@creative1 A few reasons.
—People are unaware – Linux doesn’t advertise like Microsoft and Apple do. And many people only trust the programs they heard of, even when they are inferior. I like Firefox over IE or Safari. Foxit Reader beats Abode Acrobat in every way except name recognition (and the fact that Adobe installs itself like a virus). Ever hear of Avira? I bet not, and I would also wager that you would not trust it for that reason alone.
—People are lazy – Linux doesn’t come pre-installed on systems available off the shelf; if it’s available, it’s a special order. Look how many people use IE/Safari despite there being better browsers out there just because it’s what came pre-installed. Look at how many Windows users use anti-virus stuff that doesn’t really work despite there being free options that do work, just because it came with the computer.
—People equate price with quality – I had someone who didn’t know anything about computers tell me that their Anti-virus program was better than mine because they paid $80 while mine (Avira) was free. Independent testing showed that their product was only 88% effective while mine was 99.7% effective. However, facts like performance benchmarks mean nothing to those who feel price equals quality.
—People fear the unknown – Most people do not know about computers well enough to even maintain them, can operate them only marginally well, and cannot utilize their potential. (A quad-core i7 won’t type e-mail better and isn’t better at showing dancing kittens on Youtube than a Pentium II) Hell, many people don’t even need a computer, hence the popularity of tablets; they do everything that most people want a computer to do without all of the things that computer ownership entails.
—People do use it – A majority of servers use it, including the one at the White House. Dreamworks, Pixar, and ILM use it. The One Laptop Per Child project uses it. Many governments use it; it is more secure and stable. Most (>90%) of the super-computers use it; it is more efficient and faster. Anybody with a TiVo uses it. Do you know anybody with a TomTom GPS? Guess what! And you may have heard of an oscure thing called Android…
But odds are that you are referring solely to the desktop distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, etcetera. See above for why.
Now tell me, have you ever been interested in alternative ways to do stuff when you already have a way that you feel works for you? Most people have a “This was given to me and it’s good enough!” attitude, and such fear of the unknown that even the thought that any alternatives are viable can provoke lashing out.
If you are not curious, if you are so risk-averse that you are comfortable limiting your options, if you are afraid to learn, then Linux isn’t for you. If you want to be different, don’t do it by being like everybody else. Linux is for those who are not happy settling for whatever they are handed, who are not scared to trust anything that doesn’t have glitzy multi-billion-dollar ad campaigns, and are otherwise unlike the average person who is more technophobic than they will ever admit.
Funny story about htat, actually. I have a buddy who used to do PC repair and he would actually install Linux on people’s systems then skin it and configure WINE so that it would look the same as it did, run all the programs correctly and all. They never even knew they were running Linux instead of Windows! Many complimented him for making it faster than new. I wonder how many would’ve flipped out had they known the truth despite being faster, more stable, and virus-free. I bet most, for reasons given above.
Lastly, a pic of Mac4Lin just to show that the allegedly superior UI of OS X is not unique to OS X.
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