Linux has proved itself to be an excellent Operating System for applications ranging from big corporate servers to small embedded devices. It's not a toy.

As for desktop. The popular desktop distributions (Ubuntu, Mint, [my own choice] OpenSuse, etc.) are not difficult to set up. These distributions contain software that will enable most people to be productive in most areas.

My own usage includes LibreOffice (spreadsheet, word processing), GIMP (graphics editing), FireFox, Chromium and Thunderbird (web/email) and Audacuity (audio editing).

I also do use programming environments, although I download these from the company websites rather than look to my distribution. On my desktop, I have Netbeans, Eclipse and, more recently as a project I wanted to look at had been built with it, Android Studio.


For Mr Red. I do not claim to approach being a professional programmer but I can put some smaller projects together and have things work reliably. Experiences include using the Apache, php, mysql platform for web stuff, using Java, python and at least once for a PIC chip, C. My last little project was interfacing between our Visonic burglar alarm and my home automation code.

Of course that it all trivial stuff. To look at the real stuff, I can't really see Windows being needed to develop the Linux Operating System - can you?

I'd guess you own experiences are based on earlier (10 years+ ago) Linux distributions that were much harder to set up and perhaps a commitment to VBA.

Anyway, for other home users. There can be reasons for using Windows, eg. perhaps you need some professional package that only exists on Windows. Perhaps you have got yourself locked in to some application (eg. maybe Libre Office Calc may be a perfectly good solution but you've put a lot of time and effort into VBA scripts).

It could even be that you simply do find Windows the best or find Linux not for you. Contary to what any of us may wish to say, there is no "one size fits everyone" Operating System.

One thing I would say regarding not liking Linux. My own advice to those considering a change is to download and try a few different live distributions (burn the image to disk, boot up, try it without having to install anything) from the popular distributions. My own choice is OpenSuse with the KDE desktop. That particular one should, I think, look reasonably familiar to those who've used Windows at least up to Vista (I've not used a more recent version of Windows).