Well, you guys will be proud of me. I've finally gotten settled in and comfortable enough with Slack that for the first time of ANY distro... I turned my Windows partition into my new /home partition...

Congratulations and welcome!

Ditching Windows is a dream for many (myself included) but it's always nice to dual-boot every now and then when you need to as Windows does offer things Linux doesn't have yet.

I'd do it if I wasn't a PC gamer.

Same here, at the moment the performance difference running games in wine as compared to native in windows is still just to large...

But games is the ONLY reason I still have a small portion of one of my drives infested For everything else including windows apps I need for work I use linux and wine combo.

If I want to do my taxes online I have to download software that only runs on window$.

Same here with taxes. This year they released a software for Ubuntu, I didn't have time to repackage it but will try next year. Maybe then...

Same here. Even though, interestingly enough, the Windows-only tax program here uses QT4.

Hi,

There are a lot of us that still make money taking care of M$ problems for users. I will never be M$ free since the money will roll in for a very long time.

My support cost the M$ users therefore boxen will still have installation of various OS. Really do not need the best machines for a M$ install. A laptop & desktop are dedicated for M$ support.

Rest of my boxen are Slackware.

It is my own case ...

Except for a couple of months at a time when I dual-booted a couple of PCs that had Windows preinstalled when I bought them, I've been Micro$oft-free at home for about 9 of the last 10 years. My machines are running Ubuntu, Mint, or Slackware.

Work is another story because my employer sells phone systems based on Windows Server (with a Linux-based hardware controller built in!). The desktop apps that we sell are only written for Windows (no requests from customers for either Linux or Mac as yet). I also use OrCAD, AutoCAD, and Agile Advantage as part of my job, all of which require Windows. So I dual-boot XP Pro (the only version of Windows that's even close to being good) and Ubuntu 10.04 at work.

At workplace all the client machines we have, contain Windows 7.
There are some proprietary softwares we work on only run over Windows. So can't ditch at workplace.

I tried removing my Windows partition at home, my girl cried out so loud that It was back there in 30 mins.

I am once again Windows free in my personal life. And gaming. And making money removing Windows viruses.

Crunch time for me next year when Vista Support ends and I'm forced to either leave it unpatched, or uninstall. I'll be damned if I'm buying Windows 7! I should have got a free update considering how crappy Vista turned out.

You should change your title from "Microsoft free" to "Windows free". It is possible that you have software in the kernel or one of its modules on the harddisk written by Microsoft, since Microsoft is a contributor to the kernel.