I've been using Suns since I started my degree at Aberystwyth University, nine years ago. I've been administering them for over five years. And I've been a consultant working with them for the last two years.
My standard desktop has been Solaris 2.x for the last four years (I'm familiar with Windows, but I try to have as little contact with it as possible). At home I use a Mac; if you spent all day typing obscure commands into squiddly terminal windows, you'd appreciate something with only one button on the mouse too. (There are no MS platforms in my house - conscious decision.)
I have quite a nice desktop under Solaris, customised to my needs over several years. I use the Open Look Virtual Window Manager and have most of my commonly accessed applications available from its menus. My favourite ones are automatically marked `sticky' (i.e. they appear in every desktop on the virtual desktop manager).
The applications I use most are:
You can probably tell from this list that a normal Windows PC wouldn't be of much interest to me, and that I have found alternatives for most of the common desktop apps otherwise supplied by Microsoft.
From long exposure, I am also overfamiliar with Solaris as a flavour of Unix and probably expect most Unix commands to work the Sun or SVR4 way.
In my day job, I'm a product manager and senior consultant for the high availability software my company sells, mainly on Sun (we will also soon have Linux ports, so go see!) I write documentation (in LATEX), package the code, maintain the web site and deal to some extent with the support and marketing.
It's also worth pointing out that virtually every other machine in my company is a SPARC running Solaris, including the servers. There are a large amount of public domain applications compiled for Solaris available via NFS mounts. Of course, I can always log on to the servers to use them (try doing that on an NT network), but one gets used to running them locally anywhere.
I first used Linux three years ago when the team I previously worked with purchased a group laptop, which we made dual-bootable between Win95 and Linux (probably Slackware but I can't remember). I didn't get much use out of it but was impressed by the richness of the environment. Most of the additional utilities that one had to compile and install by hand under Solaris, mainly the GNU stuff, were the default commands under Linux. For a hardcore Unix user and administrator, this was heaven.
Last year, the consultancy firm for whom I worked supplied each employee with a field laptop. The laptops all utilised a standard build; nominal Win95 partition and the majority of the disk devoted to Red Hat Linux 4.1 with Applixware. This time, I used the laptop often enough - partly through choice - to perform some limited configuration on the XFree86/FVWM desktop to make it work as I wanted (simple stuff like using the correct GB keymap).
At the same time, we began to install Red Hat for SPARC on a couple of the older SPARC machines in the office, such as IPCs. And after trying vainly to use Solaris 2.6 in 24Mb of RAM on my SPARCclassic, so did I. (The Classic has since been upgraded to RHL 5.1 and now lives at home, acting partly as a fileserver for my Mac and also as a home LATEX engine.) Additionally, I wiped all traces of Win95 off my laptop and upgraded it to RHL 5.1. And I switched to the AfterStep window manager - for a change.
I find Linux similar enough to the SVR4-based bits of Solaris for the transition to be fairly painless. XFree86 configuration is a hassle, but the rest of it is fathomable with resort to Red Hat's support pages and other sources on the web. I'm interested enough in Linux to track the latest news via Slashdot, but not sufficiently devoted to contribute to the source base. I'll take it against Windows any day, and against most flavours of Unix most days. But Solaris? Hmmm...