I came across an article on bradchoate.com about why he taught having WINE on windows is a bad idea.
http://bradchoate.com/weblog/2002/11/02/linux-for-windows
While he does have a point I have to disagree for a number of reasons, like many of OS/2 users, I migrated to OS/2 in the early 90s, and I was happy with it. I ran 90% of my applications as native OS/2 applications and very few Windows applications. The ability of OS/2 to run Windows apps to me was just an added bonus when there was the few times I needed to use a Windows App. In fact I never used MS Office back then, my suites were IBM Works and Lotus Smartsuite (both were OS/2 native). The only applications that I seemed to run with the Windows emulation was games. I was never incited to want to go back to Windows, and heck OS/2 ran Windows applications better than plain old windows could, a lot of times the applications performed faster than under windows, but that might be because OS/2 managed memory and resources better than windows could.
Windows 95 was not even an incentive to switch, I could do more with OS/2 than I one could ever do with Windows 95. The only reason I returned at the time to Windows was one reason alone, support. Support for drivers and other features got nearly impossible to get for OS/2, and with a sad and disappointed heart I migrated back to Windows. Compared to my experience with OS/2, windows sucked. The workplace shell was still years ahead of the Windows interface, you could not expand the features of the interface either since they were not extensible objects and you did not even have REXX but instead the horrid old DOS batch interpreter.
I did not even upgrade to Windows 98, in fact I upgraded to the closest thing to OS/2 on Windows… NT4. There I stayed because I needed a reliable OS, and settled for running Regina REXX. Eventually getting XP with a new computer, and greatly modifying it to the way I worked. At one time because one computer I was using was giving me a headache, I installed OS/2 instead of Windows 95 on it. Wow, what an experience, I did not have any sound but the machine ran like a bat out of hell, fully showing just how SLOW windows is.
Now, I am on Linux, and I only turn on my windows machine on rare occasions. WINE is a godsend because Linux still has some growing up to do, or should I say some linux applications need to, take for example the GIMP, it a great image editor, but it ain’t no photoshop. I do not like how it handles layers and there small hookups when doing something that you forced to work around those problems. These minor disturbances makes me like photoshop but I am not going to replace Linux for Windows for photoshop alone. There the issue of drivers again with Linux like OS/2 but the stronger linux community helps a lot more than the OS/2 community after IBM abandoned us.
The points are simple, Linux native apps are more efficient, more secure and the user interfaces on Linux are by far superior to Windows. Windows has concentrated a lot of Pizazz without improving much on efficiency of the interface, both GNOME and KDE are years ahead of Windows with there interfaces. I have to admit there are those in the Linux community that are attracted to Pizazz as well, but to date I do not see any efficiency in enabling stuff such as 3D effects of Beryl etc. An interface should be invisible to you while proving you with all the features to maximize your use of your applications. That is my view of a desktop interface, thus how fast I can switch between windows and desktops is more important than any fancy effects. I am happy that the Google Desktop for Linux is just the search and not the memory hungry sidebar that it is on Windows. Search I need, useless widgets I do not. Yes, some might argue that having updated weather is useful and I might agree with you on that, but a lot of the widgets are redundant and useless on most of them,