Why?

Personally, I try to stay away from Windows if possible.

Is that due to reflection or sniper?

hehehe :D (vi man myself, but I respect your "editor/OS" ;)

lol

yes I had a server running with it for some time and one just has to love zfs! it's pure gold. Also loved the Jails (ezjails system especially) just great. But the updating process always bothered me. Since I mixed the pkg and ports system and there were different commands for updating the ports and pkgs, (and then again for every jail) it was confusing for me and I was never certain that everything was up to date. - a simple "pacman -Syu" in arch is way more comfy ;)

Me too.

Linux has been a wonderful thing for me since I got Win10. I put Win10 back on my system for a few things here and there, but Linux has been spectacular.

First of all I prefer the philosophy behind BSD over Linux. I find Linux becoming a big mess where things easily break where as in like FreeBSD is more stable and feel like a real system while Linux is a sandbox/playground. I have been using both Linux and FreeBSD for a long time running servers and to me it was just a lot less work using FreeBSD. As for Windows compared to Linux, Windows is more stable and more user-friendly for desktop use plus that it has better software/game support. Only good thing I find with Linux is that it can be made more secure and uses less resources than Windows but for my uses there are better options than Linux.

Arch Linux, including Manjaro, is hardcore. Mint and Lite have spoiled me. Nonetheless, I hold a certain admiration for Arch users. Arch users tend to be pretty tech savvy and free-wheeling.

Windows 10 for me. I like it well enough.

Linux has looked interesting, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I'd like to download the OS to a thumb drive and test it.

Am using and will use Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit until 14.01.2020.; just as I used Windows XP SP3 until 08.04.2014.!

And then I will switch to whichever Windows will be best at that time! Windows 14?! ;-)

Here's the thing, though:

I have found Linux (at least if you have a decent distribution) to remain stable; a Debian Stable will keep working the way it currently is, and won't suddenly start misbehaving or behaving differently. In particularly, the system only updates when *you* tell it to. Also, Linux has better game support than *BSD.

Windows, on the other hand, does not; it will suddenly update to a new version that can completely break your workflow, and on Windows 10 Home Edition, there is no way to turn off automatic updates.

Another thing is that Linux is extremely flexible, if you look at all the features the kernel supports. For example, you can use the device mapper to do interesting things with block devices; for example, you can combine 2 block devices into 1 in multiple ways. Also, with some trickery, you can boot a virtual machine with the concatenation of a boot sector and a physical hard drive partition.

Also, Linux is better than *BSD for virtualization at the moment. KVM seems to be more flexible than bhyve, and bhyve requires more CPU features. Also, bhyve is only in the newest versions of FreeBSD, while KVM has been around for quite a while at this point.

Linux also has more mature driver support.

Another thing: In Linux, it is quite easy to run a functional system from RAM; just create a cpio containing the root filesystem plus an init program at /init, then use it as your initramfs image with a kernel. I haven't been able to find a similar documented method in the FreeBSD base system, or any other BSD I have looked at.

You can always disable the update service, quick and easy fix for disabling the updates in their entirety. Highly not recommended, but quite possible.

There are good things about Linux, no doubt about that but for server environment which was the main reason for me to not use Windows then Linux could never be as easy to maintain and stable as BSD. Almost every system can be made stable and secure enough with some effort but I had to put less work into using BSD to get same or better results.

For desktop use I don't see anything Linux does better than Windows in my experience. Windows has never updated itself on me, I do everything manual and it works fine so that has never been an issue. But if I installed Windows, Linux or something else for someone who don't care about updates like my parents then auto updates are best.

I agree Linux has better driver support than BSD so if you can do everything you want on Linux and you like that system I see no reason to switch to BSD except for curiosity. For gaming and general use I prefer Windows, BSD for everything else.

Desktop: Xubuntu and Windows 10.
Laptop: Lubuntu and Windows 10.

what I'm missing in your post is your stance to macOS (OS X). Since it's basically BSD with a cool and very userfriendly interface (arguably easier and definetly safer* than windows for non techies like the mentioned parents) it seems like the best of both your worlds. So ever tried macOs?


*Also less to no viruses, trojans, cryptolocker so that's a huge plus. The games though, that's always the thing isn't it? But if you use your OS for more than gaming, it shouldn't play such a huge role. Mac has more games than linux at least but for the rest I use streaming from a win box, that I don't use for anything else. Other Options are virtual machines or as a last resort dual booting into windows.

Win7 64-bit. My pc is 4 years old and I saw no reason to upgrade to Win10. Win7 works like a charm and I even got my old printer working on it so i will wait with Win10 until I buy a new pc.