[FredFredrickson]

Your opening sentence makes me wonder: why does it have to be an all-out switch?

When you need a car for getting places and a truck for moving things, and you can afford both, you don't need to choose between one or the other. You can have both, and use each for what you need it for. Operating systems are not a life-choice; they do not demand exclusive relationships.

[blablabla123]

Convenience and it's a time saver. I can only tell from my experience during a certain time:

* my cheap TV card only worked on Windows reliably

* most cool games did not work on WINE (and Unreal Tournament can become boring after some time)

* Webcam did not work on Linux (in fact until 2 or 3 years this was still a big issue)

* One word: MS Office

* many websites did only work on Windows

Yes and that's when you dual boot. So when listening to music and web surfing on Linux, I couldn't write a letter on Linux. Because StarOffice/OpenOffice had significantly lower quality than MS Office during that time. I couldn't play a video game and afterwards browse through my MP3 collection.

In such a situation you will almost naturally stay with the system that has most features for you, i.e. Windows here.

Today's "migrators" are lucky because emulator technology has evolved a lot and modern consumer (multi-core!) CPUs have some serious virtualization support. Moreover many applications moved to the Web. 10 years ago the only thing genuinly cross platform where some super ugly Java apps.

By the way, I am a Linux, OS X and Windows user. However the stuff I use works (luckily) on all 3 OSs. (Ok, I'm honest, not on Windows. ;)) Nowadays I enjoy switching computers and OSs, however this is only possible because I use Unix stuff and that just works almost everywhere.

[engtech]

Being poly-operating-system also gives you a unique viewpoint and can be an advantage in most things, provided you're using each OS for what they are best at and not just trying to emulate a different OS.

[dkersten]

I do all my work in Linux and when I'm coding, spend about 90% of my time in Linux, but for my most recent setup, I elected to run my Linux install in VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host and this has worked very well for me so far. I use a tiling window manager and spend most of my time in terminals anyway (vim is my editor of choice), so its not like my install requires a lot of resources - its almost like running a terminal in a fancy window. I use windows for (non-documentation) related web browsing, for using Visio, Office (since my other team members use it, I find its less trouble if I do too) and Balsamiq and, most of all, for playing games.

Very happy with this poly-OS setup.