£45 for an operating system which you use every day and will support almost every program under the sun seems like a decent deal to me. I'm not averse to occasionally paying for software if its very good and reasonably priced.
I used Vista for a couple of months and couldn't see what the fuss was about. It wasn't terrible at all, it worked fine. My belief is people just don't like change.
Well, as I've mentioned before, the ability to run Lightroom & Photoshop is the dealbreaker for me. As far as I'm aware these aren't supported by anything but MS and Mac.
That's what it comes down to for me also. People claim that Gimp is equivilent but it just isn't as good in reality. If it were then PS wouldn't be the professionals tool of choice given that it ain't cheap and Gimp's free.
That said you can run PS under linux using Wine - I have done before and had no problems. I'm not too sure about Lightroom though.
You can also run grep under windows using cygwin.
after using windows 7 for a week or so now I have to admit its very good, everything seems to just work, I haven't even needed to install codecs yet.Managed to find a patch for it to make it genuine so I am going to roll it out to all my other machines (x86 on the laptops)
I'm not using the beta version, its the RTM version and there is a patch to make it genuine which I found on a torrent site.I can send you a link by PM if you PM me for it but I don't want to draw unwanted attention towards this forum
There is a usable flash demo of the new windows OS here:http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/The new version of Solitaire is interesting.