As someone with 50+ years of experience on mini and microcomputers, a user of Windows 1.01 and Slackware Linux in the mid-90’s (and got on the Internet with it!), my take:
1. Windows is less than garbage, and has been since Windows 7. Basically, it’s “free” or very inexpensive spyware. Unfortunately, I have to use it because many of my “legacy” and certain other tools are Windows only. This situation has been getting better. You might say, use Linux and Wine, etc, but I am too old to do that level of screwing around. I would not recommend any young person to learn it unless they go into IT and even then I would call specializing in it career-limiting. Remember, Windows DOES have a very good office suite (although I hate that too, all the developers of Office should have been fired after 2003) and the business version of Microsoft Windows is very different - no, or maybe much less spyware, you pick when you “upgrade” or bugfix (more likely) - but you have to pay dearly for both it and the OS and will need to buy into the entire toxic business ecosystem of Microsoft.
I wouldn’t recommend in a million years the use of Windows (whatever they call the server version now) as a server. SQL Server still isn’t as good as Oracle, and is a lot less cheap than it once was. There are a lot of free or free/supported databases, but I swear, Oracle is still the best for stuff that absolutely has got to work, although I dislike its very greedy manufacturer.
2. Apple is very good, I think they have a better moral compass than Microsoft, and their “walled garden” is a very nice and not terribly expensive garden. Their development tools make it very hard for an app to hide what they are doing on your (machine/tablet/phone). That and human examination is whey developers pay a percentage to the Apple Store for. I have bought into their ecosystem (TV, tablets, phone,watch,desktop) and the apps are free or fairly priced, and for the most part, they just work, although IMO not quite as well or as often as they did in the Jobs era. And, Carplay in my car is worlds better than the nav system that the previous owner of my car paid $5000 for.
A good example of how good Apple is, is the FREE app, “Time Machine”. Upgrading to a new machine or going back to a version of something that you screwed up is about as easy as farting into a sofa cushion. Microsoft has nothing like this but has produced garbage, weak substitutes for backup over the last 40 years. The reason is that Windows is such a horrible mess that is is basically impossible to write such a piece of software for MS.
That is what the “Apple Tax” pays for.
BEWARE: Microsoft’s office suite software for Apple doesn’t work quite as well or the same as it does on Windows. Also, the “lifetime” versions of MS office generally lasts for only the last three OS releases of OSx.
3. Linux gets better and better, and a lot of development tools are becoming “Linux First”. If all you do is surf the Internet and mail, it’s been very good for several years. Keep checking if your “must have” apps run natively on Linux.
I’ve been running dual boot, Windows 7 Pro and some form of Ubuntu ever since I caught a glimpse of the Win 8 desktop. Win 7 is not allowed access to the web and at this point, I never use it and really don’t need it. Sometime soon, I’ll wipe it and gain that HDD space.
OpenOffice is a pretty good Office Suite that looks a lot like the later versions of MS Office, especially the MS 365 online version. They use it where I work. My work does .mil/fedgov contracts and there’s a few hundred PCs, intranet, dedicated network with custom database application, interaction with CNC machines etc. They decided they didn’t want to pay for full blown MS Office for business and can’t risk the MS 365 online version due to OPSEC.
MS likes to suddenly send you to MS 365 version on occasion too. Had that experience at the last place I worked. They had the full MS Office Suite licensing but MS still tried to push the 365 crap.
As far as servers, Linux runs the internet for the most part and has forever. I still see web addresses that end with .asp, aka Active Server Pages, but it’s usually a slow and bloated web app.