There is a middle ground. I use Windows/Mac for gaming, entertainment, and casual browsing, and I run Mint in a VMWare for serious stuff. The added benefit is that I can easily back up, snapshot, and transfer my work OS anywhere. And Mint/Ubuntu provide much better out-of-the-box productivity tools. I map my multiple Mint desktops to numpad keys. You can't do that with the other ones without additional software.