[LennonCook]

Well, since you told me to on MSN [img]smile.gif[/img] ...

I much prefer Linux to Windows anyday. Windows forces me to run a graphical interface for things that realy shouldn't need it - things like text editing, server hosting, file management, IRC/Chat, and sometimes I would like to use the command line for web browsing. But Windows will not let me boot to a command line. And when it does, I end up in a relatively weak command line: no recursion in scripts, and I've not even seen a simple conditional in batch. The tools you can get for MSDOS are also fairly limited:
Edit tries to be too GUI. MENUS in a COMMAND LINE?
No find functionality, and default colours that are neither contrasting enough for my liking, nor consistant with the rest of the command line interface. Vim trumps Edit on both these counts.
Ever seen a console web browser for MSDOS? Oh, that's right, MSDOS isn't internet enabled unless you have Windows running (which, realy, defies the point of using a console app - especially a web browser). The file management is also quite bad: try extracting a RAR, and then creating links to a text file such that it exists in several different places on your harddrive, possibly with several different names. And before anyone mentions copy, links point to the same file: that is, if you edit one, they all change. This is easier than having to edit all of them, or copy it all over again (probably forgetting one or two in the process), and also takes up less harddrive space. And a hard link, at least, shares copy's main advantage of deleting one file does NOT delete them all, or break any other links. The file still exists until all hard links to it are deleted.You can do these things easily in BASH. You can't at all in MSDOS.
LInux is a modular system, while Windows is monolithic. This is good, because it means that you don't have the problems in Windows of ALWAYS having IE, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, Windows Explorer, and a few others completely unremoveable from your system. This is because Microsoft has integrated thigns right into the core of Windows (which does nothing in terms of technical capability), while Linux has everything being done at the highest level it can be done at. Under Linux, don't like Lynx? Don't install it when you put linux on, or remove it afterwars. Don't like Nautilus, Eye of Gnome, GAIM, GnomeMail, or Gnome's audio player? Get rid of them. Don't like Konquerer? Uninstall it. Want your desktop to serve as eye candy, rather than be poluted with icons? Use a Window Manager like Englightenment, Window Maker, Blackbox, or Fluxbox.
While we're thinking of the GUI, the Windows XP default theme is very much against my liking. It looks ugly (I feel), the desktop background looks like a Teletubbies scene, and it is not even consistant with older Windows versions. As I remember, the default desktop in every other version since the atrocity that was Win95 has been plain blue, with silver (well, grey) borders, scrollbars, and task bar, blue active titlebars, and dark grey inactive title bars. Now that has been thrown out the window by default.
Ever been annoyed by the little popups that Windows polutes your screen with? You know the ones, "Click here to start", "Windows has hidden inactive icons", etc. They are Windows wanting you to mould to it. Linux you mould to you.
The Windows Registry is the worst idea I have ever come across. It breaks alot of things if you try to change them slightly... try copying your program files folder elsewhere, and see how much works. You can't change the location or setup of the registry, which is how spyware can change IE's home page: it knows exactly where to find it. If it wasn't for Windows being 1) monolithic, and 2) insistant upon this use of the registry, this wouldn't be nearly as easy.

And then, ofcourse, there's the traditional matter: security. Windows XP | Fedora Core 2 | Gentoo Linux | Debian GNU/Linux | Slackware Linux | Redhat Linux | MandrakeLinux.
'Nuff said.
And before you go spouting out crap about "it's only more secure because it isn't as popular", Apache is far more popular than Windows Server.

EDIT: Ofcourse, I forgot to also mention: Linux is FREE. That is, GNU Free. Download it, use it, give it away, modify it, sell it, do whatever the hell you want to it, so long as you let others do the same. In other words, no matter how you got Linux, be it from a compiled distro, or getting everything yourself, you have a guaranteed right to help your friends (or neighbours, or business partners, or any random person on the street) by giving all or part of it too them, and even make profit while your doing it. You don't need to worry about legal or moral issues, you don't need to worry about bypassing CD protection methods, you don't need to risk installing spyware onto your system to get keys or serial numbers. Free as in freedom.

[ 11-08-2004, 07:19 AM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]