You didn't specify things that 99% of people care about. Personally I couldn't care less what 99% of people want.

I think most of those people are using OS X at this point, though a couple of people I know use Linux on Mac hardware.

I think OS X is even worse than windows - that's a truly terrible UI and it makes the windows UI look almost good by comparison.

I actually prefer gimp over photoshop, because I'm used to it.
I actually prefer openoffice over MS Office, because I'm used to it and it has more features.
The other 2? Fair enough. But I don't use them or have any need to. If I did, I'd probably fire up wine or a VM (which I could snapshot and easily backup and do a bunch more than I could with a native windows install).

Want an IDE?
On windows: go download Visual Studio express. Make sure you virus scan the exe. Run the installer. Click next 50 times while you go through the install wizard. Realise that the free version has no features. Go to microsoft.com and whip out your credit card. Download a full version. Make sure you virus scan the exe. Repeat the 'click next 50 times' rigmarole.

On linux: Open up the software centre, type 'eclipse' (or browse through the 'programming' category until you find one), click 'install', run eclipse. Don't like eclipse? try one of the other 50 IDEs via an almost identical process.

Want pretty much anything else? The process is much the same. I think you need to look at e.g ubuntu's software centre - it wasn't available in redhat 6, so you've probably missed it. You'll fall in love.

You've obviously not used openoffice in the last 5+ years. And I've never found anything I couldn't do in gimp, though I will concede that I don't do image stuff all that often.

I'm not actually interested in what "people" buy computers for, I'm interested in what I want to do. No "average person" has ever laid a finger on any of my computers, and if they did they'd lose the finger. I'm not actually interested in what the market share is except insomuch as the higher the market share the more chance that there will be more awesome native proprietary software available, e.g games and your tax software. But there are other ways to encourage this too, which I actively pursue - things like paying way more than the average for humble bundles where all the games support linux, emailling people who do linux ports to say "You're awesome, I just bought it because you ported", and emailling people who you want to do ports and saying "If you port, I'll buy". If "people" want to use windows, then fine, that actually suits me perfectly because I get to say "oh, it's windows, I'm not helping you with that, go pay someone or sort it out yourself".

Then why does it matter what operating systems they support?

No, actually. I chose Linux over both BSD and Mac OS because I prefer it. I might consider the latest AmigaOS if it didn't require exotic and expensive hardware, but that's because I'm an AmigaOS fanboy - I don't know how practical it would be in real life, and I suspect I'd need linux to get things done.

That's true, but you have things backwards again - "Linux is great" does translate to "Windows sucks".

I've used Linux exclusively for 10+ years, and I've come to rely on those 10,000 little things that make it great. And when those things are not available on windows, I scream in frustration.

Or it could indicate that 98.5% of people are lazy, ignorant, or both.

See my other post, where I list a bunch of examples off the top of my head. There are many, many more.

I don't think you're really listening.

There are many reasons, but the main one is probably because I find the interface really awful.

And you saying that windows is good isn't an opinion or a personal taste?

Personally, my opinion and personal taste is for an interface that is fast and configurable and doesn't hide useful information in the name of being "user friendly". IMHO when an interface makes the assumption that I'm a moron and that I don't want to see what it is doing with my processor is a bad interface. A concrete example of this is the amount of information provided by the windows task manager vs something like top.

Another example, windows makes the assumption that I'm too stupid to know about the maximise button and helpfully maximises the window when I drag it to the top of the screen. Because there's no way I could possibly want a small window at the top of the screen. This infuriates me constantly (well, not constantly, "on the rare occasions I'm forced to do something on a windows machine").

I adore the configurability of thunar/xfce's context menus - I have a bunch of custom actions available on different types of files, such as a "Play ISO as DVD" option which appears for iso files. All added via thunar's neat 'configure custom actions' GUI, no messing about with the registry or playing with arcane configuration files or hoping that the coder who wrote my DVD playing software chose to create an association for iso files.

Then there's the godawful command line interface in windows. It lacks so many features it's not even funny. Tabs - what are they? Hell, you can't even press the 'up' key to get access to commands from your previous session (i.e across reboots).

