I think I've read The Gricer's wise words before about being quick to slag off M$ - whilst I like Linux (in fact I even like OS/2 compared to Bindoze XP but for my future career direction I think I'm going to learn fast that Wintel is the daddy after all, save for UNIX servers), I have little reason to run a distro since I mainly program in VS.NET (unaware of a Linux IDE able to write code for the architecture), find OpenOffice for Win very cumbersome compared to Office (but that's a get what you pay for argument, and by paying jack for OOo you get a great deal IMHO and Base looks better than Access in some respects from a DBD/DBA point of view!), have yet to find a program that can interact with/edit M$ Project files to my satisfaction apart from Project itself (saying that, Project doesn't half frustrate me at times!)... and on and on...
I don't like M$'s tendency to bloat out their OS though - it's my hard drive and I'll be damned if I'm giving it 20% of my HD space, hypothetically speaking. Not when some OS's have a footprint that fits on a USB flash drive (not to mention RTOS's for things like ARM chips and other microcontrollers - total footprint including SDK - 2.5MB). Not just Microsoft though, also on my bloatware hit list are Adobe, Sun (OOo is hefty and sluggish as is the JDK at times), Macromedia, most modern games developers along with... me on a lazy coding day. Oops.