> Hold on a second. You can't just claim XP had longer support except for all those "continually updated OSes" and still have a point left!

Rolling release distros are a different ball game entirely. If you take a copy of Windows 7 you can install every update from the initial release to present day. It might take you a while, but you could do it. Equally with your standard release cycle Linux distros, you could take a 3 year old copy of Ubuntu LTS (for example) and bring it bang up to date. However if you took a 3 year old image of a rolling release distro, you'd find it hugely more difficult to update (if at all possible).

Rolling release distros don't have a set end of life date because they're always incrementally reaching end of life. Particularly as breaking changes become old and unsupported (eg try taking an Arch Linux ISO before the filesystem, glibc and systemd packages and watch just how poorly that ISO updates). So something being "rolling release" doesn't mean it doesn't have an end of life - it just means you don't have to perform OS release upgrades.

> Why are there are so many defensive anti GNU comments here? Do these actual facts that correctly paint Microsoft in a bad light really upset that many Microsoft users / workers / proprietary software proponents?

Why do some people think you must be a fanboy or an employee to defend a product? If you want my honest personal opinion: I hate Windows. Absolutely despise it. Please bare in mind this is just my personal opinion, but I just cannot fathom it's maze of confusing windows, I don't like that it's command line is crippled and that Powershell is about as succinct as War And Peace. I hate the lack of a proper package manager (I could write a novel on how much I hate Windows Update). I hate the poor support for nix networking protocols. I hate the outdated file system support. I don't even find it aesthetically attractive. So there really isn't much I like about Windows.

At work I run Linux and manage Linux and Solaris servers (I'm devops) and at home I run Linux and FreeBSD. I don't own nor run a single Windows system and haven't done so in any serious capacity since the early days XP. I really couldn't be any further from the "pro-Microsoft" pigeon-hole you presumed.

I know there are people who feel the same way about Linux, and that's fine. I wouldn't want a Linux monopoly any more than I'd want a Windows monopoly. And I'm certainly not going to accuse those people of being Microsoft employees :P I just believe in being objective because nothing is perfect and we can't improve things if we look at everything with rose-tinted glasses.

> Also, what is with legitimate comments being ghosted on this site?

Most of the comments that have ghosted are because they were complaining that the article was factual thus couldn't be FUD. But that misses the point of what FUD is. FUD doesn't have to be a lie, it can also be a heavily biased fact that casts the opposition in an unfairly bad light. I personally felt the Windows XP support argument was one example of that; it was factually accurate but conveniently overlooks Linuxes similar issues of long term support

I do have a great deal of respect for GNU and RMS, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with everything posted in their name.