I had a friend that seemed to think I would like Linux many years back. He showed me on his computer, but I didn't see that it had anything over windows, and it looked to me at the time like he;d just installed some new programs. (Gimp - and then he didn't know that well enough to really show it off).

Later on I had a hard drive failure with my mission critical machine. As it was off getting serviced I paid $200 for a 486DX2 (very old) computer to at least do text processing. I needed something to help out with a student whom I was helping C++. I saw this as an opportunity to at least try Linux out. I installed Red Hat 5.2... a bear to get going fully and slow and anything would be on that machine. At least it had text processing and I soon learned enough command line to convert unix to dos formats, dump files onto a floppy (mount, cp etc etc) etc for giving the student or printing in my other computer when I got it back.

Two things I liked...

1. Linux already had a C++ compiler so I could test the programs we were writing straight away... we had to search for compilers in Windows.
2. I left it on one day... for about a week. When I returned to the machine I was expecting it to be totally frozen (Windows would have been). Instead, moving the mouse resulted in the screen flicking into life, and it was still as fast as if I'd only just left it.

That got me hooked.

Then Windows XP came out and I got scared by the new EULA which basically gave Microsoft permission to delete stuff from your drive if they crawled around and didn't think something was properly registered. I'm not into piracy, but the thought of "how would they know?" at my risk scared me.

After not very long, I found I could do pretty much anything in Linux that I used to do in Windows, only for free (except play my favourite MechWarrior game). Then I found I was getting used to a whole bunch of things that Windows can't do...

...been hooked since. These days I usually shut up about it. People ask me when they see what I'm up to

Hi,

1) No antivirus No spyware , no worry
2) Everything is free and legal (Better and free software)
3) Everything is upto you ( customizeable)
4) Bored of Windowz ..( looking for difference)
5) I like to be different..
and so on..

Thanx