Thanks. I have not had one either in probably 3 or 4 years, however I saw one last night on a Windows 2000 machine.
From what I've seen the code quality has improved vastly over the course of the last several OS releases, using NT4 as a baseline. I still see freaky stuff sometimes on all OS versions, usually when
1) playing DirectX games or
2) using peripherals that have buggy drivers or
3) messing around with not-completely-thought-through C++ code
I like Linux though, if you think its for the elite now, you probably didn't try it 5 or 6 years ago. I think companies like RedHat etc have come a long way in making this particular type of OS accessible to normal users.
Yeah, I started working with Linux back in school some 10 years ago, still use it at work a bit too. I fully agree that companies like Red Hat have done wonders for making Linux accessible, I think that's great.
Just got to pick the right tool for the job (even, uh, Apple, well, sometimes). In my line of work we count on a lot of powerful, high level tools to get a lot of work done in a short period of time and Windows is the answer. As a math/compsci geek I secretly root for open source software, I just realize in using it it'd be hard to do what I want to do and get paid.