I was one of those who disliked microsoft because it is microsoft. At the time I switched to linux, I switched for many reasons, top 2 are A. I didn't care for microsoft's business tactics. I don't support anything gates did with i.e. or the license agreement to sell microsoft products and I don't agree with ballmer, just don't like the corportate idiot. MS support was crappy, costly and useless. If you don't agree with the system, why support the system by using the products/giving them money and attention? B. microsoft technologies weren't even close to good enough, C# was still in v1 or v2. I tried v1 and didn't fall in love with it then. The microsoft API has always been wtf? I could never get used to it... I felt that it was really hacked together. Windows XP had just came around and I didn't like it, tired of the crap with it. The linux api was easier to deal with and felt more natural and easily understandable, none of the tools cost an arm and a leg, I had way more choices open to me on what I could do with linux. Linux's openness and the intelligence behind the tools and api and ease of learning (I learned to code on some old unix systems originally) was more to my style. I quickly found that with linux, I wasn't missing much, except games... and that's still true today. I just fell in love with it (and still love it to this day). Linux allows a startup to startup with less cash upfront, less time invested in learning (if you know unix and if you went to a good uni, you should understand it), less problems, less security overhead, less computational power required and scalability is awesome. Support is awesome also. These are the reasons became a "I hate microsh*t" and "windon't do *" person. It was a clear difference in philosophy's. The easiest way to deal with me was to just ignore me and let it go. After a quick rant I would just stop, I said my peace. I talk in past tense because today I'm back to using ms technologies and have fallen in love with c# v4, .NET and linq, but honestly I wouldn't use it in a professional project because they aren't that great for cross platform use. I like products that reach all the people, not some of the people (I prefer desktop development to web and phone development), for this, Qt is probably the best to reach everyone in *nix, windows and mac worlds (Java swig is a pain and annoying). In web (ui is cross platform by default), open source products again allow the more secure system and better use of resources (though just a quick note, I don't use php for