Or we could talk about configuring a webserver. That's a particularly fun one. For me, setting up an enterprise-grade web server requires me to type something like 'apt-get install apache2', then spending about 1 minute editing configuration to enable the site I want. For you, it involves purchasing the latest version of windows server, ensuring that you spent enough to have not run up against the arbitrary restrictions imposed on you ('number of simultaneous connections/users') and spending an hour and a half clicking through "wizards" which assume that you're too stupid to know what a webserver is (which is an interesting assumption, given that you've chosen to set up an enterprise-grade webserver). It's a similar situation for pretty much any other server software: "apt-get install postgresql" vs "purchase MSSQL, install MSSQL, configure MSSQL for an hour". Hell, the last time I used MSSQL it didn't even allow remote connections by default - "for security". Because apparently the idea of allowing remote connections except from the super user never occurred to anybody at microsoft.

I reiterate that these are all just off the top of my head - I haven't actually sat down and tried to create an exhaustive list, or anything. These are just a couple of big ones which immediately leap to mind. In reality the reasons Linux is better are the ten thousand little things that I just don't even notice anymore until they're not available on some other platform, when I start screaming.

chortle.. Pot, kettle!

So, by implication, since windows is so much better, it's easy to run systemd on windows then?

I actually have GTA3 running in Linux quite well, thank you very much. Also San Andreas and Vice City via my PS2 emulator - how does GTA3 run on the latest version of windows? Will it even install? I'd be surprised.

I also have all the SCUMM games, some of which run better than in their native environment (e.g Grim Fandango has mouse support). Not to mention my tens of thousands of C64 games which were "meant to run" on a C64. I installed my C64 emulator in about 1 minute with about 4 clicks. You had to go to the google, search for c64 emulator, download an exe installer, run it, hope it wasn't loaded with viruses, click 'next' 35 times, etc etc. Then there are all the DOS games, which I can scale up to higher-than-intended resolutions using custom scalers, so they look a lot better than in their native environment. Epic Pinball and Duke Nukem 2 run brilliantly and look better than they ever did in native DOS. And getting them running took seconds. How to they run in Windows 8?

Or did you mean running windows exclusive software? It's true that making something like GTA4 run in wine is a PITA right now. But that's not the fault of the linux or wine devs any more than it's Bill Gates' fault that systemd wont run on windows. Nevertheless, in a couple of years (maybe even right now, I haven't bothered checking) it'll be possible to run it in wine, and in 10 years it'll probably be easier to run it on linux than on windows, because your "support window" will have ended and nobody will care that you still want to play such an old game. Just try running the old PC version of Road Rash of Dungeon Keeper on your Windows 8 machine.

I think you have things backwards: the reason that a lot of open source software runs on windows is not because windows is good, it's because the software is good and is written in a cross-platform way which allows it to run on pretty much any platform, even windows.

Clearly if it ran windows if would be a PS5.

When Windows 8 came out, I had 3 very nontechnical friends who found themselves "upgraded" to an interface which was completely foreign and confusing to them. They called me and said that their computers had "gone weird" on them. My solution was to put an xubuntu livecd into their drives and let them play with it for a bit. All 3 of them said that they preferred it because it "made more sense" and was "more like it used to be", all 3 agreed that I should wipe the windows partition and install xubuntu. All 3 are still using it.

LOL. A gamer is not a "techhead".

Go buy a Packard Bell FastMedia Remote control and then come talk to me. You'll find it's simply impossible to use in anything newer than Windows me due to the WinNT line not allowing direct access to serial ports. Mine still works brilliantly in linux.

I literally can't remember the last time I plugged something into a linux machine and it didn't just work. It might have been around 2007, but I suspect it was more like 2003. And I get my hands on weird and wonderfully exotic hardware every now and then.

Just a couple off the top of my head:

1. Shows you what it's doing when it's busy (assuming you bother to ask)
2. Mounts mounting volumes in virtually every filesystem ever invented
3. Supports loopback mounting (i.e mount an iso [or any disk image] without thirdparty software)
4. Supports more than 25 attached disks.
5. Boots into a live, usable environment from a USB stick or DVD
6. Has a themeable, customisable interface
7. Supports MUCH MUCH more hardware
8. Runs on ARM devices
9. Runs on a Space Station
10. Serves up most of the web's traffic
11. Provides virtually all of the world's supercomputing
12. Has tens of thousands of high-quality applications available for free and about 3 clicks away from being installed
13. Provides free, 1-click updates
14. Doesn't have any arbitrary limitations imposed based on how much you spent on it.
15. Doesn't need a virus scanner
16. Doesn't suck ass

Have you ever even used Linux? If you tried Red Hat 5.0 back in 1998, it's probably time you took another look. In 2015, it's superior to windows in every respect except one: available proprietary software. And that's changing.

Not to be judgemental, but it sounds to me like you're wasting your life.

