To clear up some misunderstandings.
There are no anti-virus programs for linux because viruses are only theoretically possible to date. You can't make a vaccine until you have a disease to prevent. There are virus scanning programs that are used mainly to scan windows partitions and emails that may be infected coming from a windows machine, wouldn't want to spread them in forwards to windows users.
Viruses on Linux are not theoretical, they are very real. Unlike Windows however, they are not widespread. This is largely due to the reasons that I mentioned above, not simply due to the strength of the OS itself. It's much easier to get a naive Windows user to provide administrative access through UAC to a malicious installer by using some clever social engineering (pirated software is loaded with malware) than it is to get an experienced system administrator to run something that he or she is not familiar with with sudo.
Hardware can be an issue but to describe it as "an extreme gamble" is really not right. HP printers and scanners are in fact easier to install in Linux. Some scanners, some USB wireless dongles and some vid capture do not work but that is changing. Manufacturers are looking to the future and they see that most devices have linux on them now and they don't want to be left behind.
Linux adoption on the desktop hasn't change substantially in the past decade. Linux adoption in embedded systems has increased largely due to Android, but drivers for mobile devices are useless for desktops. What has occurred is that device designers have adopted hardware design approaches which makes it somewhat easier to write generic drivers that enable basic functionality. Microsoft has been pushing for this approach for a very long time and completely rewrote the Windows Driver Framework to enable the use of generic drivers, Linux kernel developers have simply capitalized on the benefits. Functionality that is not exposed through generic drivers, or remains proprietary to the manufacturer is often left out of Linux. For example, Seagate does not officially support Linux and provides no documentation for their S.M.A.R.T implementation, so while there's Seatools for Windows to diagnose Seagate hard drives, anything on Linux is largely an educated guess resulting from reverse engineering.
Yes, there are a variety of desktops. Some are meant to be very user friendly like Ubuntu and Mint and some like puppy are more utilitarian to accommodate very old systems that are resource shy. This is not a bad thing, rather it's a good thing. You can get versions configured specifically for music editing or school networks. Video editing or something that looks and feels like old school XP. For most users the learning curve for Ubuntu or Mint from XP or 7 is less than people going to 8. I speak from the experience of teaching in Africa and I teach both, few stay with windows because Ubuntu or Mint are easier. Yes, there is a lot more you can learn if you feel so inclined, like how to rewrite the desktop in a different language but for normal users there is little or no need.
I have no argument with that. Linux desktop environments aren't as meaty as Windows. I didn't say that there was anything wrong with them, just that they are designed to be compact and efficient. With the exception of the Windows 8 start menu replacement Windows has been consistent since it was introduced in Windows NT 3; Microsoft has maintained the exact same layout for 20 years. The big difference between them is that while almost anything and everything on Windows can be performed through the UI using some well directed mouse clicks, much of the functionality of the Linux desktop still requires a working knowledge of the command line.
My personal favourite is XFCE. I recently converted a friend of mine who bitched incessantly about Unity.
Installation of new software is extraordinarily easy. Choose and click. It'll download and install everything you need. There is some tweeking needed with specialized software but not the common user type and the fact that you can tweek it is again a plus. Backward compatibility in MS? Try opening a docx in word2003. Old software doesn't die it just fades away.
Installation is easy
if it's in the repository and there's no conflicts. If it's in the repository but the repository lacks a newer version, installation can be a royal pain in the ass; doubly so if the repository version alters the file structure of the installation package or leaves behind files that can interfere with an upstream installation. A good example that I've dealt with many times is installing MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.04; the repository contains only MySQL 5.1 and even if this is never installed or purged after installation there was a dangling my.cnf file sitting somewhere in /etc that interfered with a default source build of 5.5.
Binary packages and source installations often don't presume to link their executables to any location on the search path, or place their shared libraries in a place searchable by ldconfig. This still requires a lot of work on part of the administrator.
Repositories are a god send and they are getting better but it's extremely irritating when they do a poor job of tracking upstream.
As for Docx not working in Word 2003, that's because they changed the file format in Office 2007 and Office 2003 doesn't support it by default. Fortunately there's a patch for that
Does OpenOffice still mutilate them beyond recognition?
Most people now use linux. If you have an android phone you have linux.
Everything about Linux on Android is masked from the user. Application developers are even hidden from the OS through Dalvik. OHSA could swap the Linux kernel for pretty much anything else, even the NT kernel, and few people would notice or care. It's just like how most people aren't aware that their PCs contain a large number of ARM ISA cores in the form of various controllers found littered all over the place. Few people purchase hard disks to learn about ARM, as do few people purchase Android phones to learn about Linux. Android has certainly resulted in some lovely improvements to the Linux kernel, but it really doesn't do much to help its case as a Desktop OS. Even prior to Linux's debut as the kernel for the Android operating system it was used heavily in embedded applications and hasn't slipped there at all.
To say which is better depends entirely on what you use it for, I'm not a gamer, I'm a teacher and programmer so windows holds no advantages for me. For others it does.
Exactly.
I run all my local stuff on Windows 8.1 but I have two work environments which I run as VMs in VMWare Workstation.
One environment is an ultra stable CentOS 6.5 environment in which I do all my professional programming and EDA work (Quartus, EDS, Vivado, KiCAD, etc...). Since CentOS derives from RHEL the core libraries are rock solid from release and the QA is extensive, so nothing breaks. Sure CentOS 6 is based on a 3 year old codebase, but I don't have to spend any time diagnosing obscure error messages.
My other environment is an xUbuntu 13.10 installation that I use for hobby stuff. I get to play with the latest and greatest free software without having to diagnose the cause behind being unable to cross compile the Linux kernel to the ARM architecture. Works great on CentOS 6.5, doesn't work on Ubuntu 13.10; toolset is the same too.
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