I'd say that is a "yes." I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work, along with XP for mundane/routine office stuff. (company policy) But serious development is on RHEL. At home it is a combination of Ubuntu on a couple of machines, PCLinuxOS on another, and Debian on one. That's the beauty of Linux - try a distro. Oh, and you can keep/collect cast-off machines that others don't want. Even if they lack the horsepower/resources to run Vista or Win7, most Linux distros are right at home on them. I do use Win7 at home for a couple of things. So I'm not casting stones at Windows without having some familiarity with it.
So, do I dislike windows now? Yes.
I prefer the Linux user interface, though honestly I'm not sure about Ubuntu's unity just yet.
I prefer Linux's ease of finding/installing/trying applications (couple of clicks away). And just a couple of clicks to make them go away if you don't like them.
I prefer Linux's ease of working with devices. Installing a new printer last week and getting Ubuntu to recognize/use it was even easier than getting my son's Mac laptop to do the same. (even with a driver disk from HP for the Mac/printer)
I prefer not having to give up a fair amount of disk space and CPU cycles to an antivirus program to protect a fragile OS and application suite from the wilds of the Internet.
I prefer not having to upgrade or outright replace my computer every time a new version of the OS comes out. (typing this on a 6 year old Dell, that was at best middle of the road for performance when it was new)
I prefer getting updates and upgrades to the OS and applications automatically and in a timely manner.
I prefer the lack of crashes, blue-screens-of-death.
Being a certified computer-weenie, I prefer knowing what's going on inside the OS, rather than relying on some black-box solution.
I prefer the lack of onerous end-user license agreements.
In short, for me Linux works better than windows. That certainly won't be the case for everyone. But since Linux is so easy to try, I don't see why more people don't try it...some will like it. And that competition will drive windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X to be better.
I agree. I built my first PC in 1982. Have run all the Microsoft OS's (except ME and Vista, never owned them but worked on them). In 1998 I installed my first Linux OS, it was a UMSDOS version of Slackware. Used Mandrake and Redhat (from 5.0 on).
When Redhat 8.0 came out I discovered XFCE windows manager and fell in love with it's simplicity, efficiency and speed. This machine is running Xubuntu 11.04
“I prefer not having to upgrade or outright replace my computer every time a new version of the OS comes out. (typing this on a 6 year old Dell, that was at best middle of the road for performance when it was new) “
^^^^^^^^^
I’m typing this on a 10-year old computer with 512MB RAM on Ubuntu 10.10 and it handles fine. I’m going to move it to Linux Mint XFCE and it will be even quicker.