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<blockquote data-quote="Redwald" data-source="post: 2356792" data-attributes="member: 12271">There are a few reasons, but I admit they may not be applicable to everyone.&nbsp; First, I'm a GNU/Linux software developer as a career and a hobby; I've preferred Unix-style environments to MS-DOS or Windows ever since I was first exposed to the Unix shell (about 12 years ago now).Secondly, running a non-x86-compatible machine architecture renders you invulnerable to the vast majority of &quot;shellcode&quot;-type pieces of malware -- that is, those that take advantage of a buffer overflow to provoke a stack smash in an existing benign application and commandeer it with (usually hand-coded) malicious machine language.&nbsp; x86 machine instructions are nothing but unexecutable garbage on other platforms like the PowerPC, UltraSPARC, DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha, IA-64, PA-RISC, MIPS, ARM, and so forth.Thirdly, I'm a free software activist, and prefer to run only software which I have the freedom to examine, modify and share with others.&nbsp; That is why I prefer a free Unix operating system to something like MacOS X, and why I've found the GNU/Linux community a more hospitable place than the BSD world.&nbsp; Still, I have a lot of respect for the free BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD); they're pretty committed to free (if not copylefted) software licenses within their own projects, and OpenBSD's single-minded focus on improving computer security has yielded some greatly-improved software from which the broader Unix community has benefitted.Finally, my wife runs Debian on her iBook because she got very tired of MacOS 9 crashing, and we didn't have a license to run MacOS X on it (besides, MacOS X is slow on my 600MHz iBook and would be torture on her 466MHz model).&nbsp; The MacOS-style &quot;theme&quot; of KDE 3.3 is a bit glitchy, but she's had no complaints about the stability, and that makes her pretty happy.&nbsp; She was rebooting MacOS all the time.Hopefully my answer wasn't overkill.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Redwald, post: 2356792, member: 12271"] There are a few reasons, but I admit they may not be applicable to everyone. First, I'm a GNU/Linux software developer as a career and a hobby; I've preferred Unix-style environments to MS-DOS or Windows ever since I was first exposed to the Unix shell (about 12 years ago now). Secondly, running a non-x86-compatible machine architecture renders you invulnerable to the vast majority of "shellcode"-type pieces of malware -- that is, those that take advantage of a buffer overflow to provoke a stack smash in an existing benign application and commandeer it with (usually hand-coded) malicious machine language. x86 machine instructions are nothing but unexecutable garbage on other platforms like the PowerPC, UltraSPARC, DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha, IA-64, PA-RISC, MIPS, ARM, and so forth. Thirdly, I'm a free software activist, and prefer to run only software which I have the freedom to examine, modify and share with others. That is why I prefer a free Unix operating system to something like MacOS X, and why I've found the GNU/Linux community a more hospitable place than the BSD world. Still, I have a lot of respect for the free BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD); they're pretty committed to free (if not copylefted) software licenses within their own projects, and OpenBSD's single-minded focus on improving computer security has yielded some greatly-improved software from which the broader Unix community has benefitted. Finally, my wife runs Debian on her iBook because she got very tired of MacOS 9 crashing, and we didn't have a license to run MacOS X on it (besides, MacOS X is slow on my 600MHz iBook and would be torture on her 466MHz model). The MacOS-style "theme" of KDE 3.3 is a bit glitchy, but she's had no complaints about the stability, and that makes her pretty happy. She was rebooting MacOS all the time. Hopefully my answer wasn't overkill. :D [/QUOTE]

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