You have to be nuts to run Linux
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
To paraphrase the great man himself, "It is the worst PC OS, except for all the others I have tried".
My background includes 13 years of Fortran/Assembler/Macro programming and real time applications. During that time it was obvious *nix was a useless OS for those applications. Basically you need a simple OS that gets out they way when the application gets going, together with a hardware architecture that is register rich and interrupt driven.
Now the PC architecture doesn't come close to the requirements, although DOS showed some promise
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
What I learned on PCs is one OS more architecturally crippled than *nix is Windows. (And yes I have used it since Windows 2 and continue to use XP, 2000 et al.)
However, what finally converted my home systems to Linux was the regular merrygoround of upgrades. I run a couple of machines that I have to licence: I try to be reasonably/morally correct in terms of licencing (I have also worked many years for software developers). Typically I would have a proper licence for one machine with a pirate copy on the other, but a 'moral' justification I wasn't
that guilty as I had some old licence for a previous version as well. With Win98SE and a couple of my applications well past their sell by date (and copies of Win98 and Win 3.1 on the shelf to keep me 'legal') I really couldn't see the point of paying for an XP or 2000 licence: functionally I had everything I needed. And the penny dropped:
It's the applications, stupid!
So yeah I swapped to Linux: to some extent to climb off the MS (and others - finance, firewall, virus, office etc) licence bandwagon, to some extent for the challenge to learn something new. Without doubt it remains a hostile environment and NOT for the faint hearted. Despite massive generous contributions by so many people Linux and Linux applications are often user-hostile - finding guides that tell you how to get it out of the box and working is a nightmare. (Finding docs that tell you how to compile, what all the options are in gory detail, what all the dependencies are is easy! While recompiling my kernel is jolly exciting it is something I never want to do, and certainly no other PC users in my family want to even know about! cf several threads in the Folding forum here!) I am far from fluent in Linux: there are several things I could do with Windows (and Windows apps) that (after 4 months) are still on my Linux to-do list. But I still enjoy the challenge. I enjoy being out of the mainstream and so NOT a target for all the virus/worm/trojan crap. And most of all I am delighted to be off the licence upgrade fee treadmill:
Long live the GNU General Public Licence and the Free Software Foundation!