Mac is great if you want to spend the money.
Windows is easier but depends on what version you opt for. home basic is just the basic to operate it and the manufacture adds their stuff on, if they don't install their stuff correctly, you got problems. I learned that from ACER, bought their Aspire 5515 with Vista Home Basic. had it repaired three time under warranty, when warranty was up they sent me a letter saying they knew of the problems with windows and for $200 they can fix it. I bought a System Builders Service Pack of Win7 and installed it, never had any problems since.

Are you trying to start a religious argument? :D

While I'm no fan of the company apple, I'd have to say that if I was forced to choose between Windows and OS, X I'd choose OS X.

With with a proper shell just a keystroke away, and homebrew, you can easily make the system quite usable.

But when it comes to buying hardware, I would buy a PC over a Mac and simply install linux. If you are willing to spend mac level prices, you get much better hardware in the PC world than in the mac world.

Check out the latest XPS laptops from Dell! They designs are beautiful and thoughtful, and the screens on them are amazing.

Neither. Linux Rocks!
In reality, both Mac and all flavors ofLinux operating systems are derivatives of UNIX. With Mac, you pay for the name.
With Linux, most of your software is free. Windows and Mac you will pay dearly for it.
Many people are intimidated by Linux due to having heard of having to use the terminal or command line. In reality, for everyday computing, you don't need the command line.
I would suggest downloading a live CD of fedora and burning the image to a DVD(even better, use a thumb drive). Then boot into the DVD or thumb drive and give it a try. I feel sure you will like it.

Mmmmmm

Unix...
On the old beat up Xenix 286 at kalamazoo
With 32 users hooked up to this one machine
What a learning experience that was

Absolutely true.

And its nice that its there, as other people can often help you fix problems with your system very easily, by providing the commands that you can simply copy-paste into the terminal.

linux when it cost nothing,,,its ten times better than ms or mac...ultimate mint 17.2 is the best,love it

I think all the operating systems have their place, but I prefer to use mac over windows mainly because it has things like an e-mail client build in and you don't have to run around looking for an ssh client or ftp because it's already there. I find changing the keymap cam be more of a pain on the mac unless you put the input menu in the status menu or menu extras and there are very few games for mac compared to windows. Also I noticed the windows networking stack is weak because it wasn't designed for doing much more than office things, so when I talk to people who are using windows in a lot of cases the calls drop and I'm still sitting there. I like the command-line in a way better than GUI but again each has its place. I think there's nothing better than typing pacman -Syu and y to do the updates compared with going to the crapp store I mean app store or windows update whatever it's called these days and waiting an age to get them downloaded and installed.