Two reasons for me are that I think the open model is more economically effective, and transparency is important. There is a huge potential for hiding malicious code in proprietary software that can never be legally confirmed or denied. Free software makes this far less likely to occur, and impossible to fully hide. This is not a huge problem yet, but in the future I think it will be.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

This is a valid opinion, and I respect that.

However, with the right tools nothing is truly "closed source" ... I consider this a consumer/social issue (to be fair, it can be a big issue) ... not a technology issue.

I actually don't think that as a *desktop* system Linux is much more secure than a carefully set up Windows system. That of course only holds if the user in front of the system is behaving reasonably. On Windows it's still way too easy to fool the user into starting some trojan and giving it permission to do damage. But for me personally, that doesn't really apply, because I would never dream of opening an attachment of a spam mail that's called "hot_babes.jpg.exe"


For me, it's mainly a usability argument:

1) I like tiling window managers.
2) For pretty much everything exept web browsing, I prefer the console to GUI.

These two points boil down to me preferring the keyboard over the mouse. I absolutely hate having to move my right hand between mouse and keyboard. A tiling window manager that's keyboard controllable, plus a reasonable console, gets me very far without ever having to touch the mouse. The former is not available for Windows at all, and the latter isn't really able to compete, either.

3) I like package managers.

These things are a huge time-saver. On Windows, I often have to search the internet for some software. If I'm lucky I find an installer that I can just execute. If I'm not so lucky, I have to install some prerequisites first, then I have to search for them, too. For example on Arch Linux, I just do "pacman -S <package-name>". Or "pacman -Ss <keyword>" if I'm not sure how the package is called.

Ok, once I have everything I need installed, that's not really an issue anymore. But especially when installing a new system, the time saved here is huge. On Windows, I often need two or three days of my attention until the system is in a state where I can actually do some work. On Linux, that usually needs about an hour at most, and most of that unattended.

An added bonus is that the package manager keeps all of my software automatically up to date, not just the system and the few programs where the developer provides an auto-update. And that is IMHO the biggest security advantage of Linux compared to Windows, because outdated software is generally the biggest security risk nowadays.


To sum up: Yes, I actually prefer Linux over Windows on a pure usability basis. That goes as far as me having a VirtualBox running Linux on my Windows work PC, where I do certain tasks where the usability difference is really noticable, opposed to just some minor annoyance.


And to answer the original poll:
At home, I use mainly Linux. Windows is only used for SC2 (at the moment, probably for D3 when it comes out ).
At work, I use Windows for .NET-Development, Linux in a VirtualBox for pretty much everything else.

It is really strange that Linux has completely solved the package-management problem for 10 or 15 years, and Windows still has not even attacked it. I sit around with a bunch of old versions of stuff on my Windows machines just because every program has an inconsistent updating mechanism or no updating mechanism. How hard can this be? Even if Microsoft doesn't want to maintain an apt-style repository of Windows software, can't they expose some API that programs can register with to check for updates, and some central management screen I can look at to see the updates?

On the Windows side, I like to use Secunia PSI to keep track of what software needs updating. It's not perfect (Linux package manager are definitely better), but it is pretty good.

I think Windows 8 apps are their idea of a solution to that, but being tied to Silverlight is not so great.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Is there no equivalent of the Sparkle update framework for Mac OS X on Windows? It's a framework that individual applications use which checks for updates, presents a dialog if one is found, then downloads and installs the update. It only activates when you launch applications, but that's good enough for most people.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

If there is, then I (A Windows developer, albeit not for consumers) don't know about it and I can't say I know of any Windows software that uses it.

Interesting.

Sparkle is an open source thing, and a lot of indie developers, and some major companies, use it. Interestingly, the guy who created it got hired by Apple.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Thanks for mentioning this. Apparently there are two similar open-source projects, Winsparkle and wyUpdate, which run on Windows.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Those look cute -- I'll keep those in mind next time I write something that I want to distribute to people!

While wyUpdate itself is open source, you still need to buy wyBuild, the application that creates the updates. Unless somebody
else wrote another program that creates updates for wyUpdate.

