Honestly? People who are still flogging the "LOL WinBlow$ BSOD LOL Micro$shaft!" mantra haven't done any serious reevaluation since the days of 95 or Me. 2000 and XP are perfectly reasonable, stable systems with a coherent, modern design that's carefully relegated legacy DOS scariness to emulated support. Vista had plenty of problems, but 7 is even more generally well-regarded than XP (though I prefer XP myself.)
I'm not trying to bash Windows. But the file system is generally less well designed (as others have pointed out before).
Personally, I loath everything before or after Windows 7. Really used to like Windows XP, but now that I've to deal with dozens of systems still running Windows XP every day, I begin to see all the shortcomings and lack of userfriendliness. It just didn't age well.
Whereas Linux piles framework after framework after framework onto the system in an attempt to build a modern desktop OS out of an architecture designed to drive VT-100s from PDP-11s...
You do realize Windows is, essentially, framework driven? Sure, most of them are Microsoft products. But to say Linux piles up frameworks whereas Windows doesn't, is kind of silly.
Every system I've used Linux on has been either only as fast as or noticeably slower than an appropriately-configured Windows/OSX install. Of course, zealots will bleat about this being the fault of proprietary drivers and how it's your problem for not using open hardware and conveniently ignore how they told you that Linux will make sweet wizardly love to all of your hardware no matter how old or obscure...
Can't really follow you there. Linux runs great even on the smallest system. Of course, you shouldn't run stuff like Ubuntu or the likes.
This is true if, by "once you've figured everything out," we mean "once you've memorized The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" or something equivalent. In any other case: Bull. Shıt. Fixing Linux involves anything from posting on forums asking for help from the much-lauded and oh-so-helpful Linux user community (standard answers: "works for me," "you don't need this broken feature," "this bug was already logged in 1996, please add relevant details to the ticket and wait for a fix," or the ever-popular "you have the source, fix it yourself!") to chasing includes from one /etc shell script to the next looking for any string even vaguely related to the error.
You have to know something? Tough luck! It was never touted to be a newbie OS.
Linux was, originally, developed for people using computers for the sake of using computers. It's only now that individuals/companies seek to change this. And while this approach isn't perfect yet, distros like Linux Mint or Ubuntu already show great progress.
No need to install or update stuff you'll never even use! You know, like DBus, or PulseAudio, or grandomcryptonerdwanklibrary-effthensa or any of the zillion other packages that are required to install basically any Linux software, from text editors to web browsers, that's been around long enough to attract a dozen developers who each pile on every feature they think the software should have, no matter how esoteric.
Distros != OS
GNU/Linux doesn't require any of that stuff. Only certain distros package stuff like Pulse Audio, while others (such as any lightweight XFCE based distro) use ALSA.
Yes, because what I really want to do on a computer I just want to be able to do stuff on is rebuild the damn kernel.
It's a learning experience. Nothing wrong with rebuilding a kernel.
UI customization, on the other hand, would be great - if it were in any way consistent across any set of programs outside of the megalithic KDE-type desktop application suites (and those, of course, are the absolute worse offenders on point #3.)
I currently run Ubuntu with Unity on my laptop (utilizing a MacOSX theme). Aside of Steam (which is build on top of Chromium and thus no real native application), every application I use is styled consistently.
A community of people who can't be assed to post meaningful information, suggest you "RTFM" no matter what your problem is, and make fun of you for not having memorized the source code. Yes, very very helpful folks.
Dunno which community you are referring to, but people in the newer, more streamlined usergroups generally offer valid support even to people new to Linux/Unix.
A very compatible toolchain, unless of course you want to do something crazy like run a GCC 2-built binary on an OS that expects binaries built with GCC 4. That's just crazy talk, man!
Have you ever actually looked inside Windows/MacOSX development? Plenty of 3rd party Windows applications ask for Net 2.0 when Net 4.5 is already installed. In order to develop MacOSX 10.7 applications that also run on 10.5, you even have to implement workarounds, since XCode 3 isn't really available on MacOSX Lion anymore.
@ElPolloDiabl
It's Mozilla Firefox' plugin-container that's at fault there. I think they fixed it for one of their earlier releases (Firefox 12, possibly), only to have it turn up just a few months later again.
I currently think about compiling my own, Webkit based, browser from scratch. Webkit offers genuinely better performance and stability.
@Mrs Beanbag
It's possible, actually. I don't remember whether Windows XP already offered the option to simply overwrite your existing installation and copy all your documents to a single folder, but with BartPE, it's definitely possible. I accidently did that when I had to re-install Windows XP for a client last Friday.
You basically boot into BartPE, forget about all the formating tools and head right into the Installer. It will then copy the installation files to your existing HDD partition, reboot and install Windows XP to and from that HDD. In the end, I ended up not only with a fresh Windows XP but all the files were still there.
