About a year and a half ago, I moved my home computer to Linux. I still had a Windows machine in the house available for Quickbooks and Adobe work and the like, but my primary computer was running Ubuntu (no dual-boot) and, with some reservations I was quite content.

Since then, I finally broke down and bought a laptop. While I have a dual-boot for Ubuntu on it, I mostly use Windows since I spend much of my work time using Quickbooks, and need regular access to a customer’s website that, alas, is IE only. Sure, I could probably get this set up on Linux but it’s not worth the time. And there’s the thing I noticed the other day:

I don’t need Linux.

There was a year or so where it would have cost me a lot in productivity to not have a Linux desktop. I was using Kate for website development and FTP, so KDE’s built-in FTP client was great. It was also easier for me to set up development environments in Linux. (Note, I’m limiting my discussion here to desktops; for production servers I use Debian and I can’t imagine using windows instead).

But now that I’m using Eclipse for development, and Capistrano for deployment (from Subversion repositories) I really don’t need Linux. After all, Eclipse, Subversion, Ruby, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, they all run of Windows. Using Capistrano for deployment, Putty is generally sufficient for my SSH needs, and my home file server runs Samba. I even found a “Tail for Windows” utility.

My point, if I have one (which I probably don’t really) is that with more and more high-quality multi-platform (open-source) software, the choice between operating systems can come down which OS supports the one ”I’ve got to have this and it only work in (Windows|Linux|OS X)” piece of software. (Note that none of this software is web-based, for me). Sure, I’d prefer bash or something over Windows’ command-line, but I’m finding more and more for a desktop, the OS just doesn’t matter.

For some reason, that kind of surprises me. Including the irony that such a view has by and large led me to using the non-open-source option.