Some of us switched quite a while ago......
I don't really have much of a quarrel with XP, despite its insecurities and quirks - my own installations, with a bit of care and feeding, have been very stable - but I really
do have a problem with Microsoft's greed, arrogance and truly unpleasant and antisocial business practices.
arcniz put it very well in a previous thread.
<snip>
"The net-net-net reason that history will not remember Bill Gates fondly is... that he used the early success of his company to capture and hijack the entire destiny of computing for a period of decades.. the echos will continue into the next century, for sure. In the process he directed a program of obfuscation, disruption and proprietisation of the whole of computing technology - for no purpose other than the financial and commercial benefit of Microsoft. This continues into the present day.
Of all the profit taken in by MSFT, only a tiny fraction - say ten or fifteen percent (of the net profit) has been used to actually make software more productive, more reliable, and more useful. The remainder of those vast profits applied to development have been directed to creating and amplifying methods for making present and future computer programs more dependent on technology owned or controlled by Microsoft. This leads to greatly inferior software, but software that makes its customers totally and perpetually dependent on MSFT for tools, methods, and applications that can only be used under the intellectual property rights controlled by MSFT. One can say much about why this is bad, but in the interests of brevity I will just sum up as follows:
Bill Gates did not single-handedly invent modern computing. In fact, he waged business warfare on other innovators and companies in the early days of computing to the extent that most were effectively prevented from operating in markets that Gates sought to control. The business practices of Microsoft, guided by Bill Gates, have deliberately, methodically, and unnecessarily wasted the time and diminished the efforts of every one touched by them. The social and economic cost of his self-serving (and largely unnecessary) actions has been to deprive humanity of (at least) hundreds of billions of productive work hours, expended for totally unnecessary and wasteful work by the planet's best educated and potentially most productive citizens... for no purpose except to serve the greed of Gates and his cohort. The effect is equivalent, in economic and social cost around the globe, to exterminating millions of people. No small beans. To make recompense for that He'll have to feed a great many orphans."
By all means get a Mac (they're brilliant), but with every passing day Linux (my machines run either Kubuntu or Mepis as "best of breed" distros) becomes an increasingly compelling (and significantly cheaper) alternative.
