Dude that sucks… It’s really odd sometimes – I’ve had a few windows boxes that have been fairly stable, but then stuff like what happened to you occurs, and It’s kinda unpredictable. We had two machines at work thursday freak out due to a failed patch install, svchost.exe kept puking, (something about memory could not be read). Windows diags are so sh1tty, took an hour of googling to find I had to remove the patches from last tuesday, and then reinstall manually. 6 reboots later everything appears to be fine. But SIX REBOOTS?!?!?!?!?! Holy crap. You have to “love” windows.

While I’ve not personally used it much, I hear really good things about ubuntu and its derivitives (kubuntu, edubuntu, et al). They have more of the end-user stuff that you expect for multimedia functionality. Redhat distros don’t (fear of patent litigation, etc means missing av codecs and stuff like that. You can get them, but it can be a pain). You can get a live CD to start messing with it, so you don;t have to go cold turkey off windows. The ideal scenario for a lot of people would be a linux or unix foundation with a windows gui, though I suspect that will never happen. In 5-10 years microsoft will go the way of wordperfect.

Dive in, man. It’s really quite liberating.

I recall my first foray into linux – I think my first reason was pure ego – knowing linux or unix has an enormous amount of geek-cred. I went out and bought a slackware book with a CD, a scsi drive and adapter (this was 1993 or so, no IDE support yet). I remember being blown away by the complexity of the file system, the difficulty of getting X running, and so on. Fast forward to 1998. I was working in a mostly mac environment, w/novell servers. They were very reliable, but the licensing was expensive. I remember thinking about linux and wondering if it could serve files for mac clients, did some research and found the netatalk project.

Once I got that working under linuxppc (now defunct, I think) I had proof of concept. We had a big network upgrade project going on, and new servers were part of the job. We opted to go for linux (the savings allowed us to buy a robotic tape library). I wish I had done more with it before that deployment, but it forced me to learn. There are some things I miss about novell (permissions structure is one thing). There is NOTHING I miss about the microsoft environment. While many of my collegues at other similar organizations were turned into reboot monkeys, and having to deal with the difficulties of maintaining exchange, my stuff just ran and ran.

So yeah there’s a learning curve. And there is also an UN-learning curve. Some of the things that you do in windows are so bass-ackwards, but you get used to it and accept it as normal because you don’t know anything else. Once you start to delve into the power of unix-like systems, it is absolutely amazing how easy system management can be.

There are some things that could be better. I would like to see better enterprise management feature sin firefox and thunderbird, for example. But I can also count on the fingers of one hand the number of virus infections we’ve had (on our windows systems!) in the past 4-5 years, since we don’t support outlook, and generally don’t support IE either.

Don’t fear the learning curve. Take your time and explore. Lights WILL start going on in your head, and you WILL learn the paradigm.

As an unscientific example, my wife and I have been using linux at home for a couple of years now (ya gotta drink your own cool-aid, right?). She is mostly non-technical, but has a ton of experience with word-processing systems, starting with dedicated wp systems like wang, nbi, displaywriter, and moving to wordperfect, and more recently, ms office. She had a personal project to do for a class reunion that involved producing a semi-complex multi-column document. I was out of the house, and she had to get going on this thing. She later told me the only difficult thing was finding the right icon to launch the app (openoffice.org). Once she found it she just blasted right through it. ZERO major problems. No panicked phone calls to me. THAT says a lot to dispell the myth that opensource is difficult to use.

I might also mention the cygwin project for windows – another way to get your feet wet without blowing away your windows partition. You can play around in the bash shell, and run linux services from your windows box.

I know what you’re talking about, Converting people can be a nightmare,
people tend to Hate changed and it doesnt matter if it’s better or worst..

the best way to try and explain them how good it might be is just to give them a LIVE version of Linux and let them play around it… no need to install or anything like it, just download, burn and reboot with CD in place…

they’ll be able to see that it’s actually very familiar interface and there’s nothing to fear of changes… the only diffrence would be Saving money.

Many developers _still_ don’t know (I was one of them) that there are wonderful, powerful and free IDEs available for Linux which successfully rival those from Micro$oft.

You’re not right. Have a look at last version of Java and NetBeans 5.5 (which will soon get NetBeans 6). And it’s available for Linux, Mac and Windows.