Not why would anybody compare them, but why would I?!?
Well, I am the geek in my family and group of friends. I out geek the other geeks around normally, so why not me. I also have been an avid windows user. I used 3.0, 3.1.....thru XP. I have seen vista and frankly I don't care for the look and feel.
Of course I felt the same about XP for the first 6 months it was out, but that was because my 98SE install was humming along nicely and was just where I wanted it. But I could get XP free through school so...I did and dove in. I loved it almost from the beginning. It was more stable and worked very well for me. I know not everyone says so, but I really liked the colors and overall feel. Sue me for being a geeky drone.
Linux I wanted to love for a while, like a guilty pleasure, but it never wanted to love me back. I tried a very old version of Red Hat back in 1997, but it would boot from a cd if I burned my own. One problem, I didn't own a CD burner and the only guy who did in my dorm in college charged $10 a copy and it was 2X.....I hated to wait even then so I tried other methods. Floppy suck boot, custom installs, it was nuts.
I did eventually kinda get it to work, but my video card was brand new, it wasn't really supported........my sound card didn't work..my lan card did though, so i could browse the internet, but it wasn't the same. I also tried FreeBSD, and was amazed at the speed and use of an older system to perform to great expectations. I think I had a P90 with 64mb ram and a 2mb vid card. My roomate had a cryix 233mmx and 128mb ram and my system was quicker at user tasks then his, it also booted faster.
After that i stayed away from linux, partly because I remembered it was so hard to do, mostly because I was back home and didn't have high speed internet to download iso images with over the next 4-6 years. I also had very good luck with windows, it crashed little and had the programs i was used to and liked and everybody else had access to.
Then in 2004 I came upon Knoppix. Loved it first boot, I will spare you the review because it has been done 1,000,000 times. I carried a cd around and showed people how cool it was and how far linux had come. They said "great, but its not windows" They were correct and I agreed, but I liked it. I figured it might be time to look at linux again.
I must be lazy because I didn't really get around to anything other then Knoppix until 2006 or so. I guess my cd folder had simply Mephis and Lindows and a couple versions of red hat, but I never USED any of them. I had been programming for windows (VB6, please try not to mock my weakness openly, I am fragile!) and had liked what I could do simply. I also had been reading and talking to more folks about FOSS and what it meant to programmers and technology folks.
I will not say I am the norm, but I figured I would never write code good enough to charge for (in VB6 especially). I also thought the crap programs I saw online that guys wanted $10 bucks for were never purchased. I hate having things stolen from me, so I just started calling my programs freeware. No license or GPL or LGPL or BSD, none of that ....just please GOD give me credit if you take something from me. I thought it would be nice to be doing anything so well somebody might pinch it from my code. Hasn't happened yet to my knowledge.
I think from a buinsess perspective it only helps to go FOSS when possible. The cost is gernally lower, the codebase is no longer more sloppy or bug filled. More maintainers in my mind means less of the flashy programmer working their way to fix issues quick and dirty. Even Microsoft has that problem.
The wider veiwing audience for open source code makes it better out of vanity. I might think I look fantastic, but you can't see me. If I said that while standing next to 10 male models you could all compare and I might need to spend more time at the gym. Its the same for code. If only I see it i could care how bad it is if it works and I can update it. Or my team can do the same. But if 12yr olds in Sri Lanka can post and message me with "Why do you code this crap XYZ when everybody uses ABC in this case?" makes 99% of coders better, or at least more informed.
Ok, I rambled there, so I will make more posts for this topic later on
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