Or he'll have moved to a Mac by then?

Disclaimer: I don't own a Mac... Yet.

How would that be "sticking with XP"?

It's not. The assumption - following on from cstejerean's comment - being that once XP is no longer receiving security updates, any reasonably knowledgeable person would feel compelled to move to something else. I know I will be.

My comment was really just a facetious one, coming from my personal point of view, which is that Mac's are looking better and better these days.

Vista is a big part of why I made the switch to a Mac (for my laptop, I'm running Linux on the desktop).

I'm almost the opposite, Debian on my Laptop. XP Pro on my desktop (until my next big hardware upgrade, anyway).

But as I'm very partial to Linux, I'm starting to think Mac might be the way to go for my next big upgrade. I use my laptop almost purely for development work, but my desktop I use for work/multimedia entertainment.

While I know it's certainly doable to set up a Linux machine for multimedia capabilities, I'm somewhat attracted to the (hopefully) more "batteries included" functionality of a Mac if say, I want to watch a movie piped out to my TV or whatever. In cases like this, I'd prefer to just be able to click a few buttons and make it happen rather than trawl through mailing list archives looking for the right combination of xorg.conf directives for my particular graphics card.

My XP box works fine for this kind of stuff already, but with a Mac, I get the bonus of the familiar Unix-like underpinnings.

Still probably be a while before I might say goodbye to Bill, though.

Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me every time I tried. Getting an external project to work usually has issues, wireless is sometimes flakey and battery life typically sucks. I highly recommend checking out OS X on a laptop. I always found the Mac desktops to be too expensive for what I need (since I already have a laptop I don't need heavy multimedia just an always-on workhorse).

> Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me ...

Then you need to try out an IBM/Lenovo T60. :) This is what I've got (bought it cheap second hand, it was a great buy) and it's rock solid running Debian Lenny, everything works, and works well. ThinkPads in general are great for Linux compatibility.

But thanks, I will definitely take your words under advisement when upgrade time comes around.