[altern8]

I'm in the process of switching to elementary OS.

I don't know if there are any major advantages besides of course everything being open source. Regarding that, if you don't know how to/don't want to hack the apps you use I don't see a lot of value besides from a philosophical point of view.

There are small things that I personally like better, but it also depends a lot on the distro.

Other OSes are much easier to use in practice, since most things one wants to use are build for the Win/Mac ecosystems, and things seem to just work without much work on your part, which isn't always true with Linux.

Windows, OSX and others can do little IMHO for Linux lovers, unless they release their software open source.