Poll: What is your primary development system? Mac, PC, Linux, Other

Gentoo running on a Dell Inspiron 1525 at home. At work I run Gentoo on a Dell Optiplex 980 ( I think I have that model right)

A 10 year old operating system is a new fad?

27" iMac, 15" PowerBook. Win 7 in a VM on each. Laptop is the mobile option when the desktop gets too cramped or need some air. Now & then I'll boot up an EC2 image (typically Ubuntu) and dev in the terminal if I'm in a pinch.

Home: Laptop with Slackware. A lot of the supposedly more user-friendly (okay, less user-hostile) distributions have a knack for leaving a mess of my machine without my telling them to. Or ignoring my configuration files. Or changing their init system every other release. Slackware gives me vi and bash and then stays out of my way, so I have no need to switch. The laptop has a bit of exotic hardware that plays poorly on the BSD flavours; otherwise, I would probably use one of them.

Work: The thing sitting under my desk runs XP. It has three purposes: Outlook, internal IM, and a NoMachine session hooked up to a VM with CentOS 5.

Bought a Mac off Craigslist a year and a half ago to do development for iPhone; it was a beat up MacBook Pro 15" from 2006 with slightly messed up screen (backlighting was uneven). However, it was a good deal compared to a new Mac ($600).

It turned out I ended up using the Mac much more than my Windows machine. Why? Because it would come back from sleep in I took a nice paying dev project back in October, with the intention of using it to buy myself a new machine. I ended up buying a new MacBook Pro 15" with the anti-gloss screen and on the higher end of the hardware specs. Am in love with the computer. One of my housemates asked if he could borrow my Windows machine for an Excel class this weekend; I handed it over without hesitation. Haven't turned it on in months.

I originally thought I would have to install Parallels or boot camp when I first got my new Mac, not wanting to have to parallel path with the a separate Windows machine. In truth, I haven't ever installed any of these options. With Mac Office 2011, 99% of what I need to do is available. In the rare case when it's not, I may boot up the Windows machine for a one-off look at an Excel spreadsheet or something like that.

If I were MSFT, I would be worried. Around campus, the Apple logos outnumber the Macs in a big way these days. Two years ago, this was not the case. I'm a business school student, and Windows has always had significant crossover on campus from the corporate world. Our official school laptop is the Lenovo I don't use anymore.

Windows was always kind of a pain, but the variety of software available for it gave it tremendous leverage. I was a Mac addict as a kid, all the way up to around Windows 95, when it just became impossible to continue supporting the platform; the ecosystem had wilted at that point to a shadow of its former self. I have basically been on Windows since then, until the recent switch back to Mac.

Windows continues to ride the legacy train all the way to the graveyard. You can't do as bad of a job as MSFT has done in terms of maintaining a core platform and expect to maintain market share. Everyone from the CEO down should have been fired for Vista. Win 7 is basically the maintenance release that Vista should have been. In the meantime, the Mac has exceeded it by leaps and bounds.