why Unix?

[Saaa]

>
> Also - for me at least, learning Unix as an occasional activity (e.g. 
> cygwin, the occasional ssh, trying a couple of things) has had very little 
> value. Didn't work for me in the least. I remember how I installed cygwin 
> for the first time and started it. It was very exciting - I could try Unix 
> in a sandbox! So I started cygwin.bat and there it was - one black window 
> with a "% " prompt. I knew only ls and pwd, so I ran those, and then 
> closed the box. Unix wasn't telling me anything.
I did exactly that :D

> I had to complete a sizable task before I felt I'd started to get the 
> point.
>

If I were to switch right now it would take me a few days to install all the 
programs.
Most programs I use are open source anyways, so that wouldn't be a problem.
Even my old Photoshop is gold or so in wine.
But then I would just have a slightly crippled windows box
(less games, cs4 and office are garbage on ubuntu).
When would I start using things that aren't on windows?