I lol’d.

MS have used the tactic in sales to make the prospective buyer to believe they have to buy a system with Windows included. This is a fallacy! Whatever operating system you wish to have loaded is YOUR CHOICE!

I myself run Linux purely from the aspect that it is stable & secure, also that comparatively the cost of PC components is less expensive than that of Apple. Which is another point, OS-X is in fact a derivative of NetBSD. Yet another point of where open-source has made it’s way into the mainstream.

I surmise that most of the people who are making comments against Linux are gamers, am I correct? I have to inform you more & more of the software houses developing those games are in fact porting them to the Linux platform. Many of which that have to do less simply because they use many of the existing system libraries to run, and in many cases faster & more reliably than the MS platform.

Food for thought.

Linux wins at customisable

I’m probably making a glaringly obvious mistake here that I don’t know about.

I’ve been IT for a decade now, and trust me when I say this:
they won’t do concurrency.

Windows XP – Relatively stable, medium disk impact (ignoring games), left as vanilla install because the only thing changeable is the theme and the default one is fine. Set up took a couple of days from inserting CD to firing up half-life, still have problems with buggy drivers etc occasionally. Used only for gaming, have anti virus, firewall etc and they’re needed even though I rarely start any program except games on it. Windows Vista makes me want to kill myself, but first impressions of windows 7 are good.

Mac OSX – Avoided wherever possible, because like all apple products, once you start using it, it’s very difficult to transfer anything across to competitors products (My dad once spent several weeks trying to get an old G3 to act as a music streaming / file server for our predominantly windows home network) Seems stable, but locks you into Mr. Jobs’ fascist regimen. Doesn’t seem very customizable, but seems perfect for someone who wants a computer that ‘Just Works’. Very little software available that isn’t apple-made.

I look forward to the day when game developers start to take linux seriously

Why are you threatened by the other OS that you consider inferior? Why must you defend it? If you truly believe you’re using the best OS, just shut your mouth and let the idiots enjoy their poor choice… you guys need to get laid more often or something.

…. patiently waiting for Godwin’s law to kick in.

Remember the definition of stable though – stays the same. Windows fits that. It stays the same for years and years.

And as a Linux user I can safely say it is not user friendly at all to those arguing it is.

BTW Jim, you are wrong, linux, in any form is very user unfriendly, and I’ve used all three systems extensively.

The only thing I have run into in Linux that is not easy for the computer illiterate is tar files. Which don’t even need to be dealt with if one considers synaptic package manager.

I’ve known novice users screw linux boxes before, I installed Xubuntu on my mother’s computer because she didn’t have a legit copy of windows. I have no idea what she did, but every time it started up we got Kernel Panic.

I use Ubuntu and Windows 7, and at the moment Windows 7 is my preferred OS. I didn’t have any problems with Vista either.

I can understand why people use Linux, and i can even understand why Macs are popular, but it sort of pisses me off that the Mac/Linux users tend to have an air of self-importance and smugness about their computing choices. I know it’s not all of them, but there’s a significant number out there fouling up forums with their banal comments. It makes me sort of ashamed to be a Linux user.

This is a ridiculous debate, the graph was meant as humour, and now you guys have killed it, massively.

Of course, my Mac does crash from time to time. Most of the time, I can “kill -9 [offending proc ID]“, but about once every couple of months I have to press and hold the power button to force my Mac to shut down.