Really? I've been using Linux with the occasional foray to Windows only for old legacy programs. I haven't noticed any issues--and no viruses.
Depends on what you use it for. I find WM's under linux -- ALL of them -- to be usability train wrecks; they do a very good job of LOOKIING functional, but to be frank even Thunar - the bleeding edge best of file management in the Open Source world -- feels like a tinkertoy compared to Windows 3.x's file manager when it comes to actually doing things.
Even just the simple job of opening a program... you click on it's launcher and stick your thumb up your ass when there's no disk activity, no cursor changes, no audio queues to indicate it's obeyed what you told it to do, so you try again, 30 seconds later it up and decides to open ten copies of what you wanted. Of course when you complain about that 99% of the jacktards working on such things say "why aren't you just using the command line?" -- My response usually being "Yeah, well **** you too buddy!"
Funny since I'm quite fluent in SH and no stranger to the command line... but for a lot of simple tasks dicking around on the command line is backwards outdated BS. Said backwards outdated BS guaranteed to make most DESKTOP users tell you where to stick it!
... and to be frank for desktop tasks if I wanted to spend half my life dicking around on the command line for the simplest of things I'd drag the Model 16 running Xenix out of storage... and by simplest of things I mean like ACTUALLY setting a video mode since it refuses to see the native resolution of anything I own or having it so the speakers come back on after waking from sleep, getting anything more than stereo audio playback configured and level-set to the room properly, etc, etc...
Then of course there's freetype's fugly assed useless text kerning; where I end up having the overwhelming urge to pimp slap whoever wrote it when the stupid thing can't even render the same word twice the same way on the same page.
...though nowhere near as bad as what LibreOffice and OpenOffice have the giant pair of donkey brass to call kerning!
That's without even TALKING software; GIMP is a toy compared to most real paint programs from the Win 3.1 era (Even Aldus Photostyler blows blows it out of the water), LibreOffice is useless for actually working with text (
and similarly afflicted on Winblows -- it be spacin g!), Blender renders 30% faster on windows, there's no ACCURATE equivalent to 3DS Max, I STILL have yet to find a text editor that doesn't piss me off Wordstar style (gEdit or SCITE being the best of the lot) -- so to do anything USEFUL I'm either relying on Wine of VirtualBox so I have access to REAL programs.
... and to be frank I'm not rocking a GTX770 on my media center or GTX560ti on my workstation to have the graphics performance of a decade old 8800GTS.
MUCH of the problem can be blamed on the dead albatross hung around the neck of most *nix flavors known as X11 implementations. There's a reason when turning Linux into Android and Mach3 into Darwin that both Google and Apple respectively gave X11 the finger -- in Apple's case BARELY supporting it by running a X11 server on top of their graphics stack instead of the other way around.
That they stopped including on the distro disks ages ago and NOBODY gives a flying **** about anymore! THANKFULLY there is movement away from X11
(ABOUT TIME!!!) on Linsux but it's still not "ready for primetime". There's a reason all these WM's and application toolkits came into being. Motif, GTK, OpenLook, QT -- none of these would even EXIST if the ENTIRE X-Server methodology -- from a programmer's standpoint -- didn't get down on it's knees to inhale the proverbial equine of short stature's nether regions.
For me and my purposes Linux is almost as big a toy on the desktop as OSX is on the "
Fisher Price my first computer"... I can't even find a task manager that's as useful as what Windows has let me do since 1995; admittedly I turn off "combine", turn off large icons, turn off "customized menus", and set it to portrait mode where it's USEFUL.
KEEP IN MIND, I can attack Winblows just as well -- don't get me STARTED about ASIO support. They all suck, just in their own way making each of them a "best tool for the job" instead of "one size fits all".
I LOVE Debian as a server OS (not so wild about some other flavors -- outright HATE Red Hat legacy flavors of linsux like CentOS or Fedora), but on the desktop? Pathetically crippled tinkertoy. I've yet to find a distro that's wasn't pathetically crippled and annoying for desktop use, nor have I been able to custom build one. X11, Freetype, lack of proper file management and lack of quality applications topping the list of shortcomings.
Just like how Windows is a bloated and insecure mess as a server, and how the only two things I can praise on crApple's stuff is program installation/removal and it's ASIO support -- the rest of it being useless crippled rubbish living up to the old joke "First week you own a Mac you'll be amazed by what it can do, rest of your life you'll be amazed by what it can't."
... and yes, I do use all three regularly. Right tool for the right job. Though I'm becoming increasingly pissed off at the developers of all OS dicking around with new gooftard graphics and presentational BS while sticking their heads in the sand over functionality and usability issues -- though to keep that in perspective I consider Win98 the bleeding edge of UI design and everything since to be massive steps backwards... another reason I like windows as at least up until version 8 I can turn all the extra crap off and dial the clock back to when the OS was useful and professional instead of looking like it was made by playschool.
About the only real improvement in UI design since 1998 IMHO being windows "snap" -- it's being missing from Windows 8 just being more proof of what a giant middle finger Win8 was to desktop and laptop users... thankfully it's back in 8.1 but that's a case of too little too late.
Or have they finally fixed it to constantly hog all cores?
