Vista Launch Good for Desktop Linux?

Sensible Clod writes "XYZ Computing has an article hypothesizing that the arrival of Windows Vista may be a big opportunity for Linux to make headway on the desktop. Massive feature cutbacks for Vista as well as huge hardware requirements are cited as major factors. From the article: 'As the time gets closer and closer to the public debut of Vista the operating system seems to be constantly losing the luster which was associated with Longhorn...Whether it's the lack of a new file system or the Monad scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye'. The article then shows the need for action to be taken to get Linux onto the computers in stores (display models!), and pinpoints a few important improvements Linux distros in general need to make. Very interesting read, and timely."

negligible

Vista is not going to decrease the amount of people purchasing new computers with whatever current version of windows is pre-loaded. This is the majority of windows purchases. As for those who are going to be holding onto their current computers and using them most of them will probably not upgrade to the newest (most expensive) operating system available and will probably stick with windows xp or 2000 until they get a new computer that does come with vista.
The same people who bought windows XP at full retail will probably go ahead and buy Vista at full retail while most of us that use linux now will just keep using linux whether or not some new version of windows comes along.
I think the whole impact will be negligible.

Almost negligible

Vista will implement DRM deep into the OS and when apps start "taking advantage" of that, you will notice that it's not negligible any more.

My reason for staying away from Vosta, hardware requirements aside, is DRM and DRM only. Because there are a few neat features under the hood I'd really like to have. For instance the vector-graphics GPU-accelerated desktop.

Re:Almost negligible

Linux advocates - "No DRM in Linux!"

Legally downloaded audio/video file disclaimer - "Needs DRM compatible PC"

Windows Vista box sticker - "Fully DRM compatible!"

To an average non-technical user who just wants their music and video files to play, isn't this going to make the DRM look like an additional feature that Windows has and Linux lacks? Sadly lacking DRM might end up turning people away from Linux rather than towards it :(

Just Change Terms a Bit?

Linux advocates - "Free as in Freedom"

Legally downloaded audio/video file disclaimer - "Not Compatible with Freedom"

Windows Vista box sticker - "100% Freedom-free!"

*sigh...

Re:Almost negligible

It isn't that thewy will sell out thier freeedom. It is that they will see it as a feaqture and not understand they are giving up thier freedoms.

I recently had a customer who droped her laptop and crashed the hardrive. I was able to recover most of here file but the boot sector and partition sections of the drive was toast. It wil nevfer be bootable again. All her music was protected with the xp media players DRM and we didn't get the DRM licenses before the drive went out totaly. Now we have to crack all these WMA files in order to allow here ot use them again. (they were mostley verbal notes from meetings)

When asked why she used it, she said that windows told her it was the only way to protect them from being stolen. She didn't even Now What DRM was because thew switch said Protect content. This is a normal user and a sticker saying DRM compatable would look like a wanted feature. This is alot like the designed for windows XP sticker making people think they have to upgrade to XP to run the newest version of some program they've ran for 10 years. They just don't know and microsoft (as wel as other companies) play on this.

Recently i had a call from someone who said thier new tech support claimed somthign wouldn't run on a novel server when it was running fine for 5 years. Had him thinking he needed to instal a dell power edge running win 2003 server and a domain for a company with 3 computers plus a file server. Turned out nothign "ran" on the server, it just used a network files share for data. But illistrates that even Somewhat experienced users can be duped into the same things. It is alla planned stunt. caculated to trick a consumer out of the most money possible.

Re:Almost negligible

The vast majority of computer users live in poor countries where software is either downloaded or acquired from friends. People buy PCs specifically because it is easier to get games for it than with a console - piracy is the norm rather than the exception.
Piracy is the killer app that made the PC king, and brought broadband to the masses.
So, if piracy is ever made impossible under windows, millions of people will flock to Linux in order to continue to enjoy software free of charge, with the additional advantage that it will also give them freedom. Watch, then, as some of those millions take an interest in the people who kindly provide them with free, legal software, and become active open source contributors.
It's happening already. The other day some rich bastard was accusing me of being an evil pirate when I told him I never pay for software. I started looking at my software and lo - its practically all open source, even under windows. Gaim, OO.o, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, The Ur-Quan Masters, heck, even my mp3s are mostly legal, indie stuff. I wish I could have seen the look on his face :)

This is what amazes me

Out of all the features meant to be in vista some since 1992, almost all of them have been dropped. Microsoft a large gigantic corporation couldn't get them in their system working.

