thanks for the concise response.

i'm curious though: as a layman in technical details but a fan of the tech world, i've always been under the impression that since windows was developed by a engineering-centric organization like MS, it should be far better for such technical uses, as opposed to OSX, developed by a design-centric company like Apple. am i completely wrong in that view?

If you're doing popular web-stack programming (python, ruby, node) you'll have a far better experience on a unix-based operating system since much of the tooling is designed with it in mind.

Windows has ports here and there, and there's always Cygwin, but it's going to feel like a compatibility layer the whole time you're using it (especially if you're following guides/stack overflow help).

I've used all three stacks for years and couldn't happier with my latest MBPr (hardware or software wise).

You will be a bit hosed pursuing a CS degree on Windows. People do it, you can make it work, but you'll be constantly fighting to get your system to do useful things.

I strongly preferred Windows/Linux machines for a long time until I gave in to Apple. Their machines are just superior from a hardware standpoint if cost is not highly relevant.

OSX took the intelligent step forward of basically reskinning BSD (not exactly but it's concise enough) and adopting the Intel platform on the hardware side was enough to bridge the gap and eventually overtake it in many tech circles.

I vastly prefer the Windows 7 and Ubuntu window managers to the OS X window manager.

That was the biggest thing I missed about Win7 when I switched over to OSX. However, there are several third-party apps that will give you a Win7-like window management experience. I use Spectacle.

http://spectacleapp.com/

Two others:

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup

https://github.com/jigish/slate

I use slate because it's very configurable. Not what some people will be looking for, though.

At work, on Linux, I use quicktile.

https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile