Desktop Wars - Why does the OS we prefer evoke such powerful passions?

One of the things you might notice whenever there is an article about Vista is that a lot of people seem to feel VERY strongly about their chosen Operating System - whether its Vista or not. Why is this? Why do the comments at the bottom of such articles seem more akin to a religious debate on points of theology? Maybe we are all just a lot more committed to our computers and the interface we use to operate them than we realise!

A good example is this Engadget article - How would you change Windows Vista? At the end the author asks for positive suggestions on how the OS could be improved. Within 4 comments is this provocative little dig - “WOW another biased article! Vista needs a lot of work, and so does the journalistic integrity of Engadget” - which of course sparked another 9 or so responses debating Engadget’s integrity, none of which actually responded to the authors original question.

And obviously, there appears to be three main camps:
(1) Those loyal to Windows;
(2) Those who either have stuck with or have now switched to OSX;
(3) And those have switched to a Linux Desktop Distribution (Ubuntu seems to get the most mention at the moment).
Whether or not the article is biased is almost a mute point - the fact is if you have anything positive or negative to say about Vista, OSX, or Ubuntu, someone will assume you are biased! And perhaps the truth is, we all are. Even if you use multiple Desktop OS’s in your computing world, all of us have a preference. Add to this the substantial commitment required to switch from one to the other (just figuring out how to launch a browser in a new OS an be a challenge initially), and you have a powerful motivation to defend your ‘preferred Desktop’ choice. This is especially true if you have actually secretly been considering the possibility that the OS you currently use may not be the best available right at this moment…

Regardless of why we feel so strongly and why this seems to manifest itself in staunch criticism of anyone who doesn’t see things from our point of view, perhaps it is time we learned from religious history and called for some ‘tolerance’? There are many, many reasons why we might feel a particular OS is the right one for us - it doesn’t make someone who choses differently wrong or ‘crazy’. Worst case, they might simply be terrified of change! What do you think?
If Gartner are right in their predictions about the Consumerization of IT, then IT professionals are not only going to have to learn to be tolerant, they will also probably end up having to support all the main OS flavors!

Brett Ryland @ TechGripe!