I switched from a Mac with OSX to Ubuntu about a year ago, and I haven't looked back. I'm a developer, and I have found that everything in the Linux world seems to be set up with me in mind.
Dependencies are easier to install, there is a larger, more knowledgeable support network (compare the Ubuntu forums to any Mac forum, it's not even close), and I have discovered how powerful the command line is as a development tool.
Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.
Plus, being able to develop web apps on the same or a similar operating system to the environment it will be deployed on is incredibly convenient.
I will say that most of my leisure time now goes to developing personal projects, rather than to gaming or other multimedia - things I often did on my Mac. But I think that's a good thing. When I do invoicing or I need to work with clients' data on spreadsheets, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, respectively, have served me just fine.
If you live in a multi-computer household like I do, I think it makes sense to have one machine that dual boots the latest Windows and Ubuntu to be able to take advantage of games and other multimedia. However, for the PCs that are only being used for day-to-day things like email, web surfing, and office tools, then Ubuntu is the best value there is.
>Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.
This isn't said enough. Type a coding question into google and 9 out of 10 hits seem to be good tutorials involving the linux terminal.
Dependencies are easier to install, there is a larger, more knowledgeable support network (compare the Ubuntu forums to any Mac forum, it's not even close), and I have discovered how powerful the command line is as a development tool.
Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.
Plus, being able to develop web apps on the same or a similar operating system to the environment it will be deployed on is incredibly convenient.
I will say that most of my leisure time now goes to developing personal projects, rather than to gaming or other multimedia - things I often did on my Mac. But I think that's a good thing. When I do invoicing or I need to work with clients' data on spreadsheets, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, respectively, have served me just fine.
If you live in a multi-computer household like I do, I think it makes sense to have one machine that dual boots the latest Windows and Ubuntu to be able to take advantage of games and other multimedia. However, for the PCs that are only being used for day-to-day things like email, web surfing, and office tools, then Ubuntu is the best value there is.