The applications that come with Macs are really in many ways the best of both worlds. You can start your day with video editing and DVD authoring that's so easy you'll wonder if it's a crime, and end it in the UNIX shell writing (and hosting) a dynamic web application. And there's plenty in between (just look in the Utilities folder).

It's all built-in, and on top of that one company thought out how it would all fit together. Yet there's nothing stopping you from grabbing other Open Source apps, or buying a great deal of mainstream, high-quality commercial software (MS Office, the real deal, is even there, so no need to make do with an "adequate" OpenOffice.)

As if that weren't enough, the quality of shareware on the Mac is second to none. To name a few innovative shareware developers: konfabulator.com, rogueamoeba.com, lemkesoft.com, codingmonkeys.de, panic.com, unsanity.com, karelia.com, ambrosiasw.com, ranchero.com. I have been hard-pressed in several years of supporting Windows for a living, to find anything approaching the quality and creativity of shareware on the Mac.

The problem I have with Windows is that it is organized and friendly, but shallow. You can do relatively little with a Windows system out of the box. The thing can't even make PDFs out of your documents. All the "innovative" functionality comes from buying Microsoft's 80 separate Windows Server System products (or Plus! packs and MSN subscriptions and such for home users)

Linux, on the other hand, is complex and rich, but chaotic. I'll admit my linux experience is limited, but after trying some basic system administration tasks on SuSE 9.1 my impression is that all the nice graphical desktops and imitation Start-menus are a thin layer of kleenex on top of a roiling hive of plain-text config files and /etc/rc.d scripts. It's enough "choice" to make your head spin, and then make you reach for the documentation, except then you find out much of is full of things like "This chapter coming soon" and, "Vital config file X usually lives in /usr/local/bin/private, but your distro will probably be totally different."

I'm not out to start a war between Mac and Linux because I think they're both very much on the same team these days (or should be). But, I do think that if you're looking for something exciting and perspective-changing in terms of what a computer will enable to you to actually do, the Mac might be a better place to start. Then, check out Linux.