About four months ago I got fed up with my Windows XP Pro laptop image. It kept throwing BSODs much more frequently than I care to admit, IE quit being able to access HTTPS sites, and quite a few more annoyances that made me less than productive for days at a time. I had been thinking about (and wanting to) installing my company's Linux Desktop image. Now I consider myself to be left leaning in the OS realm and had been working with linux in a server enviroment for several years and had been quite proud that the only non-linux system I have is my wife's XP Home pc and my laptop (since every place I had worked at until now only supported Windows images).
When I went to work for my new company a little over a year ago, I found out that they offer a choice in laptop/desktop images, Windows or Red Hat linux. My laptop came imaged with Windows XP Pro and since I needed to get straight to work on my project I kept it. Then (as they always do) my laptop started its downhill slide. So while I was in between projects and my laptop would BSOD at least once a day, I decided to pull the trigger and re-image my laptop with the linux image. At first I was a little sketchy about running linux ("will I be able to access what I need to access on the client's site?" ,"...but what about app, there is no linux equivalent?").
After I got it installed, it was like I was reunited with an old friend. I had been weaning myself from closed-source/Windows-only apps for quite sometime. All my laptops and/or pc's always had Cygwin installed, I had been using Open Office as my only business apps for many years, and my main text editor/IDE is (G)Vim. So I was much more comfortable than I had imagined I would be. The only stumbling block was that I had only been using GNOME for my window manager and our linux image was built on KDE. No big deal after all.
The thing that annoyed me the most about KDE in the beginning was the differences in how it handles the XTerm setup. I had really become accustomed to XTerm in GNOME's keyboard shortcuts being similar to Firefox's.
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