FWIW, there are more options than just Apple and Microsoft.  I  was on RedHat from 1998-1999, Mandrake in 2000, back to WinXP in 2001-2002, Mandrake again from 2003-2004, XP again in 2005 but with Ubuntu running under VMWare, switched to mostly web-based apps from 2005-2007, but ended up going back to OS X Leopard (but again, with mostly webapps) in 2009.  I had a System76 laptop running Ubuntu from 2013-2015, and of course all my workstations have been Linux (usually Ubuntu) since 2005.<p>I still have a soft spot for KDE circa 2003.  It was as pretty or prettier than OS X, and also featured &quot;No malware&quot;, but even moreso.  Amarok is still probably my favorite music player ever, much better than iTunes.  People in this thread say that Safari was one of the best browsers available when it came out in 2003 - well, it got that way by forking KHTML.  Stability kinda sucked, but it was very usable.