Too lazy.

Main reason: It doesn't run the programs I want. No point in having an OS if I can't run my programs on it.

Additional reason: Not user-friendly enough. Unless that's changed since I last tried Red Hat. I can't go into specifics, though, since it's been a couple of years.

That was my reason. The truth is that most programs either have suitable equivalents in Linux or run in Wine. Or both. And the more time passes, the more programs have both.

In the last couple of years a lot has changed. Also when people say Linux is not user-friendly enough, that usually means "I'm so used to the way WindowsXP icons look like and to the WindowsXP start menu layout, that as soon as I see something slightly different, my brain freezes and/or crashes with a blue screen."

Wine runs Mac programs? I asked because Trumgottist currently only uses a Mac.

OK,
Onewing: I can't help you.

CursedTyrant: Are you sure fglrx is right for your graphics card? I don't have any experience in this since I use onboard graphics, but I know there are about four drivers just for NVidia and ATI cards. Open source and proprietry ones for each.

Trumgottist: Have you tried wine? And there are better free (as in speech) alternatives to all (read: most) Windows software available. Post it here and I'll name an alternative. It took me about a month to get equivalents for all the software I used on Windows. The only thing I couldn't replace was BlitzBasic, but that was solved when I learnt C++. Linux is very user friendly now. What version of Red Hat were you using? And if you want user friendly, you should probably go with MEPIS or an Ubuntu. Also, just because it's not immediately obvious what to do doesn't mean it's not user friendly. I find editing configuration files is a lot more user friendly than Windows dialogs. For example, configuration files work pretty much the same way for whatever you're trying to configure, so you only have to learn once and all the config files on the system are friendly to the user (you). Whilst with Windows, dialogs are all different. One might have a field in a completely different place to another. One might use a different GUI, or some use tabs and some use Back/Next. That's not user friendly, that's idiot friendly. But most things have a configuration file for the haxxor l33t among us (:P), and a front end for those who can't be bothered.

Michael Faerber: Go you!

Miran: Go you!

Kent Larsson: How is that Linux's problem? If Windows breaks it, Windows can damn well fix it. Also, you could put that in a boot script. I might write one for you if I can be bothered. Soon. Again, the university courses using Win32 APIs aren't Linux's fault, but Wine comes with a source implementation (header files and such) I believe, so you could try that. The copy/paste thing is getting more standardised, and in KDE you can always CTRL-C, CTRL-X, CTRL-V, whatever, EXCEPT when in a terminal, because the terminal steals the keyboard input, so you have to right-click. No it doesn't, please elaborate. I haven't a clue what All-In-One mouse gestures are. The flash plugin isn't Linux's fault, and I already asked somewhere, and they're going to release v9 for Linux. I agree about the sound thing, but there's normally a work around. I also agree that hardware vendors don't support Linux very well, but that just serves to give a greater sense of achievement when you get something to work. There are a million and one BitTorrent clients, I'd suggest Azureus, but you told me not to. I've never tried to program a phone so I can't comment. But that's just the phone vendors laziness mainly. I agree about the Windows user thing, which is why I started this thread to convert everyone .

MiquelFire: Macs mostly use PPC so you can't run that anyway , there are, however, emulators, but you'd get reduced speed.

FrankyR: When you get bored, just stop for the day. Next day, you'll get back and go a bit further. I find playing around with it, and having to work to get it going is fun, but I could see why people would disagree. I'd just go for a distro like MEPIS or an Ubuntu.

I use Windows for the following reasons:
- Windows runs every program I want to run. I like to play games, and games generally aren't made for Linux. Wine may or may not run what I want to run when I want to run it. I'd rather not have to wrestle with wine to play something that should just run out of the box.
- Using Windows, I don't need to learn about all the weird commands and config files that linux uses. Linux is very flexible, but it's not as easy to make simple changes. For example, in linux it took me a long time to work out how to add a new screen resolution option to the desktop resolution menu so that I could change the resolution. Also, had to do all sorts of weird hack jobs to get sound working properly.
- I already know my way around Windows, so I easily do what I want to do. Linux is good, but it isn't better than Windows*; so I see no reason to put the effort into switching.

(* Here is where you are tempted to say "Yes it is!". I suppose it's a matter of opinion. But I can't think of anything I might want to do on Linux that I can't already do on Windows.)

There are another alternative to Windows and GNU/Linux+wine: ReactOS. I didn't test it yet but I'll do soon.

Now help me James Stanley!

From what I've heard ReactOS isn't yet an alternative.

I've just edited my last post, so I'll redirect some of you there.

LennyLen: I agree that a lot of games don't work in wine, however, recently I've started to find a lot of good 3D games for Linux. Just today I downloaded a FPS (Alien Arena 06 Uranium Edition). The installers for games sometimes tend to be easier than for other software as well.

