<p>Eloquently put Boneh3ad, thank you for posting that. Your point is well communicated.</p>
<p>The main problem with Linux is that there’s a bizarre array of different user interfaces, each of which appears to have been developed by 10,000 different people, none of whom ever communicated with one another. Ugly, poorly designed and entirely inconsistent.</p>
<p>A huge drawback to the “open source” movement is that human interface design engineers aren’t able to enforce usability standards. It takes an iron hand to say “The way you’re doing this is impossible for anyone without an MSEE to understand, so do it some other way.”</p>
<p>For people who love to tinker and play around with the guts of the OS (read: computer engineers!) that’s no obstacle. But for everyone else, 99 percent of people, they don’t want to bother - hence, Linux on the desktop has never, ever gained more than a tiny niche of the market. And never will.</p>
<p>By far the most popular flavor of Unix is Mac OS X. The same powerful, stable underpinnings but with a pretty wrapper so you never have to see a command line if you don’t want to.</p>
<p>Never heard of a class that required a laptop. If your school has a library with computers, then obviously a laptop isn’t necessary. But it’s going to be extremely convenient. I’d recommend 13" or 15" at the most. Actually I’d say if you think you need a bigger screen, use the extra money you would spend on a 15" and buy an external monitor or LCD TV for your 13". Why anyone would buy a 17"+ laptop is beyond me, outside of the odd person that may need portability and a lot of power. Or gamers that like to play games in different spots lol.</p>
<p>Wow, great post!! Thanks a lot for the help. That really puts things into perspective. By saying that Windows gets viruses, I guess I should have clarified. I meant that there are just more viruses out there for Windows so it’s a lot easier to get viruses on a Windows. The statistics aren’t exactly in favor of Windows users, although I love Windows 7. I want to try out a new OS though, and I’m thinking of maybe using Linux. My friend has it and it doesn’t seem to need much user input from command lines/shells or anything though? What would you do using terminal in Linux?</p>