You'll forfeit familiarity and comfort at first, but soon enough Linux will be second nature and any other system will seem awkward. For me, the most compelling thing about Linux is the pace of innovation. Mac OS, after revolutionizing desktop publishing in the mid-80s, saw only incremental improvements over the next 15 years. Now take a look at what's happening with Linux. Two years ago, desktop Linux really didn't exist other than for zealots like Evan .
Servers are pretty simple.
They run only a few programs at a time. Things are predictable, controlled and tight. But Linux users wanted Linux desktops. First came the applications. All of a sudden, instead of a no-frills window manager like fvwm95 running buggy ports of Wordperfect and Netscape, you have several nearly complete desktop environments to choose from, each with its own object model.