"It's also more stable (at times, overall) because it is being programmed by thousands of programmers, instead of the core group at microsoft, which I estimate couldn't be more than a few hundred, tops. The power of open-source: When someone finds a bug, they have to power to fix it right away, or at least tell someone who can :)" Actually - if you read the developers list you will see that a very few people contibute a fair majority of the code... and that much of the remaining code goes in from sources that are of dubious skill and that overall the testing structure is pretty weak. This leaves Linux with the worst of all worlds - the number of high caliber programmers working ont he system remains smaller than a commercial OS, but the number of semi and low skilled programmers who pollute the code-base is much higher than a commercial system :) Let's be honest, 95% of those who run Linux never look at or fix the source code, so the user base isn't helping very much. So far "the power of open source" has come up with some an OS with deep flaws in the virtual memory subsystem, a seriously out of date SCSI subsystem and a scheduler with problems of it's own - not to mention an IDE hard drive subsystem that blows away whole filesystems at whim. Linux is not a shining example of development - it turns out that "many eyes" do not make bugs shallow but can corrupt the code... and the "mythical man-month" applies to open source as much as commercial code.