I am a thorough user of both Windows and Linux. Why? I hate both. So I am definitely no fanboy. There's only one thing I hate more than Windows and Linux combined, and that's OS X.

Nah just kidding. I like Windows and Linux both. Windows has annoyed me more but since 7 it's pretty awesome.

Windows

Windows just works. (switch reader case anti-windows) Oh come on! Ofcourse there's the occasional error for people who incist on buying the cheapest piece of shit hardware, but MS is doing a damn good job trying to make all the hardware in the universe work together. When you're a Mac user you've lost the right to badmouth Windows because Mac hardware is only available in the priciest pricerange, and the OS only has to work for a select group of certified hardware.

Windows lacks flexibility. The software, the licenses... One extraordinairy wish and you're stuck. But once your stuff is installed, you have a hassle free workflow and quality software to work with. I traded a bunch of ribs out of my skeleton for Windows 7 Professional and an Adobe Creative Suite license. That's where most creativity happens.

But it is what it is and if you don't like it you pay for it anyway. The commercial spirit floats like a turd amongst it's users. Every little wish you have comes in the form of someone's damn bloated usually ugly closed source untransparent tool that comes with a price. Exceptions here and there ofcourse. And ofcourse, MS randomly decides to stop supporting certain hardware whenever there's not enough money in it anymore. Most annoyingly hardware that can be awesomely timeless, such as huge ass expensive OfficeJet printers, joysticks or gamepads from old times, or something as simple as a $1 cardreader.

Linux

That's where Linux comes in. Flexibility to the max. Every silly functionality you can think of has a bunch of different tools, free and open source. Instead of licensing limitations you have absolutely every way someone could have thought of to install Linux on everything. My current favourite is Netbootin. An internet connection and a USB stick gives you access to all descent Linux distro's out there. Every piece of hardware is supported one way or the other. Though usually out of the box, if you go ancient with sidewinder joysticks connected to ISA cards you might have to do some compiling yourself which for normal users means spending the entire evening reading how to do it, but the main fact is that you are never stuck.

With a little knowledge, you can turn your computer into anything, automate everything and then some. I can install major applications on my way home using my phone and Symbian PuTTY and I don't even have to reboot my machine, which is a typical Windows requirement because every software wants to stick it's licensingcontrolling or otherwise useless infuential tentacles deep into the system's core. And Windows just can't do that on the fly.

I use Linux on my Server and Mediacenter, and both as a Swiss Army knive in the digital world and a platform that is home to a lot more free creativity tools.

OS X

OS X kinda is the bad from both worlds. It is based on Unix but it is not versatile (kinda like Windows actually, you get what you get and that's that), not free and somehow cheated it's way into being closed source. Apple took a Unix kernel, rebranded it Darwin kernel, released it under the Apple Public Source License and built their closed source operating system on top of that. It only works on some hardware and it's commercial just like Windows. When you want to do something crazy, you can't. The terminal is about as useful as the command prompt from Windows, while in Linux/Unix you can literally do everything. It's extremely user-friendly though, but it's userbase and extendability are a lot smaller than Windows'.

I'ma stick to Ubuntu, sorry!

I've been using Linux since 1997 when my dad gave me those three blue-white Red Hat Linux 5 CD's full of free stuff, and a big book explaining Linux. Red Hat discontinued in 2001 something. In 2005 I switched to Ubuntu (5.04) and I've been using it (together with Windows on my other computer) since.

But as much as I love customisability, I lack the will to learn rocket science just to understand why my rocket isn't launching. I have a tweaker mindset, but only where the efford stays below too much. That's why I stopped programming and started making media. I like to make stuff, but the fun stops where I have to spend most of my time under the hood.

That's why Gentoo is absolutely nothing for me. It's a good thing for educating interested people and he who spares the energy can make his dorito more computing efficient than Mexicans could dream of. But I once spent three days trying to make a very old computer merely half-descent. I decided then and there that I'd leave the making stuff work on a low level to others who are in fact good at it. I just want a working setup and tweak my way to my wishes from there.

I tried a few distro's and finally decided to stay with the Breezerdistro: Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on Debian, basically - imo - a visually and phylosophically improved version, created from the debugged and touched-up Debian-testing branch, supported (and initiated) by multimillionair Mark Shuttleworth and his big bag of money, through his company Canoniocal Ltd.

I (relatively) loved it from 5.04 to 9.04, and then they released major f$#kup version 9.10. This is ofcourse my opinion based on my hardware and it's circumstantional, but some major bugs in crucial stuff like samba networking that remained unfixed for too many weeks just is not acceptable for main release software. I wanted to change. Preferably away from a company-supported OS because in the end, how can that be good? Canonical, who owns the brandname Ubuntu, already stepped on it's users toes by prohibiting the use of *buntu name for anything that is not completely free and ubuntu related, and launching a commercial service called Ubuntu One themselves!

I've installed Debian Lenny on two machines. I used the NetInstall image on USB. It boots from USB, connects to the internet, installs the entire OS and let's you take it from there.

But in my case, after the Debian installer got everything from the internet, my network card didn't work after the installation! HAHAHA! How stupid is that? Probably a simple fix, but it would require hours of googling for me and since it's such a stupid mistake it's not worth my time. That's what I wanted to say.

Oh and Debian has some visual and phylosophical choices I don't like anyway. So I'ma stick to Ubuntu. I guess Canonical did too much good. Company or not. For me it just works and I know how to work it. But I'm not forgetting their screw-ups either, so I'm gonna stick to LTS versions alone. That's not bleeding edge, but concidering the development speed of Debian (dictionary: Rock), it probably beats Debian with the amount of blood on the edge anyway.