Operating Systems: Choice and design

[Tiberius]

I'm a Windows guy. Being a CompSci major, I'm inevitably going to shift towards Unix. I'm familiar with it, in that I can work my way around a terminal, but I've never fully made the plunge. I've dabbled in Fedora and Ubuntu, but never really made it my primary OS.

I like Windows because I've grown up on it and it's very intuitive to me. I currently run XP as I can't be bothered to deal with Vista bullshit.

Sound like myself about 2 years ago

I started out on Ubuntu, loved the fact that I didn't have to scan for virus / spyware anymore and that I could install 99% of the programs I needed from a package manager without having to find them online first, download them, extract them, click through the installer, etc.

I work so much faster on a Linux machine than I do on a Windows machine, probably because Linux gives the user (at least root) a lot more control over what happens. If a program freezes for some reason, I can easily issue a kill command, whereas in Windows I would have been messing around in the task manager, and it may not even quit when I'm doing that.

I also love the fact that if my graphics crash (often a fatal / bluescreen in Windows) I can simply switch to a text-based view by pressing Ctrl Alt F1