I know this is fanboyism, but much of it really is true. I'm constantly amazed why people put up with what they do on Windows. While a lot of the points in the post linked to above are made up for the point of humour, there are numerous truths behind them which are worth dwelling upon:
3. There is only one application on my laptop which requires a serial number to activate. (For the record, it's VMware Server, which i use only to run Windows VMs, and that fairly rarely.) If i ever need to perform a new computing task, i almost never have to go any further than Applications -> Add/Remove on my desktop. The number, breadth, and quality of applications available on Debian and Ubuntu Linux means that i almost never need anything else. And because they're available from my ISP's free zone, i never have to waste Internet quota downloading them.
6. I almost never have to think about my computer being unreliable. It pretty much just works the way i want it to and i never have to worry about rebooting. (A recent exception to this has been power management on my Dell Latitude D830 after a major overhaul of the power management system for Ubuntu 8.10.)
7. I don't have to pay for my operating system or applications. This is a big deal when you're running a small business and you need to keep overheads low.
9. I get frequent complaints about from email correspondents that they can't read my messages in Outlook. The reason for this is that i add a cryptographic signature to my emails using S/MIME (an open standard), which Outlook seems to have rather poor support for.
Many people would say that the same distinctions apply to Apple Macs, and for the most part it's true, but it breaks down at #7, and the freedom i have to copy, modify, and redistribute any part of my system is something i'm not willing to give up.
