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In truth, when I took up with Ubuntu last year, I did so out of necessity more than just curiosity; I jumped at opensouce because it offered me a shooting-chance at meaningful computing on the kind of garbage computers I could get.  I chose Ubuntu because of the readily available live CD; the comfortingly Mac-like aspects of the 12.04 desktop, and because it truly made a silk purse out of the sow's ear of a netbook I was using. It's fair to say that if my Macbook Pro had not been stolen, I wouldn't have had any incentive to switch to Linux; I was already tinkering with it in VirtualBox, and that's likely all I would have done.

So, after a year-and-some of daily Ubuntu use, have I been converted or would I run back to Apple if I could?

First-off; I'm grateful for Gnu Linux and Ubuntu, etc., for being there so i could have productive computing on obsolete hardware. I also believe in the goals of the FOSS movement; the results speak for themselves. A lot of Linux distros do a lot of things right. Ubuntu has had the (perhaps unintended) effect of making me much more comfortable with the Command Line Interface. So, no. I wouldn't exactly be running back to the Mac.

My dream computer at this point would be a well-built PC laptop with great build quality and hardware specs and it would triple-boot the unholy trinity of Windows, OS X, and some sort of Linux. There are still great programs unique to operating systems (Irfanview comes to mind). I think the hardware wars of the 1990s are over, and I think software won. If I'm surfing the Web, using Firefox, let's say, my user experience will likely be identical regardless of the platform. That's what counts these days.