It's interesting to watch people discuss choice of operating system. In a lot of ways, the modern computer industry was built by hackers. Many old hackers are bluntly honest about what they build. This is necessary, if a design is bad and no one says so for fear of hurt feelings, the technology never improves. Linus Torvalds is a prime example of this. If he sees something of stupid design, he calls them on it. There is much in computers that can be objectively evaluated and treated to this process of caustic refining. There are, however, some matters that are chiefly points of opinion and preference. This lends itself to 'holy wars' between groups of people of two preferences. The classic holy war is between emacs and vi users. An old argument between Torvalds and Tannenbaum has raged over monolithic versus microkernel architectures. This extends to operating systems.
I confess that I am pretty much agnostic these days. I have in the past been a rabid advocate of Linux, and still find it to be very much superior in many areas. I keep both Windows and Linux around, because without them I find myself limited in some regards. I play with electronics a fair bit, and most of the free development tools manufacturers make available are windows-only. But, I find if I have only windows, I miss out on many Linux tools that are of great use. I have even had a mac running so I could put programs under Mac OS X.
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