Well, the closed source and "hidden" aspect, is due to the fact that M$ is a for profit enterprise, which built itself on operating systems.
I'm not a fan of them or their tactics, but it must be admitted that they drove the computer industry - yes Jobs and Woz helped, but it was primarily IBM, Intel, and M$ (and Xerox-PARC) that got us where we are today (with a P4 3.2GHz and 2GB of RAM sitting on my desktop, bought for less than $2000 when it was the hottest thing on the market).
Also, it's not a hidden secret, much of the information you seek is available online or at a book store, it just takes the effort to go get it. And that part is actually not much different than Linux. Sure, there may be MORE info available for the inner workings of Linux, but the amount of info on the innards of Windows is far more than you make it out to be, and nearly none of it is acutally needed to just get it installed and running.
As for text editors, I find that Notepad.exe is sufficient for most things. Wordpad.exe is basically a lightweight but nearly fully fledged word processor, but I never use it. If I need something more than notepad I use Word. (There too, I LIKE Word and Excel, they rock. But if I had to pay for it, I'd be using Open Office, no doubt lol) For the purpose of actual text editing (ie, nothing fancy, just reading basic text, or jotting stuff down), notepad is very useful. I almost never use a pen anymore. lol
If I could be bothered, I could tweak it to get even more neat usefulness out of any of the variants, I'm just too busy doing other things. lol
My purpose here isn't to slam Linux. I actually liked certain versions of various desktops (NeXTStep, was it called? Was really cool looking. KDE is ok too), free is always nice, and it has come a LONG way, but I really get sick of this undue, innactuate hatred for Windows. And the thing is, I never LIKED Windows. lol
I go back to DOS, GUIs are offensive at their nature, DOS was *not* hard to use, you only needed to know 5 things, at most, to use it. Instead we got saddled with this "user friendliness" crap, and of course 3.1 sucked balls. When 95 came out, I found it much better, but still used it the same as I did 3.1, ie booting to a command prompt and launching Windows when needed for whatever reason. It was only after a few years and several builds (for various reasons) that I gave up on that and booted to the GUI. Since then, I've been forced to accept that it really isn't the evil thing I once thought it was (and so many of you still do).
In fact, my experience with other OS's (Mac in both pre and post OSX trim, BeOS, OS2, and of course various flavors of Linux desktops) has only enforced my preference for Windows (something helped by each successive version of Windows as well).
If there's something you want to do, program it. That's what the Linux community would do, right? It's really no different. You can do almost anything. It's just a mindset.
For me, it's a combination of things - the look and feel, and the flexibility (nothing tops the Explorer shell in those areas, older KDEs looked like it, but had many irritating lacks of flexibility that frustrated me and made me long for Explorer), as well as the near limitless software and hardware library. Nothing has to be coded (by me or the user community) to work (DVD playback, for example.
), and my options are limitless, and by and large, quite cheap.
To be perfectly honest, I don't really care what anyone uses, and while I DO like Windows, I'm not a zealot over it, I just get triggered by the lies and extremism demonstrated against it.
