I found this question as a quote on slashdot, and couldn’t resist responding.

Lemmings? Lemmings as popularised by the game by the same name are supposedly creatures that follow each other and just keep going regardless of dangers enroute to their destination. Being a lemming is equated to being one of the Herd or not thinking for yourself. This is an unfair and baseless accusation. Linux users by their very minority are not followers, until recently there were no computers that came with linux installed by default. Clearly if you wanted to run Linux you had to leave the Herd.

Well-engineered commercial software? That would be a stretch considering the issues that Microsoft has had over the decades since it started working with operating systems. I’m not saying that Linux has it all worked out, because it most assuredly doesn’t, but the difference is that if you’re not happy with something in Linux you have the power to do something about it. With all commercial software you are at the mercy of the company that owns the software to be dilligent.

Now I’m not saying that Windows doesn’t have good things, on the contrary there are features that I miss very much when using Linux, but the downsides are far outweighed by the benefits of an extremely stable OS. More importantly Linux is an OS that given enough time and dedication will run rings around anything Microsoft can field to compete with it.

I’m very fond of Eclipse. Sadly the code I’m working on at the moment is mostly C# .net (with at tiny bit of VB), that means I have to adapt to working with Visual Studio. Visual Studio has come a long way since I last used it but I still miss the power that you take for granted when you use eclipse. So I was wondering whether anyone had experimented with the couple of C# plugins for eclipse with anything more than hello world applications.