Fortunately I run a mixed system at my place. My laptops are all Vista, my desktops are mixed between XP and Win2000. When I run my render farm, it is usually the XP and w2k computers. I've had no problems with Vista at all. I also have Ubuntu installed on an older computer. That computer used to have Debian, and before that, SuSE. I have used other OS's, specifically Solaris, but these I never had to install on my own. They were already installed, and they behaved better than Linux at the time.

If I were to buy a new system, I would buy Vista, but if I were to buy a UNIX system, I would buy a Mac, since OS X is based on BSD UNIX.

But what I need to do now days is make a serious experiment into the realm of clustering, and in that, Beowulf clusters. This by default implies Linux, and I shall be using Ubuntu. I had to stop myself this Thursday from ordering several dual cores micro ATX's, and other hardware.. several thousand dollars. Needed more research into the software. What I really need is a HPC (high performance cluster) to run one Windows-only engineering application. I've checked out the WINE pages and they have a nice database of apps which have been tested. Unfortunately the very same app I need to make run does not behave well with WINE. So I'm looking for options. I'm disappointed there's no easy solution to implement a HPC for Windows... although ppl say there is.. but lots of pages that do specialize in beowulf how-to's are extremely biased. In the realm of business, it is not usually a decision of convenience that makes purchasing choices, but of the need. I need this one Windows app in a high computer environment. So I'm looking around for options. I'm open to go with Linux as the OS, as long as I can do what is needed to be done.