Choosing an operating system is far from easy. Just about any system comes with enough advantages and disadvantages to take every desktop/notebook user from heaven to hell in a heartbeat.

MacOS is incredibly fast, looks and feels amazing and it’s stable and secure. It offers everything you need for fun and productivity and you don’t have to scour the internet for extra good tools. But it runs on irrationally overpriced hardware, it is a closed system that traps the user in Apple world where every move is meant to suck money from your pockets worse that Sony world or Google world.

Windows has come a long way. It used to be the bloated plaything of hackers and viruses, slow and annoying throughout its Millenium and Vista installments. Only a geek could suck performance out of the XP installment. Frequent reinstalls were (and still are) a necessary headache. It came a barebone system that you have to fill with good productivity and fun tools off internet (good luck keeping your collection of Office, programming, editing, video & audio players up to date while reinstalling over and over). But today it has come a long way, with Windows 7 being more stable and better. Some headaches are still there, but for better or worse Microsoft doesn’t try to trap the user the same way Apple does.

Ubuntu has also come a long way from being “that Debian-based distro”. Now it’s “that thing which gives Ballmer nightmares” , with Canonical dragging this gem out of the mud and into the mainstream to the point where now we have “Ubuntu-based distros” (like Linux Mint). It used to be a geek’s lover, coming packed with everything one will ever need. Stable, fast, secure, it was appended with the ability to run Windows apps via Wine. It came ready for all the popular desktop environments: XFCE (Xubuntu), KDE 3/4 (kUbuntu) or Gnome (Ubuntu). But its greatness became its downfall. Becoming more mainstream led to Ubuntu becoming more bloated. In a bid to make the system ready for any and all users, the default Ubuntu comes with every service up and running whether you actually need it or not. The superuser (root) is hidden, making it harder to geeks to tweak their system. Its current Unity theme is slow and annoying, despite being based on Gnome 2.