I've been using Ubuntu since the 5.10 beta, although I bowed out for about three releases a couple years ago because I had display issues (however, I found out later it was easily fixable and therefore felt like an idiot; on the other hand I felt the time away was beneficial, because when I committed to it again I had gotten far better habits relating to managing the Linux side of my computer).
I'm not anti-Microsoft or anti-Apple (although I may be strongly opposed to some of the aforementioned's business practices, but I don't judge their OSes or their products based on that, I judge them on their own merits), but on the whole I am very much pro-open source. Few of the pivotal programs I use are not in that category. So as far as that goes, Linux is important, but it's not everything. There are still some things that Windows does better, either because of certain restrictions (most of my video software is Windows-only, even if most of it is also open source, and they don't tend to run very well in Wine; those apps which are cross-platform, such as x264 and ffmpeg, run better in Linux across the board...except maybe mplayer/SMPlayer - video playback is a sore spot) or because Wine is not an acceptable answer to me in the long-term; Wine is a passable answer, but for Linux to succeed we can't rely on Wine, the apps have to be native. ReactOS, on the other hand, is very interesting, and represents a better complete option to me than Wine does, despite the fact that the two teams work together - although ReactOS is still in an alpha phase. The same attitude also largely applies to the Linux Unified Kernel.
My main computer dual boots XP Home SP3 and Ubuntu 9.10. It's an eMachines T1110 that's been tinkered with practically six ways to Sunday...an extra 256MB stick of RAM and a new NVIDIA GeForce 6200* PCI graphics card being the latest expansions, aside from the added USB 2.0 card, an HDD upgrade, and optical drive switchouts - first a DVD-ROM I took out of a junky Compaq we threw away, and then a DVD-RW drive.
*Aye, a five-year-old card. Bought it on Amazon for about 40 bucks. This computer doesn't have AGP support, and as far as I could tell that was the last one that supported legacy PCI and used an NVIDIA GPU.
I also have the 64-bit version of 9.10 installed on my grandparents' computer using Wubi (unbalanced as it is, running an Athlon64 Orleans with only 448 MBs of RAM, and a 667 MHz FSB if I recall correctly - the RAM bottlenecks the system terribly on Windows, but runs pretty well in Ubuntu; it would be more stable had I used a dedicated partition like I did when I used the 64-bit edition of 8.10 on it).
I'll switch them both to 10.04 when the final version gets released at the end of April (although the wait is killing me and I have to fight off the urge to test the beta in Wubi). My next computer will likely be a triple boot of Win7 Pro, XP Pro SP3, and whatever the latest version of Ubuntu is at the time. I won't rule out a dual boot of Win7 Pro and Ubuntu, though, and use XP solely through Win7's XP mode - depends on what the virtualization performance is like.
), and have Linux on my media center and destkop. I haven't actually been using my desktop for quite awhile since I bought a monitor hookup for my Mac laptop. Going to turn my desktop into a server at some point for file backups, hosting applications, etc. Waiting on the OpenSolaris 2010.3 release.
