I know you are passionate for Linux but man, listing those free apps as advantadges of Linux is silly considering openoffice, thunderbird, the gimp and inkscape are also available for windows (and mac osx, shall I add).

You could save the money from Office, Photoshop, Outlook and Illustrator without switching to Linux since all those applications run on Windows too. Nevermind the fact that functionality might not necessarily be the same (do the Gimp and Inkscape provide the same tools that Photoshop and Illustrator do?).

For the recond I run no AV shit, and I haven't had any virii in a long time. My brothers, however, get tonnes of the things, and they both use Norton.

I'm a 4 year PURE Linux user. I've tried preaching it's uses, but I've stopped. Why? Because people just have a lot of trouble learning something new, or just don't want to. It's too much hassle for me to explain the benefits of Linux to people and only have them ignore them because they just turn to me to fix their computer anyways.

Sure I could stop helping them, but that's not who I am. Linux is great. Great for the basic user who just surfs the web, checks their e-mail, plays web based games. It's also great for people who love to tinker with things and have more control over their system, people like me for example. It's not great for the average user though. There are a lot of things they use the computer for, and are already easily frustrated with Windows. Introducing something new for them to get even more frustrated at is just a hassle for me.

I want Linux to succeed, and I support it by using it solely. I don't use Windows on my computer, PERIOD. The only thing close is Wine and that's simply so I don't HAVE to use Windows. Linux is certainly a viable alternative to Windows and MACs. It's just going to take a few more years to become mainstream enough that people will be more open to it more and more. When viruses, malware, phishing scams, etc become so much of a hassle they'll finally throw in the towel and try something new, be it MAC or Linux.

So do I, especially at a government level. The Green party had the deployment of OpenSource in government agencies, which attracted me to th greatly. There is no reason why our governments shouldn't migrate and it gives the advantage of creating local jobs in programming.

I switched to Ubuntu in May and then back to Windows in September. I must say it took me like 3 days to get used to Linux and start liking it and switching back to Windows irked me for more than 2 weeks.
But Linux did have its share of problems for me and in the end I switched back because after tinkering with it for days I couldn't get rid of overscan with my hdmi to the TV and using that is probably what I use most on my pc.
At the time there was also Flash being all laggy in full screen...

For the most part though it was great and I'm still using it on my laptop.
After quitting MMOs though I don't game on the pc, which is a deciding factor for Windows.

In defense of Linux with absolutely clueless users who mostly browse, listen to music, watch videos and chat, they do just fine. I've since installed it on two friends' laptops and a desktop, for people who couldn't handle setting up anything in Windows - and they've been just fine with Ubuntu.

For the mid-tech savvy crowd though it's not ready yet. It needs more direct manifacturer support on the graphics and audio cards, and on some peripherials - I gave up setting up my Logitech G15 keyboard on it, but I went through setting up my wacom. It wasn't rocket science but it also wasn't something a majority will go with.

One thing that surprised me that of all the basic stuff it was networking I couldn't figure out for quite a while (between the two computers that is, internet connection was out of the box).

Twesterm, the reason why you probably only hear these bad things about Windows from users who are trying to sell you another OS is because they -did- have problems with Windows, and got frustrated and found a different OS which they like more (and is free). If someone is using windows and is having a great time with it, I doubt you'll find them online telling you to use other OS's. It's not some conspiracy, nor is it a bad thing. It's just common sense, yeah?

In the end he's just offering his opinion for those who want to take it and try it out. I think you and a few others are taking this a bit too serious.

Oh, well Mac OSX ftw!

this is what linux is now. What Windows will be in another 10 years.

or

ssj12, isn't that first video of the Sun OS? I didn't know that was "Linux" per se.

3-D desktops are always pretty cool. It was one of my favorite things about Ubuntu, though I couldn't get my video card running well enough to get it working right.

That second video is pretty crazy, I didn't kow they were able to distort videos in real-time that way yet.

isnt linux commonly refered to as an OS not made by Apple or Microsoft. So even though technically it is normally seperated in most OS market share listing it is a form of linux by linux's definition. Also Sun was originally based of an Unix kernal.

What? No. The GNU/Linux operating systems all run off of the Linux kernel, which is distinct from the Unix kernel that the SunOS uses (though it is similar).