Karadoc~~: That's only because you only want to run software you've heard of, and you've only heard of software that runs on your Operating System. After being in Linux for a while, I've found that Linux runs more software that I want to run than Windows does. And there tends to be more choice, so you can get exactly what you want. See my answer to LennyLen about the games. It's fun learning about how it works, and how to do stuff. I do agree that sound support is currently shit. But I believe they (the kernel team) are working on that. The 'knowing my way around Windows' is a common excuse, but just because you know how to work Windows, doesn't mean you can't have fun learning Linux. Also Linux and 99.99% of it's software is free (beer and speech), so you never need to spend a penny on software.

MiquelFire: Good for you, I'm currently trying to install Gentoo because I'm building a cluster, unfortunately it will run on wireless, and the Gentoo installation pretty much requires ethernet, but I'll just lug it all downstairs to the router to get my drivers. Fluxbox is cool, I run DSL on my laptop, because it's the only distro that works (P150, 32MB RAM), and I find fluxbox to be the optimal window manager for the hardware. It's not actually the only distro that works, but the CD drive won't read 'dark' disks, and I've started use CD-RWs, so I can't get any new distros on there, so I'm stuck with DSL.

Niunio: ReactOS is cool. I ran it in an emulator once, and it seemed good. Unfortunately it seemed as stable as the Windows it is emulating. They even put in the BSOD.

Epsi: No, you don't. You want to play that sort of game. There are plenty of alternatives. Also, the alternatives are free (as in beer), so even though they're not the same game, they're a lot cheaper. I know, that's a crap argument.

EDIT:
The ubuntu eth0 boot script:

ethup.sh:

echo "Bringing down eth0 because M$ Windoze broke it..."
ifdown eth0
echo "Bringing up eth0 because I just took it down..."
ifup eth0
echo "Networking finished."

Instructions:
Log in as root
Place ethup.sh in /etc/init.d
In a terminal:

cd /etc/init.d
chmod +x ethup.sh
update-rc.d ethup.sh defaults

Try that and see what happens. I haven't tested it, I will soon.

Graphically speaking, Linux is SLOW. That is a huge drawback for Windows users.

ML: Yeah. Just edit the right files, I don't know off hand, because I've never felt the urge to stick three monitors on my desk (in fact, one barely fits!). If you could be bothered, you could install Linux once. Do all the fooling around, and never need to install it again. If you use a package manager (most distros do), you can use that to update the whole system with just a few commands, you could even put it in your crontab.

ReyBrujo: I disagree. In fact, a lot of 3D CG films are rendered on Linux clusters. If you mean the drivers are slow, then, again, that's not Linux's fault, that's the hardware vendors fault. One of them (NVidia or ATI), said that because graphics drivers are hard to write, open sourcing them wouldn't help. That's just wrong. There are a lot of good programmers in the FOSS world, and I bet if we got the proper source for the driver, some bright spark would come up with 100 ways to make it run faster.

EDIT:
ML: On my Dads machine, he runs Windows, on my machine, I run MEPIS with KDE. My Dads machine has a faster processor, more RAM, and a graphics card (I use onboard), and the menus on right click take seconds to appear. It's just generally slow. I hate using it. KDE does everything instantly.

EDIT2:
This is becoming a full time job. I didn't know so many people needed help.

Well, I have a dual-booting machine with a constantly updated Kubuntu Linux, but I use Windows for almost everything, except testing stuff on Linux .

Here is my list:

- random unwanted behaviour - my Kubuntu (updated regularly, as I said) just doesn't like GTK. Almost all applications using it (except, interestingly, GIMP) display text in a 5-pixels high font. I've been to several forums, changed several configuration files hidden in the most interesting places (including font DPI settings, printing settings, some GTK specific files), and still couldn't get it to display the fonts readable. I've got similar problems with setting up sound to work properly everywhere.

- the programs - this is an issue whether you like it or not. I use Corel for all my graphics needs, and I'm very used to it. Before you mention GIMP - have you ever tried to do something REAL in it, like a professional website design? Oh, it doesn't run under Wine.

- unneeded security - I understand why Linux handles users the way it does, and I know it has its uses, but a home desktop is not one of them. I found that sometimes I have to "sudo" games just to let them run in fullscreen, and during the configuration stage I was pretty tired of finding out that I forgot to sudo Kate and it won't allow me to save the config file.

- the looks - I know you can alter almost everything about the looks of KDE. Believe me, I tried and tried, and still it doesn't look right. Everything is just so... I don't know, maybe I am too used to Windows, but I can't get too like how KDE looks. This is the smallest concern, however.

- things that are just unavailable under Linux, period - I like to play games. Very much. I play loads of emulated games and that would work just as fine under Linux, but I still have a select few PC games that won't run on Linux (not now, and probably not ever). The same goes for Flash, and I don't mean the plugin, I mean the authoring tool.

Seriously, I wanted to like Linux, and tried to like it. But it just doesn't feel right. It feels more like if I am fighting the computer to do something than actually doing something, every step of the way.