What's funny is that every one of those features is available today in a Linux distro near you. Yet still nobody listens and switches to linux in droves, but many wait for vista

I think sometimes everyone is a sheep

Re:This is what amazes me

I think sometimes everyone is a sheep

If that's what you think, then so do I!

Re:This is what amazes me

1) Driver Support: Maybe what you say is true, but my personal experience has been otherwise -- Linux picked up all my hardware automatically, while Windows (XP) didn't.

2)Hey, there are enough games on Linux already! Doom3, Counterstrike, and um, a few others work on Linux. And besides,

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. ``Excuse me,'' he said, ``may I examine it?''
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master.
``I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard,'' said the master. ``Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.''
``Pray, great master,'' implored the novice, ``how does one find this mysterious settings?''
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
-- The Tao of Programming, 8.2

:)
3) Openoffice, Kword, Abiword, antiword... all open Word files. The reason most Linux users hate to receive Word attachments is a philosophy thing, not that they can't open them.

Re:This is what amazes me

Why can't Linux people understand this: Windows users utilize software written only for Windows. My copies of Adobe Creative Suite, Maya, Dreamweaver, MS Office, Microsoft Money and other utilites cost me almost $4000. That's $4000 that pays my bills and makes me money. Will the Windows binaries run on OSX? No, so I'm not switching. Will they run on Linux natively? No, so I'm not switching.

When software developers sell multi-platform licenses for each title, then we can switch. Until then, it's Windows or whatever OS you are locked into due to the expense of moving to another platform, which would require buying a full version instead of an upgrade. Why spend that kind of money to switch when the software/hardware combo you are using now will work just fine?

People don't care

People don't care about Monad or new file systems - they want nice GUIs with RSS integrated - IE with tabs etc... Vista is everything the average user wants.

As for hardware requirements - most people will get vista with their shiny new hardware from dell or whatever. It will meet the requirements and look great with lots of eye-candy.

Linux doesn't just need to be better than Vista - it needs to be MUCH better to get an average user to switch.

Dupe!! It's a DUPE!

This story was posted in 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2003. It is a dupe. Nothing to see here.

Re:Dupe!! It's a DUPE!

It's posted more often than that. Every single time Microsoft does something even slightly stupid (even if it's not related to Windows itself), some idiot will come along and be like OH BOY TIHS IS LINIXS BIG CHANCE GUYS I CAN SEE IT NOW

... But Microsoft has done something stupid every day for the past decade (at least), and Linux still isn't popular on the desk-top.

If you like Linux and want it to succeed, that's awesome. Me too. But stop kidding yourself, you look like idiots. Don't pat yourself on the back every time Microsoft screws up, because it's going to take a GIGANTIC screw-up to ever put Linux anywhere near being a popular desk-top OS. In fact, chances are that it'll never happen, unless somebody really smart does with Linux what Apple did with BSD.

Finally!

XYZ Computing has an article hypothesizing that the arrival of Windows Vista may be a big opportunity for Linux to make headway on the desktop.

A decade ago it was Windows 95 that was going to be a big opportunity for Linux to make headway on the desktop, then it was Windows 98, 2000, XP, the DRM in Media Player, Internet Explorer, the license of MS SQL Server, the flaws in ASP security model, the nonsense of .NET hysteria, the C#... Meanwhile, GNU/Linux is already on my desktop and I couldn't really care less what Micro$oft does. I just use it because it is the best tool for my job. Period.

Lack of features won't make a difference...

XP offered very little beyond Windows 2000 with a new skinning engine, especially as far as most people were concerned. So long as Longhorn looks a little prettier and the pressure eventually is pushed to corporations/people to upgrade for compatibility, people will move to it.

Linux will find a way to people's desktops eventually, when it's more ready and the market in general is more ready to support it. Linux won't make inroads because of anything Microsoft does, for better or worse.
-N

Re:Lack of features won't make a difference...

The fascinating story is also that a lot of stuff was cut back from Windows 2000. In beta 2, Office files with different data streams could actually be persisted to disk as several NTFS streams in one file, with the intent to expand this. Indexing was also implemented and at some point it was expected to be much better than the current service.

