Re: Why are people still using Windows?
"Tried it."
No you haven't and it's brutally obvious when you recycle 1990's headlines.
I admin a network that has hundreds of Linux desktops and thousands of Linux servers. No compilation needed. You simply don't need to compile software unless you have very, very specific requirements. Most software comes in RPM or Deb packages and with a respective repository. That way you use the same mechanism for updating everything, and you don't have to play lottery when patching, hoping that nothing breaks.
Software from lazy vendors that is distributed as a tarball (or worse, a self-extracting binary) is usually pretty simple to convert into a proper RPM or Deb package if you are working at scale. Yum/RPM and it's ilk make Windows Update and MSI packages look positively clumsy by comparison.
Obviously much the above isn't in the realm of the home user, but for vendors that aren't lazy, all that a home user needs to do installing their products from proper Deb packages is simply a matter of download, double-click, enter an admin password and click Install. So when done properly, it's very straightforward for basic users and scales easily for sysadmins.
Text files have permissions applied to them as appropriate and change control is as simple as Git or Subversion. Try that with the registry mess. Throw in Puppet and you get massive scalability as well. It's easy.
I cut my teeth on Windows and spent ten years as a Windows systadmin. Trying out 'nix was a breath of fresh air. Sure it has plenty of faults (everything does), but let's talk about the real ones instead of the tripe above.