And WinSparkle seems to be only an update checker, not an updater. Pretty useless IMO.

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Sanity is for the weak.

I've used computers since, uhm, 1983 or so, and I’ve used more operating systems than I have fingers on my hands (I still have 5 on each hand ).

My favourite OS is OS X, followed by iOS, but I’m also Windows-savvy, having taught media stuff and OS usage on Mac OS “Classic”, OS X, and Windows.

Greetings, Tom in Germany

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My usual first chat line in an online game: “Hello, this is Tom in Germany”
Let me know whether I should add you to my Go circle/list on … Google+ · Facebook · Twitter (not much used these days)

I'm not there yet, but I'm wondering if in a year's time, I may be the guy who asks why Emacs isn't included as an option.

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When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious.

I just tried out Linux again (Ubuntu), but it can't compete with the maturity and stability of Windows 7.

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

I wouldn't recommend anybody try Ubuntu or any other gnome 3-based Linux right now. A year ago Ubuntu and others were quite good, but then they upgrade to a new version of the UI called Gnome 3 and there are big problems. The gnome team has ideas about UI design that I disagree with strongly so they took away a lot of the useful features when they went to Gnome 3 and made it very difficult and awkward (and they introduced a lot of bugs in the process). The only way I'm able to get work done is by installing the gnome 2 UI layer on top of gnome 3, and that itself is clumsy in same places.

There may be some Linux distributions that don't use gnome 3, but Ubuntu for sure does, so stay away.

I primarily use OS X. When I'm in the mood, I run gentoo (with fluxbox) on a vm. When I want to play on tygem, I use windows 7 (or iOS on my iPad).

Wow, it's interesting to know that. Just a week ago I leapfrogged two (or maybe three?) upgrades, from L to N, and I was immediately struck by how wordfiltered slow everything is now.

I originally preferred Ubuntu to Windows because I was finding Windows XP to be too slow and too unstable. I was always restarting all the time, and everything was calling on other software, and five thousand things would try to launch on start up and I'd have to keep re-bleaching the directory and... it just wasn't worth it. This was without running any anti-virus software at all, by the way, which meant that I had to be very selective about where I permitted js, which has gotten harder and harder as web designers have embraced everything that MySpace had to teach us about how to make eyes bleed.

The biggest problem I've been having with N is that the network manager has an egregious memory leak, but I've definitely noticed how ugly and buggy the Mac-facsimile gui is. The reason I originally looked into switching to Linux was that I loved how minimalist and speedy the unix shells at college were, and wanted something similar. No more.

While I'm engaging in free-form reflection on my OS choices, I should say that when I first switched to Ubuntu full time I didn't think that learning to use the new applications would be too hard, and I assumed that over time I would absorb details about how to stay in control of my computer, they way I did with Windows. Sadly, wrong on both counts. I was surprised by how much human capital I had invested in little things like how to use Microsoft Word, and I was surprised by how little control I have over gnome (or compiz, for that matter), and therefore how little I learned to manipulate it.

So wms - Does this mean that another upgrade to O, the latest Ubuntu release, isn't going to fix my desktop or make it pretty again?

What can I say? The Sun God needs power for his never-ending struggle against darkness.

My experience was that AbiWord and KWord (or whatever it was called) were ridiculously slow. OO was also pretty slow, but not quite as painful; however, all of the default settings are really, really, really painful (two biggest pains were the predictive typing - please, just feed me my own spleen and be done with it - and footnotes, but all formatting issues were unnecessarily complex). Now that I've upgraded to N I have LibreOffice instead. I was very excited to try it, but under N my computer is just to slow to bother with opening any large documents.

O is no better. A few bug fixes, but still the same slow, hard to use UI. Still missing critical things like a separate bar for minimized apps and the ability to choose what goes into the status bar.

Edit - Thinking about Xubuntu and similar solutions. For now, putting the Gnome 2 shell on top of Gnome 3 makes it usable (just barely), so I'm hoping to ride it out. Hopefully saner heads will prevail eventually.