Windows 2003 is a great Workstation 12222

On Thursday 29 September 2005 11:24, William Poaster stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Well, in my case, I didn't have Internet and I was only using Windows NT 4.0 on my machine to do some office work. Nothing really serious.

However, I was intrigued by an article in a computer magazine in which several Gnu-Linux distributions were being compared. Among them were - if I recall correctly - RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux and Yellow Dog.

Mandrake and SuSE seemed to come out as the best, with SuSE having some hardware recognition problems. Two weeks later, I went to buy MS Encarta as a Christmas gift to my brother, and I saw MDK 6.0 PowerPack on the shelf. I picked it up, then said to myself "Why bother? I already have an OS..." and put it back. Then, I picked it up again and took it with me to the cash register.

When I had first installed it - in dual-boot with NT, as I had paid big money for that NT and the MS Office 97 suite and so I wanted to hang on to it for a while - I was thoroughly intrigued by Gnu-Linux. It was everything I had hoped for, and more! I now finally had a genuine UNIX operating system at my fingertips, and it had cost me far less than I had paid for Windows alone, not even mentioning the MS-Office suite or my Norton AntiVirus.

When NT refused to boot up on January 1st 2000 - despite the Y2K updates and the Service Packs - I continued to work with Gnu-Linux for a while and wondered whether I would now have to buy Windows 2000.

Then it dawned to me... Why would I need to pay big dough again for Windows2000, just to have two operating systems on my machine, when one of them sufficed for everything I wanted to do, and this one operating system was the kind of OS I had always wanted: a UNIX clone!

My choice for buying NT 4.0 stemmed from the fact that commercial UNIX was still very expensive at the time, OS-2 - which I had been using for 5 years before that - was as good as dead, Windows 95 was DOS-based, and my friends were using Windows 95 - later on they had Win98 and even ME - and so I needed something that was compatible with their OS, yet more worthy of a Pentium II than an MS-DOS-based Windows version.

But then why would I need to run something that was compatible with what my friends had? And on top of that: StarOffice - which was included in the PowerPack edition of Mandrake 6.0 - could do just that!

And so my choice was made. I chose for the operating system I liked. I also felt very strongly about the GPL, and about the fact that all this wonderful software was created by enthusiasts and shared with everyone for free, at no charge.

So it was not a matter of "getting away from Microsoft" for me. It was also not a struggle to adapt. The Gnu and the Penguin managed to enter my heart from day one, and I couldn't wish for any better operating system. ;-)

And then they say Windows is not being forced onto anyone... :-

I figured he was a zealot, especially since he has such nice names forkillfilealready as I lost my temper a little easier that day.

Speaking of low IQ's... Isn't it amazing how people with lower intelligence seem to hate everything that actually requires them to think?

Like I said before... Maybe that's what the Win-trolls are so afraid of: the exposure of their lower intelligence... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered Gnu-Linux user #223157)