Because "don't be evil" and "publicly traded corporation" don't mix well.

Not only that, but it lets you do things like automatically grouping applications into single windows with tabs, too! Back when I switched from OS X to Linux, I thought I would end up missing OS X's clean, elegant UI, but now that I've been using KDE, OS X and Windows seem far, far too limiting. KDE allows me to adapt my environment to suit my ideal workflow, rather than requiring I adapt my workflow to suit my environment!

They get their computers from big box retailers like BestBuy, Office Depot, etc. and are clueless as to how to protect themselves, so they just listen to the retail associates who offer to infect their computer with McAfee or Norton. Worse, these users usually end up lulled into a false sense of security because they think that McAfee/Norton is keeping them safe and they can do whatever they want because the antivirus will catch anything bad! I have found malware on FAR more PCs with active antivirus subscriptions (especially McAfee and Norton) than otherwise.

Also, speaking from experience (I've worked as a tech for one of those big box retailers) I would strongly advise telling your less savvy friends and family to NEVER take their PC to a big box retailer for support! The techs in these places are usually just college students who know more about PCs than your average user, but they're not trained technicians. Their job is to run some software that gets a diagnosis, then once the repair service is sold, they connect the PC to a low-paid remote technician who's basically just following a checklist and does not give a single fuck about whether or not the PC actually gets fixed.

Funny thing, I got a new laptop on Black Friday and made a recovery flash drive of Windows 8, then wiped the HD and installed Ubuntu on it. I installed a bigger HD and decided I'd put a Win 8 partition on it just in case... but the damn recovery media couldn't find the factory image that was on the flash drive! Spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to get it to work, gave up and installed Ubuntu on the new drive. Works perfectly, and makes better use of the touchscreen than Windows 8 did.

Win 8 is a damn mess I keep running into issue after issue with. It makes my job (fixing PCs) a lot harder, and most people I've met would even rather use Vista than Windows 8.

I think the problem is, as stated before, the defaults. I thought KDE sucked at first with the default installation from the Ubuntu repositories, but I played around with it more and more and took a liking to it. I found more and more useful features, and I configured it to fit my ideal work flow. I don't really like using anything else any more (especially Windows) because everything else feels far too restrictive to me. I've got my KDE desktop configured such that the applications I use regularly start up exactly how I want them: dimensions, position, workspace... hell, I even have my IRC, email, and RSS clients set up to group together into a single window with tabs separating the applications! And I've got the menu-bars and widgets I need exactly where and how I want them.

But that's the "trouble" with KDE. It doesn't give you something amazing right from the start, it gives you the ability to build something amazing for yourself.

I love how badly this strategy is backfiring. A lot of game developers have realized that OpenGL is a better choice than D3D, for the simple fact that if they use OpenGL, their work is easily portable between PS4, iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, and others, while with DirectX they're stuck with Windows and XBox.

I dunno. Although I don't foresee a "mass migration", Windows 8 is certainly drumming up a dangerous amount of interest in alternatives to Windows. It's gotten a LOT easier to talk people into giving user-friendly Linux distros like Ubuntu and Mint a try (and I've found most people tend to adapt to Ubuntu extremely well and end up loving it; hell, I'm a power-user who uses KDE but even I will admit that if you look at Ubuntu Unity from the perspective of being newbie-friendly, it's damn-well designed) and I've seen a lot more people willing to shell out the extra $ for Macs because OS X is a hell of a lot more appealing than Windows 8. I don't see Windows losing its lead in the PC OS market all that soon, but it's definitely faltering.

As tired as the whole "this is the year of Linux on the desktop!" crap has gotten, I will say that it's gotten to the point where you can realistically set up your "average Joe" users with Ubuntu and they'll be happy to have an OS that's easy to use, free, and comes with what they need. (Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice for most people.) As someone who does PC repair, BTW, I've tested out Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.04 on a lot of different machines, and it's _extremely_ rare I run into any notable issues. Usually it'll run perfectly right off the bat, from my experience, and from my own more advanced usage perspective, I've only run into a few major issues, all of which were because I am a gamer and manually install the latest video drivers from AMD, and importantly, they were all fairly easy to fix, which is more than I can say of a large amount of the "Windows won't boot" scenarios I come across.

It just works until your video card dies and you have to pay out the ass for a new one, or go the risky route of flashing the ROM of a PC video card. I used to be a long-time Mac user, but I switched to Linux after I got sick of Apple's overpriced hardware and propensity for screwing over pro users with hardware that can't be upgraded past a certain point. (I had a first-gen Mac Pro, which despite having a 64 bit CPU had 32 bit EFI firmware and the generation of PCIe that was already obsolete when the Mac Pro came out, so I was stuck with crap for video card options and it can't run OS 10.8 or later.)

Now that I've been using Linux for a while, I wish I'd switched a long time ago. Sure, I run into problems a bit more often than I did on Mac, but they're usually an awful lot easier to fix than Mac or Windows issues. (Especially Windows, and I work as a PC repair technician!) I've gotten so accustomed to the features and customization of KDE that even OS X--which I used happily from the time it came out to 10.7--feels too limiting.

There were some kinks in some older versions of KDE 4.x for me on Ubuntu 12.10, such as nepomuk crashing daily and the UI theme reverting to the default sometimes when updating KDE system preferences, but they all got ironed out months ago, and KDE has run pretty much flawlessly for me, even after I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04.

I love KDE and it's what I use on my own computer, but it does have a bit of a learning curve. I tried setting my roommate up with it and he got lost pretty quickly, so I'm easing him in by starting him off with LXDE and XFCE. It took me a while to get used to KDE, too. First few times I tried it I didn't like it, but once I got used to it and realized the fact that I could essentially build my own desktop environment far closer to my ideal than any other DE (especially Windows and OS X) can achieve, I grew to love it. Nowadays everything else feels uncomfortably limited, and I find myself missing KDE features when using Windows or Mac.

Funny thing, actually, on Win 8 booting faster: it's largely because they quietly turned "Shut Down" into "Hibernate". When you select "Shut Down" in Win 8, you're really hibernating it. The only way to properly shut it down is via the command line. I learned this the hard way as a PC repair tech; I couldn't mount a Windows 8 volume using ntfs-3g, even though I'd "properly" shut it down Win 8. I did some digging and learned the truth, and shut it down via the command line, and was able to mount the drive using ntfs-3g.

The beauty of it, though, is that if you don't like the UI, you can replace it with something better. I use Ubuntu, but don't like Unity, so I tried other UIs out until I developed a favorite. (KDE 4) I still have access to the benefits of Ubuntu, but don't have to put up with Unity's crap.

Well, I grew up using Windows and got pretty savvy with it, but I switched to Macs during the OS 9 days, and have been using OS X mainly ever since, though I still use Windows occasionally and Ubuntu frequently. Even though I grew up with it, I find Windows a great deal more difficult to manage than unix-like OSes. The Windows filesystem is a damn mess, the permissions are even worse, the registry is... the registry, and I've found GNOME, XFCE, and a few other Linux desktop environments a LOT more intuitive than Windows, even though I had no previous experience with them. You would think that I'd find an OS I have many years of experience with easier to manage, but that simply isn't the case with Windows. I've never once managed to get OS X or Linux so FUBAR I had to reformat and reinstall, while I've had it happen at least a few times in Windows, usually in such a way that I have no idea what caused it. (I still have weird, unexplained issues in Windows, like how every once in a while when I boot it up, it won't receive any input from my keyboard.)