Still, Windows 2000 was a huge step over NT4. And, still, XP improved several APIs, both in kernel and user mode. Auto-growing stacks was introduced (news in the Windows world), which of course can simplify development of recursive stuff in some scenarios. It's not much, and if you want to keep compatible with 2000, it's irrelevant, but they continued tweaking.

Vista can still, from what I know, be a huge enough step to warrant a 6.0 version number. It won't be a "new" product, but (just about) nobody ever said it would. If NT4 => 2000 was an upgrade worth mentioning, I would think that this will be, too.

(And, hey, on a laptop/TFT desktop, Cleartype is enough for me to want XP if I run Windows)

*hmpf* if only that was true

how many people earnestly think it is about usability and security that most people choose their software?
i agree, some of the more sophisticated desktop users might be willing to switch, but much more powerful forces for not switching are: a lot of people don't like serious changes. they know windows (though it might suck), not necessarily the OS, but the brand, so they stick with it.
a lot of companies are either bound by contracts or - more importantly - by internal applications that are broken enough only to work with windows (in that case, to be more specific, mostly word, excel and access).
these are, i think, compelling reasons why a large percentage - mark, percentage, not single individuals - will not want to switch to linux because of what the article states.

I'm not sure why you would think that

Unless you mean to say that the lower new feature count will make it easier to clone those features into the Linux GUIs. Or maybe you mean that people who upgrade to new PCs will then have their older PCs available to load Linux on. I'm not sure how the next release of Windows will help Linux in the least.

People buy Microsoft because that's what they expect when they buy a computer. Some people think they want more, so they buy a Mac. Other people are happy with Linux, and they don't even have to spend a dime to get the OS software.

When Microsoft releases their next version, I don't think it will have the massive uptake that Windows 95 did, or even Windows 2000 did. Even Windows XP had a slower takeup than the real quantum leaps in Windows history (Win95, Win2K). People are just satisfied with what they've got.

How are you going to convince satisfied people to run Linux? It doesn't really offer them anything that they don't already have or need. If it were that important to them, they would be running it already.

So why would Windows Vista help Linux?

Lack of innovation in this OS..

Well, I recently took a good long look at all three desktop operating systems for a personal shootout, and I must say that out of Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux with KDE or Gnome, and OSX Tiger, OSX was the only one that stood out from the crowd as being anywhere near innovative or 'new'. I didnt see anything in Linux that I havent enjoyed using elsewhere for years, although its security strengths are a positive, Windows had the games plus point, but its much of a muchness desktop wise, but OSX takes integration and ease of use to a new level, especially for developers.

What am I trying to say? Well, before you complain about Vista not being 'innovative', take a look at the alternatives first, they arent much different in many aspects.

What desktop am I posting this from? OSX of course!

Linux' big chance

I completely agree. Vista, which (as Longhorn in its initial announcement stages) looked actually quite good, has now become what is basically XP SP3. Features that would have made it worthwhile, such as WinFS, have all been stripped from the final product: while Linux continues to accelerate ahead in terms of stability, compatibility and features. The fact that it is becoming easier to use, more recognised and therefore attracts more coders, also is a great plus for Linux and means that it is increasing in value exponentially. As well, Vista's crazy system requirements are in stark contrast to those of many Linux distributions, despite the fact that these distributions have most if not all of Vista's featurs (and many more on top. And plus - the price difference.

Re:Linux' big chance

But isn't XP already ahead of the Linux desktop options anyway? You have to surpass the previous iteration of MS offerings before you snatch an "opportunity" with their successor.

And since when did more than 0.5% of the PC-using population ever really pay much attention to the left-out features (filesystem changes, etc).

People who were considering Vista for their current underpowered machine would go with XP or 2000 before trying Linux, I suspect.

Uses today's hardwre. Linux, not anytime soon.

There is no absence of innovation or new features. Avalon, the new graphics subsystem, and the developer tools that will allow you to develop for it, have leapfrogged everything I have ever seen. While Linux will still be using the 2D capabilities of a graphics card (sucks!) Microsoft Vista will be using all that tremendous 3D technology already present in our machines to render your desktop. 3rd party apps will be using it too. Yes, at first it feels like it will need ebtter equipment, but when you finally get that equipment and your pathetic X-Window or other Linux windowing system looks ridiculously passé when compared to Windows Vista, you'll realize Microsoft is no longer trying to catch up to OS X, which is already a much more polished OS than any Linux flavor.

