I believe my area of expertise will be different from the majority of users on this site. I deal in large scale network management systems dealing application performance analysis and network forensics.

To me computers are a profession not a hobby, this means they are entirely functional pieces of hardware. The system that does what I want with the minimal fuss is the system that gets used.

For all my desktop general-purpose stuff it has to be Windows, it works with everything and it’s easy.

For analysis of High-speed networks, the platform I use is a Free BSD variant that has been heavily customized to offer the high performance required to analyse Gigabit speed + networks.

I feel that the issue here is very technical people have the habit of getting very engrossed in very specific areas. Unix people stick with Unix, Mac people with Macs and so on, different operating systems are specialized for different things.

If you wish to implement a budget custom system, Linux is a good platform to build around. However I don’t care what performance increase Linux offers on a low end desktop, the difficulty of use is to great to justify when the cost of a high spec Windows PC is so low.

I can’t see Linux moving from a niche market for the next couple of years as it is to bloody difficult to use.