I'm on a thinkpad t530 dual booting Mint 13 (which is Unbuntu based for those that don't know) and Windows 7. screen is 1920 by 1080. The disadvantage Linux ha

I'm on a thinkpad t530 dual booting Mint 13 (which is Unbuntu based for those that don't know) and Windows 7. screen is 1920 by 1080. The disadvantage Linux has to Windows or Mac OS X at this point is mostly small ease of use issues and polish. Sometimes to have to do stuff to make stuff work, though most stuff worked out of the box. The stuff that is easier to do in Linux is really easy to do. The stuff that is hard to do is sometimes really hard, but I've yet to find anything to be impossible. Where as with Windows and Mac OS X, some simple things are easy, some simple things things are difficult, and some things, especially anything unusual, seem impossible to do. I think where Ubuntu occasionally falls is in a lack of unity a focus on functionality before ease of use, and a tendency towards a tabla rasa. I'd probably be on xmonad (a tiling window manager) now if it came with a nice setup to start and then let you select from built in user set ups, tweak existing setups, OR make your own. But that's also part of the strength of the linux ecosystem, people build things to be interoperable and flexible and hackable. And for a Developer, the latter is preferable anyway. tl:dr Linux isn't the same as windows or OS X. But it is perfectly viable as a desktop OS. And where it rocks, it rocks hard.