12. Openness: When there is a security scare with GNU/Linux, you always get to know all the details. Even with the biggest GNU/Linux company, Red Hat, it only took eight days, for a full account of a security breach to be provided. With Microsoft, you never know until something leaks to the media. (When I reported about the theft of Windows 2000 code in 2004, the Microsoft PR people in the US suddenly rook an inordinate amount of interest in me. And mine was only a second-hand report!)

Of course, it you have trust in big corporations and love weasel words, openness isn't a virtue, it's a vice.

13. Independence: With GNU/Linux, you are not dependent on one single entity to keep it going. You can do it yourself. You can hire people to do it for you. Or you can contribute to a project along with others and keep it going so that you get what you want. With Windows, you are at the mercy of one company.

14. Versatility: You can run GNU/Linux on any one of a huge number of architectures. I am a non-technical user - and I run Debian on the AMD64 (desktop), x86 (laptop) and the MIPS (server) architectures. Imagine what it would have cost me to buy operating systems for all these architectures.

15. Community: Windows user groups - ever heard of them? I haven't. I have heard of plenty of Linux user groups, though. I'm a quiet member of two. Nice folk, good discussions on the mailing lists and plenty of cheap services, not limited to GNU/Linux, through the contacts.

16. Solutions vs workarounds: With Windows there are always workarounds which have to be constantly reimplemented; with GNU/Linux there are solutions which, once implemented, make the problem go away for good. No need to elaborate on that one.

17. Hardware longevity: With every version of Windows, you need more expensive hardware and more of it to achieve acceptable performance. Vista, for example, needs 4 GB of memory to run at a speed acceptable to me on a dual-core 64-bit AMD processor -  but then I've been spoiled by using GNU/Linux all these years. Oh, my desktop is a single-core AMD64 system with 2 GB of RAM and I do a lot of video encoding and processing for burning to DVD while I'm using the box for my regular work. My last PC was used for seven years, six of them running Debian.It's now being used as a server in an university.

18. Peaceful co-existence: How many times have you tried to use a product that competes with some application or the other from Microsoft and found that its features are blocked or disabled? The latest one hears is that IE 8 may start blocking text ads from Google - which is why Google came up with its Chrome browser!!! This kind of activity goes down to the level of drivers - unless a company has paid the Microsoft tax, the drivers are often replaced by drivers from Microsoft. Or else the hardware in question starts playing up.

Try installing a second operating system on the drive in your beautiful $2000 Vista PC - but don't hold me liable for the damage.You can try it on my PC, which cost about half as much two years ago, without a problem.

19. Freedom: You don't have to register your copy of GNU/Linux. You don't have to validate it. You don't have to call up some faceless entity every time you change to a new PC and want to re-use the same copy. You are your own boss. Even with commercial distributions like Red Hat, you can always opt for CentOS - which is Red Hat minus the trademarks. With Windows, they don't sell freedom.

20. Education: GNU/Linux encourages you to learn. And the more you learn, you find that you can extract more and more from that grey box which you bought for a few hundred dollars. It does not serve mashed food - it encourages you to masticate food yourself. I know of one individual who learnt to program in C after he had retired - and then promptly became a Debian developer. The man was 70 when he joined the project.

What Windows does in this respect is best left unsaid.