Oooh. Yeah. I happen to be anti-microsoft. I bought a linux distribution, only $80 canadian for the equivilent amount of software that microsoft would charge about $500 for. And even though I was planning to keep windows because of games and old school work files, when I copied (maybe deleted) the files from the system backup partition which comes with ME and up to free up space for Linux, I tell myself, Windows didn't like this and when I was formatting partitions, the table couldn't be read and I ended up wiping my drive. Since then, I've found that, with a few grey areas, but excusable considering that linux is contributed to worldwide, linux is 200% better than windows.
First of all, most of the progams I got in my package are actually open source. Including the core linux os. Yes, linux is free, stable and if you add in gnome/kde, better than windows. I've run it for 2 days straight so far, no problems. With windows, you leave it on overnight and in the morning you'll have to reboot (The secret MSELVES.exe). If a program chrashes in windows, the computer usually takes a fall too, with linux, no problems. Microsoft hypes itself with pretty pictures, well, linux has that and more. In KDE and GNOME, the look'n'feel is above that of windows, and it never even slows down. With the advent of wine (WIN Emulator, or officially, Wine is not an emulator), soon enough linux will be fully backward compatible with Windows, including with it's programs if you must have them, and no one will have an excuse to keep windows discounting stupidity.