@Andru:
which always bring people to holy wars
Wise words, I'm afraid I may just start one, I don't mean to so I'll try and keep the specifics out of it...

@Lifepower:
I use x64 linux mint 11 (katya as its called), themed like a mac although you could do anything you wanted. I still sport GNOME 2 for my desktop as many people do. If its your first linux install I would recommend mint - no console faff. Just boot, hook up to the net (optional) click next a few times, tell it where to place the install on the HDD, answer 3 questions about username and password, click your country and wait 15 minutes. Done, all in a nice GUI (keeping in livecd tradition)

Why: Development is crazy, you get mono and wine - so a lot of windows stuff works, performance is inconceivable when coming from windows in many cases. Just try getting it to exceed 1.6GiB of RAM through normal usae with an XP VM, a LOT of firefox tabs, banshee, skype, compiz, LibreOffice writer, Geany and thunderbird Plus no antiviurs as Linux has no viruses targeting it

Stability: I have crashed windows a total of around 16 times over time, windows 7 thrice in 8 months... Linux crashes: 2 - due to absolute idiocy on my behalf - if you have a few braincells this never happens. Like mucking with the file system on a root level (DUH). Linux IS the most stable platform (same as mac - common ancestry through BSD)

Drivers: I am cursed by an ATI card that royally muck up windows (hybrid GPU ). I use the fglrx drivers, crappy but I've only had 1 issue with docky, so I set up a keyboard shortcut to restart it once a week And yes, I call it unstable as a linux user - it messes up once a week. For the record I reboot once a fortnight.

Nicenesses: lets say I want to install some programs that are quite common, like freepascal compiler, geany IDE and chromium (google chrome for linux) I just need to type in:
Code:
sudo apt-get install fpc geany chromium-browser
Or on arch I believe it'd be something like
Code:
sudo pacman -S fpc geany chromium-browser
No downloading stupid exes from random places.... Nice.

And wait a minute or two for the packages to be downloaded and installed - no intervention unless you are installing some proprietary 3rd party stuff that needs you to hit space to say you accept a license once in a blue moon

Hope you get to take a distro for a spin sometime...