Right now, Linux has a much steeper learning curve than Windows, and less software designed to run on it. For this reason, it has gained acceptance mostly as a small-server OS, where the cost vs. benefits arguments are more in its favor. Microsoft makes you pay twice for its server products, first for the product itself, and then more, depending on how many machines you connect to it. For the free system Linux, the cost to a business of finding someone to run it is often outweighed by the savings on licensing fees.

I believe however, that the day is not too far off that you'll see its acceptance on the desktop as well. Yes, there are many things that are point-and-click in Windows that take an inexperienced user weeks to figure out in Linux, but do you remember where Windows came from? That's right, it came from DOS, which is nothing more than a stripped-down subset of Unix commands. The command lines for network operations, the autoexec.bat files, config.sys files, ini files in the early days of Windows are no different from the idea of editing files today. Over time, programs to automate these commands in a graphical interface will evolve, and become adopted as standard. Redhat has some nice tools, and SuSE has Sax and YAST.

The big difference between the GUI (graphic user interface) of Windows vs. the one for Linux is that the Microsoft GUI is integrated into the operating system whereas the Linux one is not. Microsoft people might think that to be an advantage of their system but I beg to differ. I can still remember the time when I switched the video mode of a Windows-95 computer to one that it turned out that the monitor could not handle and then as per Windows "You must restart..." I restarted Windows. The screen was a blur, and I had to delete system.dat and user.dat and let the OS restore the registry from a backup. NT is a little more forgiving -- at least you can reboot in VGA mode. But in Linux X-windows, it's a snap. Just kill the Xserver with Ctl-Alt-Backspace and you do not have to reboot and you can either continue to work in text mode or you can reconfigure X. And Linux users find they have a choice of several window managers (KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, Ice, etc) and not just the one Microsoft gives you.

As for security, 95 and 98 cannot compete with either NT or Linux, since either of the last two come with certain security by default. I'm not really sure how secure Windows 2000 Professional will turn out to be, since it has an install option to do away with the mandatory logon and assume you're the Administrator with all the privileges. With NT/2000 you can rename the Administrator account to foil hacking, which you can't do with Linux, because everybody familiar with the OS knows it to be 'root'. But you can't remotely log on with 'root' anyway. You'd have to do so with a normal account and then use a 'superuser' command. And the truth is that any machine that can be accessed PHYSICALLY by unauthorized persons is unsafe anyway, because all the hacker has to do is open the machine (pull the CMOS battery if need be) and use tools to resize partitions and install an OS capable of reading any files. On the other hand, you cannot shut off SMB services (Microsoft's networking protocol) in Windows-NT/2000, but you can with Linux or any of the unices. Either a Microsoft (NT or 2000) OR a Linux box CAN be configured to be a packet-filtering firewall but with Microsoft you'll need a 3rd party product to get the job done.

Have you ever accidentally overwritten a configuration file? Well, in Linux, I noticed that the KDE editor automatically makes a backup of the original file for you!