It depends on your needs. What do you mainly use your computer for?

The main advantages of Linux over Windows are:

1) Easier to install any software - over 20,000 completely free programs that are good or better replacements for many Windows applications are availible with one click - no installers and no download websites.

Unless you have to compile or "make" it yourself. If the program is not prepackaged in some format (rpm for example), it can be very time consuming to get things up and running.

In the same situation on Windows, you have... zero opportunity. You just won't be able to do anything about it, while on Linux you still have the ability to compile, so what you say actually has no validity in this context.

Besides, it's a very bad advice to compile anything on a distro. This is tedious, and is not the purpose of a distro at all. When you need sth that is not available and you have no Linux skills, the best thing to do is to ask the community for help.

You've never used Gentoo have you?  If you totally throw away the option of compiling and all the skills that come with it, you lose a good part of the freedom and configuration Linux gives you.  You also sacrifice a lot of knowledge that is very useful in running a *nix system.  Of course, the average user may or may not need that knowledge.  ^_^

2) Much faster than Windows.

This is a 100% bold-faced LIE. Linux is absolutely not faster than an XP setup and in fact it's often slower. The reason for this is that Windows uses a lot of prefetching of the sort that Linux decided to avoid for security concerns. What this means is that programs on Windows are often "snappier" than their linux counterparts in loading.

This is 100% true and what you say is a LIE. Linux runs circle around Windows related to efficiency and speed. Your prefetching doesn't explains why Linux is not faster. The free Linux desktops (Gnome, KDE) both support the feature of session save, where when you login, you get back every application opened previously in the state they were when you logged off. Which is why this "snappier" effect (which is not even true anymore, this is an at least 3 years old complaint) is irrelevant on Linux, as your app is often already open when you login.

Session save?  That's not even what I'm talking about.  Keeping all your apps running and saving all your them by suspending your session is not a fair compensation for having your apps take an extra second or two to load.

3) Zero viruses and almost complete protection from spyware

There is no such thing as "complete protection" as most computer-related maladies today are caused not by a hole in the system but rather the actions of a stupid user. That said, a stupid user is much more like to screw up an xorg/x11 setting in a Linux environment than get a malicious program.

It's pretty apparent you have only shallow knowledge of UNIX, or any Linux distribution.

The protection from viruses is inherent to the OS design. Unix and therefore Linux are virus prone. The only automated things that can get to a Linux or Unix system are worms and attacks based on exploits (holes in the system). There even were open-source viruses sites that warned that these viruses had no chance of working on Linux.

A "stupid user" will have a hard time even screwing up its xorg/X11 setting on Ubuntu actually.

The very same users that were deemed stupid on Windows like you're doing right now, never managed to break any of the Ubuntu (or formerly Mandriva or Mandrake) I installed for them in replacement of Windows.

Strangely enough, they weren't stupid anymore on Linux. They could even click every mail they had without fear of being infected, and then be called stupid because they *gasp* clicked on an email.

This "blame the user" to protect a flawed OS is sth I always despised, and it's a Windows only thing.

I think you'd be fairly surprised at my knowledge in this area, but you can find someone else to measure your e-penis against.

I will agree that *nix is more secure against viruses, however not that it's harder to break.  The fact that a Windows restart can fix certain stupid problems that a Linux restart won't is also a mixed blessing.  It's just so much easier to tell someone to restart their computer than walk them through fixing a Linux config problem.  ^_^


4) Free. Completely free. Major new versions of Linux distributions are relaesed every six months or so with more new features than a new version of Windows.

Free is good, but considering many PCs people buy come with Windows pre-installed (at a cost to them of course) and do not follow through the steps and hassle of getting it refunded, free is a hard argument to sell against Window's "free."

Whatever you say, Linux and most Linux desktop distros are still free.

5) Looks better than Windows. Search youtube for "Compiz". Wobby windows, transparency, multiple desktops.... much better than Vista, and thousands of free themes and icon sets that don't require hacks like Windows does to use.