But my long-term goals do NOT include being a sys admin. Oh, it's fun as a grad-school job, but I want to program.
Besides, I've learned several different revisions of Windows so far (started with 3.11, went to 95 and 98, fooled with ME for a while, now I'm on XP) and I doubt Longhorn will be that hard to learn.
Anyway I am against an OS that has to be configured to automatically mount the cd drive.
That is a pretty minor thing to be against. A better way to look at it is that it is and OS that you can configure to NOT do that. Not that that might be useful but there are so many things that other OS's just don't let you do. for getting a programming job being mediocre in a bunch of OS's is better than being really good with just windows. Especially when 'mediocre' in this case means 'power user'