I primarily use Windows.
Windows - Although I've dealt with the occasional BSOD, extreme slowdown, bizarre incompatibility problems, and one or two viruses, overall it hasn't been so bad. Windows XP has worked the best for me. Visual Studio has been the main reason for me to stick with Windows. Games not so much because historically I've bought low-end computers and I'm increasingly preferring retro games. And I enjoy the customization I'm allowed regarding how the system looks and functions. However, I've had to reformat a lot of times due to too much junk on the computer or the rare virus. It boggles my mind that OEM computers don't have the courtesy to ship a reformat disc set anymore. They just say "make your own". That'd be fine if they didn't restrict you to making one and only one disc set. Why? If your first burn fails, then you're screwed unless you call up the company. At least it's better to have a reformat disc than to send the computer into a shop every six months.
Macintosh -
I owned a Mac laptop with 10.3 "Panther" on it until it suffered a hard drive crash after two years. On one hand it's "you get what you pay for" in that while Macs are a lot more expensive, the user interface is more appealing (part of the reason I got a Mac was to see those beautiful icons), it's supposedly more friendly to users so I don't have to think as much about defragging or worrying about viruses, they should be more reliable since Apple does the software and hardware, and they've come out with some exciting features.
Plus it has iMovie, which I really enjoyed until I found out how to use Windows Movie Maker properly (regarding exporting video, I think they're equally poor. Windows Movie Maker doesn't give me enough choice, and I can't find a "store on hard drive at high quality at 320x240" choice. As for iMovie, I believe YouTube required a Windows format at the time, so iMovie's export to AVI put everything out of sync. And the size of an iMovie project is like four gigabytes for a 2-minute movie because it stores everything at the highest quality possible, while Windows Movie Maker is happy to work with your existing clips in their existing formats - just as long as you don't move them, else you have to find them again). For interface I prefer iMovie 6. But once I got a taste of Final Cut Pro, I couldn't really go back. iMovie just looks really weak by comparison.
iPhoto's good but takes ages to load and I really don't care for how it burns images to CD (like I'm seriously going to go through each folder containing one image each. It's like you need iPhoto to read that CD again). iTunes is decent but I've gotten out of the habit of using it since I use VLC for everything now. I liked Safari for a while, but then it crashed hard and would never start up again. I don't use Safari anymore because I was really worried about the inability to export bookmarks (that should be a basic feature!) unless you used a third-party app. And no, I don't use Firefox for its extensions. I use Firefox because I found it to be a decent alternative. At least until I heard about Opera.
I've had a couple of kernel panics however (the equivalent of a BSOD, and mainly from poorly-written third-party apps). While simplicity is good, I keep worrying that it's hiding vital info from me. I never would have figured out that the cron jobs (maintenance stuff) weren't running unless I looked it up. The default is to run it late at night, which I guess is reasonable since most people leave their computers on throughout the night. For some reason I didn't, so the cron jobs never ran. Shouldn't it, I don't know, run at startup if it didn't run last night? There's no GUI interface to change that unless you go to the Terminal or just download a third-party app.
But the worst of all is the quick pace of the Apple world. Shortly after getting Panther, 10.4 "Tiger" came out. A few months later, just about all the new applications are Tiger only. I couldn't understand what was so fundamentally different between Panther and Tiger (especially given the release numbers 10.3 and 10.4, implying they're minor updates - although in the Mac world those are major releases) to make new applications incompatible. Microsoft has backwards compatibility on its side, for better or worse. Apple on the other hand is "upgrade, upgrade, upgrade!" And upgrading's not cheap. Oh, and I never figured out the deal with storing stuff in resource forks. Maybe those .whatever files on CDs I burned on a Mac are useful after all. I might be able to appreciate Mac more now that I've learned a bit of Linux. Perhaps it's just a matter of looking for open-source software on Mac OS X, which I didn't do before.
So while I like Mac, I just can't keep up with it.
Linux -
I've only worked with Ubuntu because it's a pain to download a whole CD-worth when you're on an internet provider with severe download caps. My first time around I spent two days setting up a dual boot because Linux wouldn't boot (it couldn't find the bootloader) and Windows wouldn't boot (one crucial byte in the Master File Table was screwed up). After dealing with that, Linux went pretty smoothly. As long as I can find an open-source program for what I want to do, which is likely since Debian distributions have the most packages, everything's fine. But I found MonoDevelop lacking as a decent C# IDE. It's IntelliSense equivalent isn't as good, for the life of me I can't figure out how to use the designer for GTK windows nor know how to even create an event, can't figure out how to customize the toolbar... either I'm stupid or MonoDevelop's lacking an intuitive interface. Worse, I can't upgrade to the newest MonoDevelop - either I have to upgrade Ubuntu to Jaunty Jackalope or go through a bunch of complicated steps to build it for Hardy Heron.
While I've gotten used to the Terminal, it boggles my mind how the usual solution to a problem is "type in these arcane commands into the Terminal". These are not things I'd figure out on my own unless I dedicated myself to using the Terminal for everything. So basically I have to keep a browser open the whole time just in case I stumble across another roadblock. While I've used Linux for a few months, I still don't consider myself close to an expert. I don't know how to recompile a kernel, nor do I see myself ever doing that in the future. 95% of Terminal functions I don't know. I don't know the standard approaches to fix common problems unless they're supported in a GUI (what? Open fstab?). No, I will not fix bugs or write a program myself if something doesn't work, I've been given the impression that it would require more expertise than I have in order to do that. And I can see people getting confused over what distribution to use first. There's a billion of them and most of them are above the "impulse download" limit.
I admire the philosophy behind Linux, but there's too much choice, open-source software is not -necessarily- of better quality than commercial software (sometimes it is, not always), and it's still too complicated for a normal person to use. Some of the people seem to put choice (we need 500 features because we can!) over the overall experience. That's one of the reasons I prefer Gnome instead of KDE (XFCE isn't pretty enough, so that's out). And then one time I removed the stuff in auto-remove because Terminal said it contained stuff that wasn't necessary... well, that "unnecessary" stuff included Gnome and X and other vital system programs. Had to reinstall. Would it kill people to create a Terminal that says "this appears to be your first time using this command. This command is very powerful and can kill your system if you don't know what you're doing. Read up on it first. If you want to continue, press Y." I know I was a total idiot for doing it, but that just shows how someone otherwise knowledgeable can make a mistake from time to time. Why then did it have to be a costly mistake? For experts, they can hit a switch to ignore all the nag messages.
And it ticks me off to no end that Ubuntu's slideshow screensaver refuses to let you select any folder you want, it's just stuck on My Pictures. It seems to be a bug, something you can fix by installing something over top of it that may make the system unstable... yeah, that makes me feel confident. I think the problem's solved if I switch to KDE, but I shouldn't have to do that. I tried changing the location it points to by editing the config file for the screensaver, it's in one of those places I'd never think to look (not to mention it wasn't where the tutorial said it would be because the listed location didn't exist) -- and it didn't do squat.
So overall, Windows is nice despite its flaws, Mac is good but too costly in the long run, and Linux on occasion is just too involved for me. The best experience I've had is Windows, helped by the fact that Macintosh is surprisingly lacking in customization for appearance.
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