Why do people switch to Linux 13474

I switched out of frustration with Winders. I learned to dislike and loathe the people who produce the crap over time thereafter.

I started up a small business at one point. My idea was to upgrade computers for people and fix their hardware problems. At the time the majority of machines still needed jumpers to make all of the hardware work. I was fairly good at sorting those things, so I knew I could make some bucks doing it for people who weren't adept at such things.

Instead of working with hardware mostly, I found myself spending the majority of my time trying to unfutz software. Not just any software, but the most commonly-used OS around. Sometimes it was drivers. Sometimes is was a conflict in the hardware. Sometimes it was the installed software (other than OS) itself. But more than 90% of my time was spent trying to work through the twisted maze of garbage that the monopoly produced. Many times it would take several tries to get it to work. Almost always what worked ended up being something I'd done several times before that kept failing.

One can learn to really despise something that's so fragile that it fails 4 out of 5 times at the same thing that ends up working!

I still didn't hate Windoze. I was just worn out. As I continued fixing crapware for other people, I began looking for something better for me. I found it in linux. I've never considered, and will never consider, changing back from that time forward. Maybe to something else someday. But M$ crapware is gone from my machines for good.

I gave up the sideline I'd started. It wasn't what I wanted it to be. I was fairly good at it, but I was becoming (slowly) less effective because I was becoming less interested and more frustrated that anyone making that much money from a product would continue selling so much crap. And frustrated that so many people continued smiling as they ate that crap.

Here I am, approaching a decade later, still unfutzing Winders even though I refuse to have it in my home for anyone's use. The paid monkeys at work won't normally do it (they usually have a couple of fairly vaild excuses), and they're rarely successful when they're forced to try. I sometimes fail, too, just like they do. A little less often, but there are still failures. I didn't pay the monopoly a lot of money to not know anything, though, like they did, so I'm ahead in that game.

But that's the job. At home I don't have such frustrations. At home I can sit down and know that everything is working (barring a hardware failure). Just like I left it this morning, yesterday, last week, last month or a year ago.

Even the Macs end up with error codes of the screen once in awhile. I haven't seen that with linux (except from buggy live CDs or something similar) in a long, long while.

-- Windows: When you haven't been abused enough by the IRS.