FOSS: How much difference can it make?

foss solidarity candle illumination at Maitighar to mark SFD tomorrow
Illuminated FOSS indeed looked exotic. But can it exotic to other people besides those involved and those aware of FOSS. I myself am a sort of fan and user of FOSS and look for FOSS softwares whenever possible. I use GIMP occasionally but again happen to use photoshop. I use Firefox excessively but again test applications in IE to make sure that the firefox-ignorants can also use the web-apps. I use Microsoft office though I have installed Open-office. I am still using Winamp; I am happy with pidgin (IM replacement of gtalk, msn, yahoo and lot others), VLC Player or MPlayer. Despite all these love-hate for FOSS-proprietary softwares, I am still using Windows XP at home as well as office. I could have used different distributions of Linux but I can't at office and my home computer doesn't support so far - the screen goes berserk. I remember finally having suse installed but resulting in much slower pace compared to XP - it seemed to be hardware problem. I have no choice than to continue with XP :(