I switched at the beginning of college (oddly enough, before I decided to add a computer science degree or had ever written a line of code), and I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. I've stuck with ThinkPads for hardware compatibility, and I've always been 10x more productive on my machine than anyone I know. On top of that, I've been able to keep 90% of the same habits and config while taking my machine over the years from a prettier-than-Mac Gnome+Compiz setup to a barebones, personalized, blazing fast, low power keyboard-shortcut-driven Openbox setup. The key insight is that if almost ANYTHING about my machine doesn't perfectly fit me, I can make it fit me in about five minutes.

Frankly, I consider this table stakes for a competent OS and I don't understand why people put up with being deprived of this (especially devs): over the last decade I haven't been able to shake the feeling that almost everyone else in the personal computer market has been conned.

I completely agree. The beauty of my system now is that I can make it do whatever I want it to, and I never have to worry about somebody taking it away (open source lives forever. can't say the same about Win XP or old version of OSX). I also never worry about what the corporation behind my OS is doing with my data.

Because some of us have been spoiled with development environments like Smalltalk, Common Lisp IDEs, Delphi, ... with Visual Studio being one of the best.

I remember following KDevelop progress hoping that one day it could eventually match what I already had available in Borland and MS tools.

Thanks for the perspective: I haven't heard VS given as a reason before. It's probably a consequence of the bubbles I've been in, but for every dev I've ever met (incl everyone in my CS program), there wasn't any advantage to Windows for development and disadvantages everywhere you looked. This may be a consequence of the devs I know (esp the good ones) skewing towards having a CS background (though obviously most of them aren't computer scientists in industry).

(Of course none of this applies to personal computing, where I still don't understand Windows usage beyond the need for niche software).

I was on my 2nd CS year when Slackware 2.0 was released, and we had big boys UNIX on the department, like Aix and DG/UX.

Yet the majority of lab computers were running Windows 95/98.

UNIX was mostly used for the OS, compiler design and distributed computing classes.

Everything else, including graphics programming was on Windows.

> unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia

Or any sort of GPU compute / machine learning. That is actually my primary reason for buying laptop with a dedicated Nvidia GPU - it sucks performance wise, that's to be expected, but at least I can play with both OpenCL and CUDA.

> unless you plan to do gaming, stay away from Nvidia

The newer AMD cards work very well with the mainline kernels and Mesa. (My desktop PC has an R9 Nano from 2015.) Haven't tried compute or Vulkan yet, though.