It finally happened. I moved to Linux. Specifically, it is my development machine at work that I installed Red Hat AS 3.0 on. I plan to do most of my development work on Linux from now on.
The installation was a breeze. I had two hard disks on my old (relatively speaking, it's P IV 2.4GHz/512 MB RAM), trustworthy development machine so I just cleaned the other disk and installed Linux on it with a dual-boot option. I switched a BIOS option to boot from that disk to be able to use Linux' boot loader instead of having to go through configuring NT loader.
I'm also running the beta 1 Java 1.5 Tiger, Eclipse and Tomcat (inside Eclipse with the Sysdeo's Eclipse Tomcat plug-in) Everything works great. I'm as happy as a fed pig in mud!
It continues to amaze how much stuff you actually get with any decent Linux distro these days. In contrast to Windows environments, you have most if not all of the apps you are ever going to need already installed and set up for you. I've used Unix main frames starting around 10 years ago and from time to time (often GUIless) Linux servers (as file servers, CVS, web etc.), but not really Linux workstations/desktops. So there's a lot to learn, but I love every minute of it. In a way, it feels I've come back home. Everything just makes sense, and you don't have to hunt for these weird registry settings to change or suffer from totally random failures so common in Windows environments.
It's estimated that Linux currently has around 1-3% market share on the desktop. But this is how it starts. It's well known that IBM is internally moving to Linux. Cisco and Nokia are likely doing the same thing. Once the bigger tech companies have moved onto it, it gets easier and easier for the non-tech companies to embrace Linux too. It just doesn't make sense to pay that much for the same or lower quality software to one company only. We live interesting times.