I'm faced daily with a conflict inside..
Most people are able to pick a side, I on the other hand, am unable to.
Of course (well, perhaps it's not that obvious), I'm talking about Linux vs. Windows. There's many reasons to support both.
Windows
Well, the reason to support Windows is obvious... It's easy to use, there's plenty of application support, and it well "just works". That, and my job requires me to use, support, and program for/with Microsoft products. Windows == job.
Linux
While it doesn't usually "just work", there's still many reasons to have it. I use it for server purposes. It's stable, and once it's running, it hardly ever needs touching. And it's great for networking.
Last December, I had a satellite dish installed, because the area I live in is a "black zone" -- I can't get TransACT, or ADSL. ISDN is phobititively expensive, and not to mention slow. And I was fed up with 56k. Prior to this, my gateway/router was running Windows 2000 Server. While it was fine for dialup routing, it just couldn't seem to handle satellite. It required a reboot daily, and frequently, squid (http proxy) crashed.
I can hear the *nix advocates coming out of the closet, broomstick in hand, ready to say, "I told you so".
I finally gave up. I downloaded a netinstall Debian CD and chucked it in. Needless to say, it didn't work first time. I couldn't even get the drivers for the satellite card to compile. Errors everywhere.
After 8 hours, I got Rob to come round and "fix it". It took Rob over 12 hours to make the damn thing work, but afterwards, it worked like a dream.
Six months later, the router has been rebooted only once, and that was because of a power failure.
While I have to praise Linux for it's stability in this situation, I believe over 20 man-hours of work to get a driver to work is too much work. Under Windows, it took 20 minutes to get the card set up, and the routing software working with it.
And the turmoil doesn't stop here.
I personally feel Linux has great potential... Possibly, for this reason, Rob (same Rob as mentioned above) has recently convinced me to become a package maintainer in the Debian project.
One of the great things about Debian is it's packaging system (dpkg). Need a piece of software; just "apt-get" it. However, this system requires that someone package the software appropriately. That's where I come in.
Currently, I've created two new packages, exp (formerly named "e", but Debian wouldn't let me call it "e"), and TorrentFlux.
I'm also adopting the SmartEiffel package from Oliver Elphick, the PostgreSQL package maintainer.
By the way, if you want any of these packages, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.realmtech.net/debian/ unstable main
deb-src http://www.realmtech.net/debian/ unstable main
You see the conflict? Am I continuing to support Windows, or am I slowly moving towards Linux? .. only time will tell.
Comments
It's good to see you are open to linux, and that longhorn hasn't made you believe that windows is totally superior.
However, you appear to have missed a few (major) reasons for using Linux over Microsoft:
Freedom -- the freedom to do with your computer what _you_ want to do with your computer. To not be locked into the whims of a profit-driven corporate power.
(and for)
The Good Feeling You Get Inside
(coming from)
Openness of Ideas and Standards.
Open Source and Free Software. That is what it is all about.
This is all that is important to me.
Even if linux was totally buggy and sucked total cock, I would still use it, for these kinds of reasons. Everyone else should think about it too.
By "Freedom", do you say you mean the freedom to do with your computer what you want.
By forcing myself to be closed minded and use only Linux, I am essentially saying I can't run what software I want...
If I choose to use Photoshop, I'm forced to use either MacOS or Windows. Sure, there are Linux alternatives such as GIMP, but, not meaning to offend anyone, it's a vastly inferior product.
I'm all for "best tool for the job", and in a desktop environment, Linux isn't.
In a web based or non-gui environment (i.e., on servers), Linux tends to be a clear winner. It has stability and daemon support -- if you can manage to get it running on your hardware.