Im mainly a linux guy myself. ArchLinux on my main computer. Arch also on my VPS. Home server is debian. Labs at Uni are CentOS (there are Windows machines too, but I havnt used them). Windows for the rare occasion I play games. And an android phone.

I dont really like cloud apps myself (im a console and emacs junkie thou). Im very controlled on what I do put on facebook/twitter/plus, I keep a local copy of my email. Google calander and reader are about the only web-apps I use often. Calander the sync is pretty important to me (labs and phone). And for RSS I need to be online anyway and it does a pretty good job.

Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 forever!

Well, I use quite a number of operating systems. I’ve got Arch on my desktop, Gentoo on my server, FreeBSD on my NAS, Ubuntu on my laptap, and at work everything runs on Solaris. I think it’s a pretty nifty setup. Now I’m not sure what these ‘OSx’ or ‘Windows’ things of which you all speak are, but I’m sure they’re pretty neat too.

@ Phil:

I did. First thing, actually :) It reminded me of my CorelDRAW days very much but it feels kind of unbalanced, workable but not pretty. And it also requires X11.

I’m somewhat an oddity in that I triple boot my MacBook. I’ve found that I primarily use Fedora, but I switch between OS’s fairly freely. I’d have to say that my workflow varies between OS’s quite a bit because I use them for entirely different reasons. Certainly my browsing is all the same — Google does a good job of keeping my settings neat across platforms — but that’s the only similarity. If I’m in Windows, its because I need something Windows specific like CAD, games, or some Excel extension. OS X is primarily used for managing music, videos, and photos (I rather like Time Machine backups) and sharing said things easily with other Mac users.

Although I’m using my Chromebook more and more frequently, there are a number of improvements to be made to cloud apps before entirely living on the web is possible. While Google docs is adequate for basic paper writing, the spreadsheet and slide presentation aspects need a great deal of work before they reach parity with any of the popular desktop office suites. There’s also not yet good web support for LaTeX — there are a few projects getting going, but nothing I’ve found has been usable. If Google ever finishes “chromoting,” though, all of this will be irrelevant.

My family has a mishmash of XP (kid’s computer), Win7 (wife’s and 1 other laptop), Archlinux(1 laptop, 1 desktop and 1 server), 1 iPhone, and 2 android phones. I finally setup everyone with their own Samba share on the server so I don’t have to try and manage backing up 4-7 different machines. I told everyone to save their stuff to the server or it doesn’t get backed up. I also moved all our media (pictures and music) to the server so I’m not trying to keep 70+GB of music and pictures synchronized between several machines. So far so good, but it’s only been a couple weeks so far.

My wife and I use Dropbox to share files back and forth. I have a keepass database in the dropbox folder so I can use it on any of our machines if I need to. Haven’t been able to convert my wife to using keepass yet…she still calls and asks for passwords :)

The hardest part of the samba share is getting everyone’s permissions right so only the adults can alter media files, but kids can still view them, and when my wife uploads a picture, it has the right permissions so that I can alter it later on. Ugh!! I’m still not sure it’s 100% yet. I’d also like to upgrade our network to ‘N’ wireless and gigabit wired to make the ‘local cloud’ media browsing a little more snappy….but that’s not particularly cheap.

We all use libreoffice and either winamp or clementine for ipod management. The iphone is new so I may have to put itunes on one machine…haven’t tested the iphone with winamp & clementine yet.

But the kids can move pretty comfortably between platforms because like you said…firefox/chrome, libreoffice and clementine all look the same no matter what machine you’re on!

Scott

Windows on my desktop, Ubuntu on my old and underpowered laptop (which was like a breath of fresh air at first, but has since gotten a bit heavy for the poor thing, might need to find myself a new distro at some point, or just buy a new one)

But in terms of the software I use, doesn’t really matter which OS I’m on – Firefox, VLC, GIMP, OpenOffice. Gotta love the open source world. MSN vs Pidgin isn’t too much of a difference, nor is there much to tell between the Skype clients. Would be nice if Foobar2000 ran natively on Linux, but it runs happily under WINE.

Only thing I really miss on Linux is a mid-weight image editor; there are mimics of MSPaint (although I’m yet to find one of those I like much) or there’s the somewhat more bloaty GIMP, but on Windows I quite like Paint.NET, which won’t run on Linux.

Basically just waiting for Steam and the games I play to play nicely, either natively or with WINE; that’s the main reason I keep Windows around. Well, that and the fact that my storage is currently a li’l bit locked into their Dynamic Disks system for RAID, but that could be changed.

@ Victoria:
Have you tried Inkscape instead of Adobe Illustrator?

To me it’s the opposite – since I started using Linux as my primary OS (around 3 ½ years from now), I’ve gotten so used to the niceness that is using a proper shell that returning to Windows, CMD.EXE and its lack of shell programs is a pain. Another problem is my current dependence on virtual desktops and tilling WMs.

I still use Windows, but keeping a Putty window to my Linux machine is indispensable for my well being, unless I’m gaming.

I’m pretty much Windows-ified, because of my constant need to play games on every platform imaginable. I used to have a MacBook, but my brother wanted one for his school use, so I gave that away. I used to have an iPhone and iPad too, which I’ve sold off to make way for an Android. Still finding a nice tablet replacement (currently joining the TouchPad craze).

I used to rock Ubuntu at work, but my development and test environment requires Windows, since my team predominently does Windows work. But I persisted with , Ubuntu and Vmware Player as I couldn’t stand the default Windows XP that I was supposed to use. A few months ago, I discovered that Windows 7 has been approved for use and I promptly switched to it.

It’s not that I’m a Windows person or anything, but my work life (Windows dev env) and personal life (gaming) basically warrants Windows to be in my life. Luckily, 7 does not suck as hard as XP/Vista did (yes, I hated XP).