TV Commercials?

The majority of people out there still haven't even heard of Linux. The people who just use their computers for email and think that AOL is the internet. Have there ever even been any TV ads for any of the commercial linux distros? What the linux community needs to do is make a real ad campain. I realize it costs money, but with all the people out there that love linux with a furvor, there shouldn't be that much of a problem raising funds.

Terrible article

Am I the only one that thinks that article doesn't make too much sense?

I fail to see how vista, even if it weren't very convincing, will help linux getting on the desktop. All a bad windows release will lead to in the short tearm is not many people buying Vist, but staying with their curren OS, which is some kind of Windows in most cases.

And people who really care about monad not being included are people who would consider running linux anyway, but they only make a small percentage of the market.

Further, I'm convinced that Linux will not make large inroads into the private desktop in the near future, not because Linux isn't good enough, but simply because Windows is much to entrenched in this market.

Corporate and gouvernment desktops are an other story though and we'll see a lot of things happening there in the future, I'm sure.

Not trolling, but...

"Year of the Linux desktop" or whatever. Isn't that a dupe and troll in itself? It's been repeated over and over again, and yet never happened.

Honestly, I don't think Linux (as it is now anyway) is ready for the desktop. Why? Sure, you got aptitude and lot of neat stuff. Gnome may be bloated as hell, but it looks good, and that's what most consumers want.

You got lots of good stuff, but when your average linux-distro starts to break down, when stuff doesn't work automagicly, when hardware detetction fails and so on... Most users (and by most users I also mean powerusers) will have a really hard time fixing stuff, if they even manage to fix it at all. Not all of us are geeks who grew up with a keyboard.

Plus, I don't really care if linux hits the mainstream or not. I use what works for me, I'll let others use what works for them. To me, open standards are a lot more important than whatever OS people are running to get their work done.

Missing the point

The important thing to realise about new Windows product launches is that they form part of a cathartic marketing ritual. People want to buy a brand new, higher spec computer along with the latest version of whatever it is Microsoft has to offer because there's a mentality that 'old' and 'slow' spyware-infested computers are no longer functional, and this new product can solve all one's current issues, and it often does: XP was a vast reliability leap from ME or Win98.

Quite a few people see the OS as ineluctably linked with the hardware.

I think using a seemingly less polished, cheaper (or free) operating system will take much of the enjoyment out of a new computer purchase - after all, most copies of Windows are bundled with the latest hardware, and the high specifications required for Vista aren't going to bother the majority of users who will overhaul their whole system when confronted by the marketing blitz.

Any benefit for corporations?

My company didn't use Windows 98 (or ME) at all. They stuck with 95 until the obvious benefits of Windows 2000 (and now XP) were mainstream. I haven't read about one feature in Vista that would compell them to upgrade a thousand or more PCs. They won't do it to give us more eye candy, or to raise the minimum system requirements.

Desktop Linux needs the following:

Desktop Linux will still be a long way off until applications can be installed and un-installed in an easy way. I know folks are going to mention apt-get and its sister dpkg tools. But these are not very useful unless one can configure them and is also on the internet. With the rich resources of the OSS community, one wonders why rpm dependency hell has no adopted solution. Autopackage http://www.autopackage.org/ [autopackage.org] would be a good start but all major distros are not even giving it support! From a developer's point of view, writing an application for Linux means testing the application on no more than 6 distros! In some cases, I have seen more than 17 binaries for the same applications targeting different Linux distros. In the Windows world, there could be just 1 or 2. So it follows that if we in the Linux world can make life easier for developers, then that is positive. Our egos alone will not deliver. I think we need some kind of dictatrship here.

The other thing Desktop Linux needs is good fonts. I am yet to find a desktop Linux installation that is beautiful out of the box. Often times, one has to download M$ fonts or could use the script found here: http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/webFonts4Linux/webFonts. sh [unimi.it] to get good fonts for the web.

Next thing is multimedia and multimedia applications. Totem in the GNOME world and Amarok in the KDE world will not play mp3s out of the box, yet there are no licensing restrictions on these formats! These are so many other examples in the multimedia field.

