Like it or not we can listen to the unfortunates who run Microsoft garbage software and can fairly conclude that it is shit. Because the software I run does not give me the grief that affects Windows users. So if you really think that anyone needs to pay $$$ to Microsoft to install and run their garbage to form a valid opinion about it you are just a moron.

Quite frankly I was trying to escape from Windows for years. The first Linux distro I tried was Caldera Open Linux 2.4. The problem was that it wasn’t capable of doing what I needed. Over the years I’ve tried most of the major distros, and many of the minor ones, and watched Free Software improve dramatically. Oh, it always worked well, but the user interface was usually an after thought in early distros, whether BSD or Linux kernel based.

About 4 years ago a friend converted one of his computers to Mandrake 9. While it wasn’t what I needed, it was far more usable. Over the next two years, I tried a series of distros. I even installed Scientific Linux in a separate partition on an old desktop for use as a network access point in the hospitality suite of a convention that I helped run. By doing this, and forcing everyone to use a guest account, I was able to lock out my work partition, keep the machine virus free, and assure that the thing would run 24/7 with no problems for the length of the convention.

In early 2007 I bought a new notebook. Vista was due out any day, and I wanted to avoid it. I’d been through Microsloth upgrades before, and knew that Vista was likely to f*** up a lot of my current software, so to avoid it I bought a machine with XP installed (and a Vista certificate that I promptly binned). So I got XP, and was happy for about two months. You got it – XP blew up. Backup was a bitch, the “Restore” CD wouldn’t, the restore partition wouldn’t, the system was totally useless. So I decided to try Ubuntu 7.04.

Install was a breeze. The only problem I had was getting wireless working, some time spent in the Ubuntu forums solved that problem. Now the problem could have been hardware, instead of XP, but since the computer has run flawlessly for nearly two years with Ubuntu installed, and only managed 2 months with XP installed, my conclusion is that the hardware is fine.

This is not the first time I’ve had stability problems with Windows. In my NOT SO HUMBLE OPINION the last stable version of Windows was 3.10, and that it’s been in a nose dive like a paralyzed falcon ever since.

And that’s what will kill Microsoft. You can’t produce shit, and expect your customers to stick around. Apple knows this. Apple is out for the money, and they know the easiest way to make lots of cash, is to make the customer so damned happy that he wouldn’t even consider another option. People pay more for Macs, because Macs are worth more. They last longer (very well built hardware), and they don’t need expensive anti-virus subscriptions.

Meanwhile Microsoft looks at the customer’s back as they leave, and wonders what they did wrong. But they are looking at the wrong customer. Microsoft thinks that Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc. are their customer. They are wrong. Their customer is John Q. Public, and they don’t give a shit about John Q. Public, and John Q. Public knows this, and is voting by moving to Apple for the top end, and Linux at the bottom end, while Microsoft gets squeezed in the middle.

You can sign me off at this point as:

ONE PISSED OFF EX-MICROSOFT CUSTOMER

Note: writer of this comment adds absolutely nothing but stalking and personal attacks against readers, as documented here.

Hell. By your definition Windows works. And I swore two years ago that I’d NEVER have that piece of shit on any computer that I own, ever again.

I should have worded my post better. Mandriva works well, far better than Windows XP (don’t know about Vista, never tried it). Of course any modern Linux/BSD/Solaris Distro is better than XP, hell XP is seven years old. And based on Microsoft’s lack of ability, they are all probably better than Vista.

That said, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Sabayon, Knoppix, Yellow Dog (yes, I have a G3 Mac), KUbuntu, XUbuntu, LinuxMint, and PCLinuxOS all failed my personal use test. Quite frankly if I hate to use an OS, it’s a failure for me.

OSX, Fedora and Ubuntu all passed. It’s a matter of taste.

Im sure you had in in the links 2 weeks ago but I actually thought you were writing this under a pseudo.