Not installing windows.

Some people like to play games but aren't "serious about games".
Some people find windows to be a far, far, far worse experience with far far more headaches. To such an extent that if a game is only available for windows then playing it is not worth the headache. I'd really like to play the newer GTA games - But do I want to play them enough to endure installing windows? No way. I'll just find other interesting games to play.

Oh, I know! The PITA involved in getting Bioshock Infinite running was just terrible! it was such rigmarole! First, I had to start Steam, then I had to click 'Install', then I had to actually wait while it downloaded (sheesh!), then I had to click "Play", then "New Game". It was such a chore! And don't even get me started on the horror of transferring my Half-Life savegames from windows to Linux - I had to wait until it stopped saying "syncing steam cloud" - such a headache!

Me, for one.

1. Because I find the windows user interace utterly abhorrent. Like really really horribly terribly godawful. It makes me want to sacrifice kittens to dark gods.
2. Because I have better things to do with my disk space than waste an entire partition on what is essentially a launcher for games.
2a. Because even if I didn't have better things to do with my disk space than have an entire partition just for games, I would find managing said partition very annoying - I'd be constantly resizing it so that I could fit more games, or maybe even buying an entire disk just for games.
3. Because I find rebooting just to play a game very inconvenient, so much so that when I did have a windows partition for games, I rarely ever bothered playing games.
4. Did I mention that I find the windows user interface to be completely, utterly, totally terribly horrible in every respect? I mean it's really, really awful. Just try using something with a semi-decent, fast, configurable user interface (xfce, for example) for 10 years and then going back to that slow, unconfigurable throwback of a UI... you'll start to understand why people take high-powered rifles up to clock towers. Not to mention the hideously slow start up times and the times it just sits there doing god-knows-what while you're sitting there wondering WTF. And of course there's no way to actually find out what it's doing, because system monitor reports that it's using zero percent of its CPU while the disk spins away crazily and the system is completely unresponsive.
5. Windows doesn't support my gamepad anymore - the latest drivers released by the manufacturer were for windows XP. It "just works" in every linux game I've ever tried (except for the silly ones that only support an xbox controller).
6. Windows is slow.
7. Windows is huge and bloated.
8. Windows costs money.

I hope this has been an enlightening experience. :)

here you go

I think you are missing his point. Regardless of what is technically/theoretically possible, right now, the nvidia proprietary drivers do outperform the free drivers.

Yes, yes, it's because nvidia refuse to publish their specs and that makes them evil and the free guys have to reverse engineer everything and it's hard work and they're always behind and bla bla and boo hoo. But that doesn't change the fact that the free drivers don't peform as well as the proprietary drivers do in the real world today.

If the free drivers ever do manage to outperform the proprietary drivers, you can be damn sure we'll switch over in a big hurry.

(BTW I hadn't heard of this EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL before. IMHO that is bullshit, it's the good old "you're free to do as we tell you" thing)

This. Free software is great and I'll always check out the free alternatives before I consider paying for anything, but not all of us think that all proprietary software is inherently evil. Most (all?) of the people I know are much more pragmatic and interested in getting real-world work done than that. I'd love to hand over cash for a powerful video editor that is easier to use than cinellera or a native version of FL Studio so that I can finally ditch wine.

I for one have absolutely zero problem paying for games, even if I do think we'd all be better off if game makers released source code (the content should stay nonfree, though). I just recently broke the "100 nonfree games for Linux" barrier. I'm loving Bioshock Infinite, it was worth every penny, and I'm really happy to see it out for my OS of choice. But it's their code - who am I to argue if they don't want to release their source?

I'm going to choose the video driver that allows me to use my hardware to its fullest extent and gives the highest possible framerate with the prettiest effects. If nvidia want to do it all by themselves and don't want the community's help making their drivers even better than they already are, who am I to argue?

TL;DR: I use Linux because it's better more than because it's free - free is an added bonus.

(I do think the zealots/extremists are essentially correct, but they tend to use a lot of rhetoric and margnialise themselves. It's unfortunate. But it does make us pragmatists seem a whole lot saner)

Well, I wouldn't exactly condone giving microsoft money either, but to each his own.

GOG is another games retailer with ethics.

You're not the first to boycott them, and you won't be the last. Welcome!
One day there will be enough of us that they'll start caring.

No, I will pirate it.

There's a solution to this, it's called the humble store. Cut off valve's money-making machine and suddenly they'll start caring again.

If thats the case then you should probably fire those devs and get new ones who do want to do it.