Been in this game for more than 40 years. Academic side over here and at two US varsities. (I began at OSU then wound up at Stanford eventually, passing through local unis on the way.) Worked for Intel (processor design), Motorola (more processor design), IBM (processor destroyer), others. If it were up to me, we'd all be running VMS on Vaxen. Then MS took VMS and twisted it into a hellish nightmare called NT which did absolutely nothing right, and that dream was finally shattered forever.
There are a lot of my fingerprints all over much of the early UNIX code, and if you look long and hard enough you may still just find some in dusty corners of modern *NIX.
My point being I have some small idea of what I'm talking about, although the Alzheimer's has a habit of getting in the way now.
Yeah, tinkering and testing can still be a whole lot of fun, but for production systems I stick with the tried-and-true. On the desktop, when I have commercial applications to run, that means Microsoft Windows XP Professional. Why? Because right now it works with the applications I'm running with the least amount of tinkering and testing. My hardware is up to it.
Is there even a single compelling reason to throw that baby out with the bathwater by purchasing a complete new rig just so I can get the latest OS to run well enough to stay out of the way of the applications I use right now? Nyuh-uh. No time, I have too much work to do.
