why Unix?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Saaa wrote:
>> 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?

When you'd be writing computer programs.

Andrei