There's a saying among the nerds' community: "There are two kinds of computer users: Those that use Linux, and those that will soon use Linux." Interesting enough -- that might come true someday!! I'm not against any particular Operating System: Every OS offers variety of functionalities; one does better job than the others, depending on what we're looking for, to accomplish a task. Let's not forget ..however.. that we all Linux users (at least the ones that are here reading and posting in sajha, unless any of us worked for companies running the commercial UNIX prior to '99, AND learnt using a PC on an UNIX platform) climbed the stairs of Windows to get to the point where we could overlook the Windows, and stepped up to the Linux world; because -- Linux was developed in the early 90s, and went public in 1999. Now, if you were a complete computer illiterate till 1999 and had your first PC that came with MAC (or LINUX..does that happen?) installed; then my saying wouldn't hold the truth. So, Personally,.. I think no OS is worse than its counterparts. Just wanted to point out few things though, about some of the previous posts I saw in this thread --: Someone wrote:".. it is free and geeks get a boost of self-pride and self-esteem by using it, which they can't get by using windows." I agree on that. It needs an extra mile-effort to get comfortable using this OS. Someone talked about Linux Kernel & applications being harder and hard to break into, so the attackers get deviated. I think that's true as well, and since Windows is still far more widespread, majority of malwares are written to exploit exclusively the Windows OS. It is reliable, customizable (because of being open source), and is free -- Agreeable. Someone gave an example of running a UNIX/ LINUX machine for 2 years without an interruption -- The OS is not the only factor on that. You need to consider the Hardware specifications, the physical environment, the applications you are running, performance, and payload. One of the old Volvos ran close to one million miles during its lifetime-- and I assume it didnt run that far simply because it's a Volvo. It must have been well maintained and ontime repaired. Memory leaks occur in any OS -- and it happens with LINUX too. As someone mentioned earlier -- it depends on what applications you are running. Try some exploits and payloads through www.metasploit.org and test against your Linux machine .. you can run buffer overflows in a matter of minutes. Also, as far as I know -- Kernel is the core of the Operating System, and there is only ONE core embedded within each OS. Hyperthreading is running multiple threads (instances of a process) in parallel, not running multiple Kernels. And Hyperthreading is supported by both Windows and Linux. Virtual Machine concept (VMware) comes into play...when you need to run multiple Kernels. And that's supported by both platforms as well. Also, Win3.1 is an Operating System version. Even DOS is an Operating system on itself. So, let's not call 3.1 as a Non OS. Pretty much all Linux distros (not only Knoppix) have their OS booting+running 'One CD' version out in the wild these days. ~@~