My experience has been mixed. I used an Apple machine for a 3 years, then when I picked up a serveresque power box, ubuntu for a year, now I'm using a win7 on

My experience has been mixed. I used an Apple machine for a 3 years, then when I picked up a serveresque power box, ubuntu for a year, now I'm using a win7 on the same box. I briefly tried the hackintosh route, but it was unsatisfactory. Now I have a strange arrangement: "home" stuff like address books and calendars and music are in the mac world. Applications that require CPU like document creation, web browsing (e.g. with a working version of flash), movie viewing (netflix), games, etc are done on win7. And development/hacking are done on ubuntu (in a vm). That pretty much characterizes my opinion of the platforms. Linux just completely lacks polish -- even with the latest and greatest ubuntu release, most of the apps you use outside of the web browser are... substandard, sometimes compared to even the same app running on windows -- and not well integrated. When I was running ubuntu, I would have to play sysadmin at least once a month to get some odd thing working. OS X is great, but if you want a server box you have to pay 3x more than you really want to get it. Sure, you might get equivalent value, but I don't want an 8-core xeon machine in a fancy case, I just want a cheap reliable machine without a monitor built into a chassis. Win7 is also great, but is similar to Linux with more application and hardware support. I don't have to play sysadmin as often or at all, but the integration is still fair to middling. Consider how contacts are managed on linux and windows compared to OS X, and the difference becomes striking.