There is a bug/feature I found in Linux that needs attention in relation to how devices are mounted. Remember that we in the Linux world are aiming at domination. So we should attract as many users as we can. The bug is here: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=111173 [kde.org]. I was surprised that there was a wontfix mentioned. So how are we to attract users if there will always be confusion in how devices are mounted?

Last but not least, we need publicity - good publicity. Right now, Linux is being touted as very good or good enough for the average user. What happens is that folks then have to understand that Linux is just a KERNEL and that there are many implementations associated with this kernel. To many, understanding this is a challenge. So one says "I use Linux at home, it's freely available on the net...try it out..." (and they leave it at that)! What follows is confusion as newbies find tons of distros and incompatible packages. Folks what do you think?

Got standards?

The problem I see with Linux on the desktop is that it's nonstandard. By that I mean that a programmer can't assume that any one installation resembles any other. From libraries to window managers to Xfree86 vs X.org or whatever it is now, there are no constants. I understand the benefits of such a scenario; it's great for people who love to pop the hood and do it themselves. But it's a nightmare for the average person who just wants to USE a system rather than build it themselves.

Users don't want to (and shouldn't have to, in my opinion,) worry about things like dependancies, finding a binary package for their particular distribution and/or kernel, or compiling and configuring a program upon installation. The power of configurability is great, but it doesn't have to be an either/or conflict with usability. How many times have you found a program you were interested in, and you ./configure, only to find 5 or 6 things you need to install just to get it to finish without error? And once you get an error you have to figure out if you're actually missing the requirement, or it's just an environment variable, or the wrong verson of the libraries, or permissions, or any other number of potential conflicts. SUSE, for example, doesn't even install gcc by default. I don't think it should need to install a compiler just to be a viable desktop solution, but the fact is that unless someone's already made a binary package, a compiler isn't optional, it's mandatory. The very essence of Linux, its constantly evolving nature, is also its weakness when it comes to getting a foothold in the desktop market.

Also the networking, while powerful, is anything but simple. In XP for example, if I right click on a network interface and select "Share this connection," Windows automatically starts DHCP on my second NIC, assigns my other computer(s) an IP, and everything just works. In Linux, I have to set up masquerading, routing tables, rules, etc. It's these sort of things that send most people running.

Standards DO have drawbacks, but they're generally outweighed by the benefits. Too many choices can be bad. One need look no further than the current battle between HD-DVD and BluRay for a perfect example.

Honestly, I don't ever see this happening, but unless the Linux community can rally around ONE distribution as the "standard", I don't think Linux will ever be an option for the masses.

Linux... no, Mac increase... YES

I have been an MS Windows user for years and have alittle experience with GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. After seeing all the cool things stripped out of Vista (especially the new WinFS) what is left is basically Windows XP SP3. Boring.

Frankly, with the new Intel Macs hitting the street during that time, with its ease of use, long track record, etc., that is the system that can win big, and I think that Apple (especially with its monopolistic policies with hardware and software, such as leveraging Final Cut to get Avid/Adobe to give up on Mac and of course iTunes) may just be the next Microsoft.

Answer: No.

Too late to get modded up, but what the hell. No, Vista will not be the spark that ignites Linux. Win98 was pretty unstable. Did Linux take over then? No. Win ME sucked ass. Did Linux take over then? No. Win2k was pretty nice but wasn't shipped on much consumer hardware. Did Linux take over then? No. WinXP is annoying as fuck, what with balloons popping up everywhere (Take a tour! This is the start menu! Wireless is here! Wireless is gone! Hey, wireless is back! No, wait, gone again!) and all the activation BS, not to mention spyware, viruses, self-spreading bad stuff, etc. Did Linux take over? No. Vista? Well, technically I can't see into the future, but I'm a pretty good guesser.

"Whether it's the lack of a new file system or the Monad scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye." One second--you think customers care one fucking bit about innovation in an OS? What planet is this guy on that he thinks people care about a fucking FILESYSTEM or SHELL?!?!?* I'm gonna say this once really loud for the cheap seats: WINDOWS IS POPULAR BECAUSE IT'S THE OS ON THE CHEAPEST COMPUTERS OUT THERE!!!!!!!111oneoneone. The 5% of customers that do care about innovation already have a home: they're at the Apple store.

