"My days are spent working with Windows, and challenges abound there. But often the challenges are not the ones I anticipated. Rather than concentrating on my own code, I often have to run down buggy SQL drivers, ActiveX components, or DLL's (or some nightmarish combination of all three). Windows is littered with badly-thought-out APIs. Trying to make Windows inter-operate with other systems is like teaching an elephant to tap-dance: you can do it, but the results aren't pretty.

This is not to say, as so many in the Linux community do, that "Windows sucks." Windows doesn't suck. Lots of very smart people have worked very hard to ensure that Windows doesn't suck. But it is also clear that Windows was designed and built by committee, with a specification written by a marketing and PR department. It is a great, ungainly bag of good and bad technologies all mixed together. To a person like myself, who values elegance and cleanness of design over all else, Windows inspires more winces than smiles.

...

Linux is not behind Windows because Linux isn't following Windows. We're doing things a different way, the correct way. We admit bugs when they happen and do our best to fix them. Our feature sets are not dictated by marketing and PR departments. We give back to the community."