but I had no assurances that Linux would be any better. I was just looking for something that worked at a level that I could live with while being aesthetically pleasing also. Linux just seems to fit the bill.

As soon as I started using Ubuntu, I just had no desire to return to Vista. Again, ti use yet another car analogy- it's like the difference between driving a car that not only gets you from point A to point B, but one that is fun to drive and which is competent enough to allow you to just drive, without worrying about keeping the motor from stalling or the tranny from grinding or the brakes from locking up as opposed to a car that may get you to point B, but which requires you to keep your foot on the accelerator when coasting or stopped at a light, so that the engine doesn't stall...and which stalls every time you downshift...and where you have to fumble with the shifter for 20 seconds between each gear to keep it from grinding and which won't allow you to go too fast, even though it has a powerful engine, because stopping quickly might cause a skid...(O-K...bad analogy- as we all know, Win-D'ohs is very good at stopping quickly!)

I've had A LOT of those cars! LOL. I learned a lot that I wish I hadn't needed to learn doing so!

It really boils down to one point:

People are either die-hard linux, macs or window$ users. Each OS has their pros and cons. But, we don't care because we chosen that OS for our own reasons.

I came from an era where my OS didn't crash, care was given to make programs that didn't crash, quality still counted in ones work over mass production and the "all mighty release date"... When I saw Win95, I knew there had to be something better. I had never used any version of Win up until that time. The search was on and Linux answered that call. Now in Linux, I still have to be choosey of what distro I pick as things are getting sloppy here too. Thanks to the powers that be there are still a few distros like Debian that actually care about the things I value. I wish the same could be said of it's proginy in many cases. Give me a "real" coke... "There ain't nothing like the real thing baby!!"

Unless you're referring to mainframe/midrange systems (that rarely crash), I can't imagine what era this might be. Every PC I've owned from the C64 down to my current era linux boxes have crashed.

Only OS I've ever run that barely ever crashed was VMS (and even that crashes on rare occasion).



I'm not a die-hard *any* OS user. I'm kind of a VMS bigot, but I switch OSs like crazy. PC-BSD, Linux, Windows 7, OSX, RHEL, AIX, Solaris... and that's all in the course of one day. We're not even counting stuff like phones where I mostly ignore the OS.

I'd like to think that people pick features they like and then pick the OS that has most of them. Realistically, they tend to just use whatever is there when they turn the machine on.

Sometimes referred to as casual users.

To go back a little further, my old Vic-20 would crash too. That was my first puter. lol Was that considered a computer? It was back then.

Once I learned how to allot memory properly to programs (including tsr's) the old DOS (PC, DR, IBM and even MS) no longer had crashing trouble and ran for weeks with out a reboot. In fact, I never had to reboot out of nessity due to the OS having trouble. Granted my first computer was an 8086 so I missed most of the fun of companies making up their own OS specifically for their own hardware. Win95 crashed more in the first month of my using it than in all my previous history using computers (including my needing to learn how to allocate RAM properly). While I have had Linux (including Debian) crash on me it has been few and far between. If something only crashes once every 6 months, that is something I can deal with. While I wouldn't be too happy about it, I could even put up with an OS that only crashed once a month. As it is, there is no way to run a Win system for even a month with out rebooting regularly to maintain memory stability. It is not uncommon for any of the Linux systems I deal with to run for 6 months (or more) with out ever being rebooted. Even on GUI workstaions often the only thing that might need done is restarting the GUI and that I don't hardly ever have to do on Debian. I don't use any propriatary drivers/firmware for anything though as it is my experiance that they are problematic from time to time and the open-source drivers tend to be more reliable (especially when it comes to graphics cards/chipsets).

If they're desktop systems, then that's horribly wasteful of electricity. Servers are another matter of course, although even there some don't NEED to be on 24/7.

Oops, PC-DOS is IBM-DOS, sorry about that. There are more DOSs that I have used but I can't remember their names. Those were pretty popular though.