* note: Windows does ship with a shell. But no one needs it. (Because Windows also ships with a GUI, natch.) Before writing another article like this, do this simple test: walk up to 50 people and ask them about the shell in Windows.
- 46 will go "huh?"
- 2 will say "cmd.exe but I have no use for it." (You just stumbled across two people who work in IT or a computer store.)
- 1 will say "cmd.exe and I use it once in a while because I've been using PCs for 20 years and I still do things there 'cause I'm used to it."
- And exactly one will say "cmd.exe but I don't use it 'cause it's teh sux0rz! When I get a new comp the first thing I do is use IE to download Firefox and then I use Firefox to download Cygwin!" [diveintomark.org] (Read that page, it's really funny. I love that story.)

Monad is very cool [newbox.org] but even if MS would have shipped it in Vista, did you really think you were going to spend next thanksgiving teaching your mom how to use it? "Look, mom, here--I just pipe this through that, and what makes Monad even cooler than bash is that it isn't just text coming out, these are actual objects, so I can take these results and..." Uh-huh. Right.

Re:2005 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!

Recompile the kernel to install a driver? Not likely. Most Linux drivers distributed outside the kernel are set up with a Makefile that builds a kernel module for just that driver. All you have to do is "./configure && make && su -c 'make install'", and then possibly insert the module. Unless you're using some incredibly screwy custom-built kernel, you shouldn't even need to reboot, let alone recompile the kernel. (You do, however, need the kernel source installed.)

I call BS. Even under Mandrake Linux, building and using a driver for my wireless card (ndiswrapper) was easy. Incidentally, is there any distro that doesn't automatically create desktop icons for CD-ROMs these days? Apart from Gentoo, though even that probably would if I set it up right...

Admittedly, I don't entirely trust the commercial distros not to try and extract mucho cash (which is part of the reason I use Gentoo), but still.

Re:I guess I just don't get it

Your skepticism is misplaced.

What "starter" version of Linux are you talking about? I've been a RedHat and now Fedora user and have only paid for maybe two boxes... I wanted to get the stickers and stuff. I have only made ONE support call (mostly to see what it was like) only to be told they only support one NIC installation on a machine. Disappointing to say the least... it was years ago so maybe support has gotten better since then, I don't know, but I see almost no advantage to buying a support agreement. You're simply better off having a support PERSON on site or available on short notice and that goes for Linux or Windows or any OS.

Mozilla incorporating has nothing to do with making a version to be paid for. This is ALL open-source. The moment someone even thinks they will take it closed-source for profit, a fork will happen and someone else will drive the project as open source. There are many examples of this to cite... do I really need to?

"Good busines woman" or not, you don't know what you're talking about -- you're just unaccustomed to the way things work in the OS world. Salesmen are out to make money and I don't blame you for being suspicious of their intentions. But the OS community as a whole are more likely to do it for free just for the fun and challenge involved.

Open Source has too long a history to be a gimmick or a bait-n-switch. I still can't decide if you're a troll or not. If not, then I wonder what an experienced business woman would be doing here on Slashdot in the first place.

And finally, you need to re-think what computing does for your business. It's a tool, not a religion. Determine what tools you need to run your business and I heartily recommend you start with the applications you need to run and base your choice of OS secondarily. To make the choice of OS first would be a decision not on the OS as a tool, but for other reasons such as a bas experience with a BSA audit, or some reason that involves emotional drive of some sort. Think business tools and test a lot of stuff before settling on something. And if you select something that runs well under Linux, then consider your support options. (1) learn how to do it yourself (2) find someone who knows this stuff. I don't think it's any different under Windows really -- I have rarely had a support experience with Windows that was helpful.

P.S. Closed-minds and Open-source do not work well together.

Re:How to tell if you are a linux fanatic.

33. Your server has not had to reboot in over a year.

34. When you need to install a major piece of software, be it an office suite, a graphics tool, or a compiler, you do not have to drive to a store and shell out enormous amounts of money. Instead, you simply select the desired package from the package repository and it and its dependencies are installed automatically.

35. You are able to read and write a vast array of file systems - not just a handful designed by a single company.

36. You realise that those who still have Windows on their computer "because it came with it" probably have picture frames with pictures of model families who they don't know "because it came with the frame"

37. You are tired of hearing Windows users bitch about viruses and spyware as if they had not choice but to be afflicted with them.