Huh, hard to understand you people
I have been using ONLY Linux (that is, I do have a Windows flavour arround because my gf needs to do some work on it or because I need to try some Win32 only stuff but 99% of the time I work on a computer happens on Linux) for the last 5 years now and can't complain about anything. Actually I can't stand working on Windows for more than a couple of minutes (out of a game that is) because of the interface limitations, strange responsiveness to my actions (random response times) and often crashes (yes, don't know why, could be just my hardware but even with XP I still get crashes on Windows).
I program on Linux (C/C++), IRC, Web, listen to music, watch movies, reencode movies/music when needed, download stuff, play games (yeah, fs2_open on Linux/AMD64 rules
), write CD/DVDs and upload the Plextor DVD writer hardware on updates, etc.. Very rarely I step on needs not possible to be done on my Linux system (like the motherboard flash updating utility, now that I think of it, can't say I searched for how to do this on Linux tho).
Since I started to "play" with Linux (about 9 years ago at school) I am more of more of an oppinion that (for someone as me, a developer more than a user of computers) Linux and the whole Open Source Community is an powerful catalizer for the IT knowledge. While with the current distros this might not be still true but before you had to learn a lot of stuff to get to a point where you could use them on an acceptable level. This learning proved extremely important for me as it opened my eyes to things I never imagined that exist out there (in the IT universe), concepts and ideas from various IT fields, terms and knowledge.
Just take for example that for the last 4 years I focused on network programming by working on mostly network programming open source projects, then to some gaming network programming (the gaming server part), and now more and more into the actual client game programming (including the math, 3d terms and concepts) with fs2_open. Open source allows me to move from one field to another with just my time/ambition and IQ as the limits
I used to work (as a job) in networking operations for many years, now I moved to programming, in the future probably I will move to operations back (but on a different level). For me Linux and open source is more than a operating system kernel and a licensing model, it is pure freedom, freedom to learn which is my favourite thing to in life (ok, besides sex
).
It is this all variaty that makes is so cool, many distributions, many window managers, many audio players, etc. I can understand that for someone that comes from a "do it one way" world this can seem very confusing. I have one advise for them: just chose a popular distribution (that is, one that you have heard of, that is a very good principle to find out about which distribution is popular
). After getting used to it (modern popular distributions should be pretty easy even for new Linux users) you will find it fun that you can have all those different window managers and in time you will come to appriciate that by just chosing one over another. After a while try another popular distribution, it will be fun to have a lot of stuff different now (well at least, I get bored very easy about the same thing all over again, I like to change in time stuff, to make life fun).
