Ubuntu is like the yellow brick road of operating systems, because while much of the path is paved and can ultimately lead you to the Emerald City, there are all sorts of scary side adventures that will pop up and require to you explore and solve.

In my opinion, installing Ubuntu and declaring that you're now a Linux man is a nice way of telling everyone you'll be back at Windows soon. Linux is a good choice, but it requires a commitment to learn more about the inner workings of the OS than you've ever previously had to. None of them are perfect and there is definitely compromise on all fronts. I get why you're annoyed at Windows, but all three of the OSs you listed have pits that you can fall in. My advice would be to stop, take a deep breath, and serious think about what you're asking. What do you guys think? Any advice on direction? Would you guys think you get most of the advantage of linux along with being being very user friendly without the technical headaches of trying to get everything setup up correctly with linux or trying to troubleshoot problems? I'm not going to be able to get a loaded 32GB machine. You get some of the goodies of linux like native ssh support. One thing thats really great about macs i guess is they just work. I ended having to choose one of the older kernels in boot menu. For example Ubuntu 12.10 still doesn't support intel's HD 4000 and when i first got my I7-3700 and then upgraded the kernel it would lock up hard as soon as i booted. One think i know that can be negative about ubuntu is support for hardware (especially newer hardware). I know some basics on structure for example fstab and etc but i'm definitely not an expert. Very easy to get new software and very easy to update all your existing software. I can tell you one think i love about ubuntu is apt-get. Now i need everyone help in making a choice of which direction to go here. I will still need to run windows for specific development work but i'm either going to use parallels/bootcamp on the MAC or VMWare on Ubuntu. You can easily build an affordable machine with 32GB of memory that gives you a lot of flexibility in that i can run multiple virtual environments (Hyper-V) but after tonight experience i'm giving that up. I'm a microsoft developer by trade (SQL Server, Visual Studio/C#/Ect.). I will probably be blogging later about it and will be happy to link the blog entry to this post but after tonight experience i would say i have a strong dislike for the company. After a horrible experience with a Microsoft Product (Windows Live) i've changed my mind. I've always resisted, for the most part, using any OS but Windows.

Ubuntu vs mac osx