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 Walking away from Microsoft forever -- Demosthenes || Post in the forum
 Submitted by Demosthenes
In teh Geekery forum (OMFGLOL!!1) catwritr and I were discussing the notion of people breaking their Windows CDs in half and walking away from Microsoft forever.
The more alternatives become viable, the more people will actually walk down that path.
I mean, to me, Microsoft is dead. Windows 2000 is the last OS they produced that didn't require "activation", and from the sounds of it, Longhorn will be the worst one yet, since it will be infested with Palladium DRM bullshit that simply doesn't belong on a computer, period.
I don't want it. Most people who have any idea what it is don't want it either.
The way I see it, with Linux, nor do we need it.
With Linux, you have better browsers than IE available to you: Opera, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, and others.
With Linux, you have many, many good options available for email clients in a variety of user-friendly graphical apps, or simple text-based "old school" apps: Ximian Evolution, mutt, PINE, ELM, Kmail, Mozilla Mail, Opera Mail, and numerous others.
With Linux you have thousands and thousands (instead of MS's dozens) of top-notch developers reviewing code and patching bugs and security holes as they happen... not when it's fiscally convenient.
With Linux you have stability. I had a power outage on Sunday because of a thunderstorm that moved through our area, but at the point I lost power, my desktop machine at home (named "damnthing") had been up and running on Slackware for 61 continuous days without a reboot. The longest that machine had ever run on ANY operating system before that had been 3 days. And that was on Windows 2000. And at that point it started acting flaky so it had to be rebooted.
With Linux you have OPTIONS. You can run a fully-immersed, easy to use graphical environment like KDE or Gnome, rich with features, applications, and nice-looking interfaces that rival anything Microsoft has ever created. Or you can run simple, resource-friendly "minimalist" windowing environments like Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, or IceWM, or no graphical environment AT ALL if you don't mind command line console interfaces.
With Linux you can use your choice of office productivity apps, from Sun's StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, to great applications like Abiword, Kword, Gnumeric, and more than I can even think of right now.
With Linux, if you don't mind learning this stuff yourself, you can do all of that I just listed and more for 100% free. And not break any anti-piracy laws. You can change open source applications in any way you see fit, and even make copies for your friends (as long as you distribute them with source code) and you won't have the software police knocking on your door with a court summons and a lawsuit in hand.
Fuck Microsoft. We don't need them.
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