This is why I have two machines, one is windows the other is Ubuntu. Most work and browsing gets done on the linux box, and I have very few complaints. My big

This is why I have two machines, one is windows the other is Ubuntu. Most work and browsing gets done on the linux box, and I have very few complaints. My biggest complaint was a bug in the firefox search box that seems to have been resolved; and I haven't been able to figure out how to disable touch-click on the trackpad (without disabling the trackpad entirely, which I admit is much easier to do in Linux than windows). I'm very comfortable with cygwin, emacs, and putty on windows, and can move more or less effortlessly between windows and linux when working. The biggest annoyance is probably the slightly different copy-paste rules between putty and gnome/gnome-terminal. So I generally use Linux and Windows concurrently enough that whenever I encounter something that windows does better, I can just use that. Because those four positives the original author lists are enormous: * shell * transparency, control * package management * lack of viruses, malware Cygwin is good but limited. On Linux, back up your data and script your installation. Configuring a new box should take a few hours at most. On windows it will probably be days of tracking down all the software you need and getting all the right license keys and other crap.