I Am Not Really Ant-Microsoft, I Promise

I get asked questions by friends, colleagues, church family, and family about my passion for free software any my disdane to using Microsoft products. It comes down to a just a few reasons, really.

1) God wants us to be good stewards of our resources. Why pay for something when there is a reasonably good substitute that is readily available and free? MS Office and Photoshop, while great products, are expensive. Open Office and The GIMP are free to use and almost as good. Also, why doesn't MS give their OS away for free? If their software is so much better than other companies, they could recoup any losses from OS sales from their "superior" software.

2) I do not like to put all my eggs in one basket. Whether it is Google or Microsoft I do not use on company exclusively for all my needs. MS writes some good software, but most of it is over priced and bloated. Most open source and free software is USUALLY less bloated, comparable to the big boys, and free for personal / family use.

3) I do not like proprietary formats. MS Office uses a proprietary format to create documents. Open Office follows the Open Document standard. Windows Movie Maker uses a proprietary format to save its files in. No other OS does this to the best of my knowledge.

Microsoft has claimed it creates some of the best software in the world. If that is so, then they ought to prove it by writing software that NATIVELY creates files in standardized formats. When I get sent a document, I should be able to read and edit it using any OS. If Windows and Windows software is superior to Linux and Mac, show us without making us compare apples and oranges (sorry about the pun). How can I PROVE MS Office is better than Open Office if the formats are not interchangeable? Even their file system is proprietary. At least in Linux, I can read (and write in many cases) most every file system known. In Linux I can read NTFS (the current MS standard), but cannot write to it properly. If I am in Windows, there are many programs that allow full read and write (with the proper permissions) to the Linux file systems.

I am not anti-Microsoft, but I am anti anyone who thinks they are the answer to all my computing needs, be it Apple, Adobe, Google, or Microsoft. Linux is open source. The programs installed are from many people and groups. The programs follow industry standards and are usually bloat-free.

Give me a free, stable, and secure OS for home use. Allow me to use my choice of software on that OS that follows the industry standards for all file formats. Allow the file system the ability to easily read and write to other files systems regardless of which OS it is. Make the OS and its software easy to install and remove, with little crap left behind.

Is that too much to ask?