Unix is for dweebs. Just don't tell them that. Sure, it's real nice for apps that just run and run and don't have any mods to the OS or the app. Runs just fine. I've got some Unix boxes and some Linux boxes doing some special-purpose stuff. They run great, but so does everything else. But would I drop a Linux OS onto a laptop for somebody that travels and has to remote connect to the company every day? Hell no...
But of course the same is true of *any* OS. Hell... DOS 5 ran perfectly well too, as long as you didn't try to do anything complicated with it.
What really fun, after the *nix dweebies get through trashing MS for bug fixes... is to remind them that *nix patches are now numbered at somewhere around 30,000 plus. The bug fixes for *nix are still an order of magnitude greater than the bug fixes for any MS OS.
Not that it will really matter...
Hehehe... I know! I'm glad most of the time I'll be doing Windows, and they gave me a very nice XP box to use.
Remember, this is a CS department at a university. Half of 'em are socialists from being around Higher Education too long; the rest are either keeping their heads down, like me, in the hopes of graduating and getting a high-paying job in the real world; or they know they'll never get the job they really want. Which would be Bill Gates'.
I think a lot of Windows-hatred is really just Gates-envy.