You can say that about Apple users too, but the zealotry has somewhat declined as Apple products has become more mainstream.

Historically Linux users where people that actively choose to use Linux based on a combination of technical & philosophical reasons, thus they are more passionate about it.

Most common Windows users get Windows preinstalled from the store where they bought the computer. It is not really an active choice based on reason, therefore no reason to have a holy war.

The more Linux becomes mainstream, the holy wars will become more & more fringe. Systemd is pushing Linux more into the mainstream.

It's tribalism and jealousy, and becomes loudest when one side perceives they have "lost" and don't have the skills to do anything about it.

And that was one of the sillier holy wars, since text editors have near-zero network effects and it's trivial for distros to ship both.

(FWIW I use nano.)

> And that was one of the sillier holy wars, since text editors have near-zero network effects and it's trivial for distros to ship both.

Text editors like vi may have near-zero network effects, but operating systems like emacs and vim have plenty of network effects. If I spend months building an amazing interface to git in Emacs but my colleague uses vim, our organisation is hurt.

That's (I think) why people care: they want to collaborate.

> (FWIW I use nano.)

boggle

I’m mostly kidding about nano, I only use that when I have to. My main editor is HomeSite+ 5.5 running on Windows XP in a virtual machine on my Mac. And I’m not kidding.

Oh and by the way it starts faster and uses less RAM than Eclipse. That's fucked up.