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I never once regretted making the switch.

I'm a little more curious as to why you made the switch. By that I mean why did you stop using Windows, not why did you start using Linux. My Linux box is pretty useful for development purposes, and of course I have a number of servers that I run on it, so I certainly can't and won't argue with the utility of a Linux box. I really like being able to throw up a quick perl/cgi hack to do stuff like converting pdf to ps, etc that I can connect to remotely from my laptop, etc.

But I can't really do without a lot of applications on windows, and I still prefer MS Office to anything on Linux, and I have a lot of tools for embedded development I can't get on Linux. I'm sure most people have programs that can't run on Linux that they miss, ones without open source alternatives, or where the open source alternatives just aren't quite as good.

With active kvm switches being so cheap now days, and the price of a decent homemade Linux box being a couple hundred bucks, why not use both? There is always dual booting if you can't bother with the hassle of two machines. Why only Linux? If Linux was really able to (at this point in time) completely replace windows I don't think people would be bothering with wine or vmware, but the beautiful thing is that there is no reason you have to give up Windows to use Linux.

I guess it is because I'm an engineer, but I view an operating system as simply a tool, and Windows and Linux are better suited to different tasks not just by their innate qualities but by the applications available for them. Administered correctly either one should be stable and secure. There are applications on both that I don't want to live without, so I use both.

Because of that I don't try to convince people to come to my side of the fence and use on o/s or the other. But there are people who spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get something working on Linux when it works fine under windows and I often wonder why they bother. This goes both ways, I have a friend who wasted way more time than he should have trying to get apache and postgresql working on an XP machine, which is equally dumb.

-paridel