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You're asking for a reply along the lines of "virus and malware!". Personally I've not had a virus in years. If I want to recommend a computer to my gran, I always say get a Mac. It's secure and just works. Linux has a tre hard job beating that.

Indeed. I agree with you. I also tend to tell people "get a Mac" Mac is easy (just works), secure, and stable.

That wasn't my intention, you can get antivirus and antispyware for free so it's not really a problem for me or my family. I look after their computers and I've taught them not to open anything if they aren't sure.

Although I can understand why general users get infected, the adverts are really sneakily done.

Hmm, well, I tried to switch to linux. I realized the only software I mostly use is opensource and/or cross platform. GAIM, Openoffice, Firefox, GIMP, .net (mono), thunderbird, etc.

The problem was it didn't quite work out on my hardware, problems with drivers on 64 bit. I've tried 32 bit and now i get grub error 21 if i boot to the linux hard drive.

Which distibution did you try and could you give your system specification? Mistake that several people commit is to give an unclear information hoping to get very good answers.

That was my problem, hardware didn't work properly and I have no clue how to fix it.

Otherwise I liked it.

I believe Grub error 21 means it can't find the partition you sent it to.
I've read things about setting the drive to LBA and that sort of thing in CMOS.
And I've also seen suggestions that they may be using the wrong disk.

You might wanna ask in a forum and provide your grub.conf and a brief description of your disk setup (which hard disk it's on, what partition of that hard disk).
linuxquestions.org and justlinux.com are good places to start looking and asking if you can't find help.

The reason I still stick with Linux is because WindowsXP doesn't offer anything more than Linux. There are free and open source applications for Linux so what reason do I have to switch? If I didn't have Linux then I would have a reason to look at a free alternative OS.

I will never switch to Linux unless Linux offers me better (performance + functionality)/price ratio. All the KDE and GNOME in Linux are Dog slow compared to XP UI.

Then i would want excellent development tools on Linux like SoftIce, Visual Studio, IDA Pro, Hex Workshop, Executable explorer (like PE explorer) on Linux.

I would also want all the cool software like Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger on Linux.

Honestly, Linux today doesn't stand a chance. It has nothing on which it can boast to be a superior system. It is good on server but on desktop it sucks...

That's just silly doing that, it doesn't add anything to the discussion.

And I thought Linux was free?

To each their own.

My personnal reasons for using linux are that while windows works generally well, it is often infuriatingly slow and irresponsive for no good reason.

There is also that while there are a few big free software apps, most of the small mundane things you may want to do are available only as nagware applications (no, I'm not paying you 10$ for your ugly and poorly designed piece of crap, especially if I need it only for a one time job)

As for usability, there are just as many problems on windows as there are on linux (even though not the same one), and they are much more prone to annoy me on windows (might be because windows' usability is overrated)

"nagware applications"

Nagware? On Linux?

Why on earth would you want to?

Name one.

Challenge - name one thing I would want to do as a normal user on a Linux desktop that I would have to use nagware for.

Edited 2006-01-16 10:30

When you say Linux offers no more value than Windows XP, I think there's one big thing you're missing. Linux is open source. In particular a good portion of it, including the kernel is licensed under the GPL. Now maybe to you the availability of the source holds no value, but it's quite valuable to a whole lot of us. For one, just knowing that my OS doesn't harbor any spyware is reason enough for me. But in my eyes, it's a beautiful thing that due to the nature of the GPL Linux is pretty much always guaranteed to be free(as in beer) in some form or another.