Should I buy windows 7?

Hi, Its my first post here.

Let me Explain my scenario first,

I'm in my second year of my university. I'm studying computer Science. I was always fond of mathematics and computations so i have mainly avoided more IT related pragmatic courses, This also includes web development and other stuffs. I have mostly taken Algorithm, Data Structures, Computation, Discrete math, Concrete maths, UNIX related courses , AI etc. Why i'm saying this?

My experience with computers started when one of my relatives gave me an old laptop preinstalled with debian linux and book about unix systems. I was quickly fell in love with computers and they become my only hobby. I teach a class of high school kids about programming and mathematics as by part time job. And whenever i could round up some money i try to by something computer related stuff. my dad bought my first computer. Then i have bought two . actually whenever a new processor is released i try to build a machine with it. As my machine was bought from retailers it came with a windows xp.cd. At that moment i knew nothing about windows so i didnt bother and installed debian on it. my other two machines are custom built by me they also run on linux distros. my core i5 machine runs on fedora 13. my core 2 duo machine runs on debian lenny and the old pentium machine runs on ubuntu server. i use the pentium machine as ftp server and keep backups of other two machines on it.

Most of my friend uses windows as their main OS. But i didnt think of using one. But from them i have heard for job market i have to know some programming in windows environment like .NET or VB. I never programmed anything in these environment. All my life i was using gcc, gdb, python for serious stuff implementing algorithms or and shell scripts for small desktop utility for my usage. At that point i bought a vmware workstation license for running linux distros and solaris. So gave the windows xp go for the first time. it installed cleanly. I never used windows as the labs of my university runs on various flavors of unix and linux. windows UI looked like kde so i thought it wont be that different. but suddenly i found out that its command line is very weak. Its command line editor 'edit' is slow and does not have any features that i need to write something. Next thing i could not understand the system structure and where the configuration files are. and it also lacks basic tools like sed, awk,grep ,cat without which i can not do anything. and the default gui text editor seems worthless. so i downloaded VIM for windows. and i thought i should not think about the os itself and then downloaded VSstudio express edition. it is slow and bloated. The text editor comes with vs studio sucks. the debugger also does not suit me either. so i asked my friends how i can use the vc++ compiler from command line so that i can edit in vim and compile with vc++. they could not tell me how to do it. I also could not found how to use vstudio's make utility. and the debugger can not be used from command line. running microsofts compiler and other development tools as i need it seems to be difficult and i could not found documentations about it.

even the simple uses of the OS seems difficult because every tools seems to be designed as gui only. i could not found how to pipe or input output redirection among different tools. So i asked my friends about windows 7. They told me its much better than xp and it has a good command line interface. i have some money saved for future usage. So i'm thinking of buying a windows 7 to run in on vmware.

What i want to know is windows 7 is better? should i buy it? I think in this forum there are people who are experienced in both environment. so please let me know IS windows 7 is better for program development and simple usage.

As far as command line usage goes, Win 7 isn't that much different than XP so don't expect it to work substantially differently in that respect.

However, if you do some looking around you can find most (all?) of the various tools you are used to working with in the Unix world have been ported over to the Windows world and can be run from the command line.

You might want to take a look at cygwin which claims to be a "Linux-like environment for Windows." I haven't used it personally but it looks interesting from the web page.

I say run VMWare and look at Windows 7 in Virtual Machine.

For the reasons you have stated, yes, there is a need for ASP/.Net programmers (Which includes the Visual C++ and the like). But at the same time, look at Dice.com for tech jobs. You will also find jobs that want LAMP familiar type people, both in private and government/education levels. I know it is hard to believe, but there are some systems that will want Linux experienced users and willing to learn other code bases besides the Microsoft Visual Suite. But it also doesn't hurt to be familiar with the Windows environment for a simple reason... Largest Desktop market in both home and business.

One of the challenges that will always come will be the need to find way to have two different OS models to communicate with each other, and finding ways to adapt or know how it is possible. In both private and government/education areas, there will be legacy based systems where they can't convert information or need to convert information to a different platform and having the experience in both is very helpful in the long run.

As far as the command line, you may want to try Powershell; I've heard it's better and brings Windows far closer to the power of terminal in Linux but I don't really use CLI very much so I can't confirm this. And like they (above) have suggested, try it in a virtual machine first before buying it.