I use Linux for server purposes(most efficient form of servers) since a lot of the software that I use are not well supported or even on Linux. on my work machine, if I need something done on Linux, Virtual Box is generally my answer. I do think it's a good OS and it has a good amount of features that neither Windows or OS-X can bring, but it's not as good for multimedia purposes(EVR is superior when counting playback quality abilities, and a lot of editing software are simply lacking,) I also need DX(10) for obvious reasons =/.
and since you have experiences, goto doom9 forums and tell them what you said and I'll bet you'll get destroyed very fast =P(about encoding and decoding that is.) real video was never a good format for quality distribution though, they've improved over the years but they still have lousy audio codecs and the video quality is only better because they've updated to 264 type video codecs recently, but the options are terribad(not a real word =P.)
