I can understand that very well.
I'm in a good situation here--while the official desktop is Windows, I am allowed to use my Linux laptop. My business case for it is that (since I am a Linux admin) I can connect to the servers I'm responsible for a lot easier. It makes my job more productive.
My official work desktop is sitting on my desk, running headless, mouseless, and keyboardless. I remote into it whenever I need to use the one and only Windows app that I can't get running on Linux--Lotus Notes (the only reason I can't get it running on Linux is that I don't have the install disks available).
the only Linux program I used was Puppy when my laptop crashed (I’ve reformatted it twice so far) and luckily recovered current college files. I really haven’t studied it at all, but was wondering if, since college papers turned in (online classes) must be in Word Doc format, is it possible to still use Linux?
I have a windows laptop at work that does exactly one thing - outlook. It's basically a couple of thousand dollars worth of an email terminal, because the underlying OS just doesn't work the way I do.
I need multiple desktops, and a real shell with tools that will actually let me automate stuff that would otherwise take far too much of my time, or not be possible at all without an in-house programmer. I need to have direct shell access both to and from my box, along with a webserver, ftp (anonymous only), and scp server so I can move files from one place to another without the hassel of 'shares', and other artificial weirdness.
I'm sure windows is fine for people who don't actually have to do multiple tasks simultaneously, and can focus on their one program they are working on at the moment. I'm sure it's fine for people who don't value their time enough to put up with scanning for viruses, malware, and other crap that seems to be attracted to Microsoft operating systems like a big Hoover vacuum. I just don't have the time to mess with all the crap that comes with being a MS-Windows user.
I also like knowing that by backing up my /home partition, even after a catastrophic disk failure, I can get my entire system back within a few hours (most of that time is the data restore) in exactly the same condition it was today right down to the individual tweaks I've made to my personal desktop settings.
I'm glad there is choice out there. Different people like different things. Different people have different needs and requirements. Thank God we have the ability to choose that which works best for us as individuals. Mac users can be happy, MS-Windows users can be happy, and Linux users can be happy because they have what is best for them.
VMware (and other VM software for all I know) will let you clone an existing physical machine into a VM that you can run on your Linux box. See, no Notes reinstall required! It doesn't even know it's running on new (virtualized) hardware. The only way I could see that not working is if Notes has copy protection keyed to HD serial numbers or MAC ID's or something like that. Those are probably not coming along to the VM. In a way, running stuff from a VM is even safer IT-wise because you can backup the entire machine and restore it on new hardware even easier than restoring a HD image.