I've used Microsoft products on many an occasion; I have to say, they did lift their game as time went on. I have used Windows 3.x, but generally the times I installed it on my 486 generally led to me erasing it for something less fragile. My current main box is Fedora, and before that it was Kubuntu, and before that it was Win 8.1 and before that Win 76.x - economics; those were the only machines I could then afford when my PCLinuxOS box died. I've played around with OpenSolaris, which was an eye-opener for someone who'd used Linux almost exclusively since I'd got my hands on Slackware 3.x on CDROM, before transitioning to Mandrake 9.0, and thence to PCLinuxOS.

Though, Linux is still more robust than Windows - I've got a PC running MS Win10, which has shown me a blank white screen the last time I booted it, while the time Fedora had a display driver issue, I was able to update the system the following day and solved that issue in the process.

Wesley Parish

On Thu, Mar 7, 2024 at 2:42 PM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows.

I run Windows because it's easy to get third-party maintenance for Windows or Mac, and Windows is easier to tune.

Cygwin plus the sam editor make me feel at home.

Ditto, except I don't like TUI editors, so I use `ex` and drop into `vi' mode when I need to bounce on the % key when doing Lisp.  The benefits of `sam -d` over `ex` aren't big enough to justify changing years of habit.

The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing, File Explorer and Task Manager.

I use both Edge/Bing and Chrome/Google depending on what's integrated with them.