Equipment
I use a variety of machines to get my work done… none of them runs Winblows.
Development Machine
17″ Apple MacBook Pro - 2Gb - 2.13GHz - OS X 10.5
Home Machine
24″ Apple iMac Core2Duo - 1Gb - 2.4GHz - OS X 10.5
Backup Machine
17″ Apple iMac G5 - 2Gb - 1.8GHz - OS X 10.5
Ultra-Portable
Asus 7″ eeePC - 512MB - 900MHz - Xandros Linux
I have access to a wide variety of Windows machines for testing at the office. Additionally, I maintain the Higher Sites server farm of Dell AMD Opteron hardware and Debian Linux.
I moved away from Windows primarily because I got so fed up with re-installing computers. I have played with, used and supported all the Microsoft operating systems. Vista is a waste of space, quite literally. Microsoft’s server operating systems are excellent, so there’s really no reason why they shouldn’t be able to create a stable desktop OS. Some might say they did with Windows XP. I simply say connect it up to the web without a firewall and virus checker and see how stable it is then.
I like OS X because it’s stable and it’s based on UNIX, which makes my life easier. It’s not without its own annoyances, but on the whole it’s just better than Windows.
I’ve used and worked with many different flavours of Linux, and my preference has shifted over the years from SuSE, to RedHat, to Debian. Debian is my current favourite for server OS. For a desktop OS, one of the Debian variants (Ubuntu, Xandros etc.) would be my choice. Unfortunately, I can’t use Linux as my principal OS, due to the lack of software support. Big players like Adobe really need to get their act together in this regard.