Elfcape, you're just illustrating precisely what I said - all user interfaces are easy when you know how. For any UI, there's a learning curve, and if you're going to change horses then you need to learn how the new horse behaves. If you already know a UI, then you might not want to move to a different one because of the time it'll take. I don't claim to be a proper Mac user, but I'm a fairly serious Windows user from the DOS6 days (my day job is software engineering), and if I have problems with switching to the Mac UI then you can be pretty damn sure that other people will too.

Keyboard shortcuts are the classic here - for example, on Windows, I know I can do Win+E and get an Explorer window up. Easy? Sure. Intuitive? Nope. Something a beginner would know without reading the manual all the way through? No way. Or there's Photoshop, from your example.

I've been meaning to fire up Linux for a while now, but I've never got round to it. There's no apps I particularly want from Linux, and I don't have that much free time, so there's little incentive. Similarly I probably wouldn't switch to a Mac in future because there's no apps for Macs which I particularly want that I can't also get on PC (or at least an equivalent). Unless the price of Macs came down below PCs, in which case there'd be an incentive. But having to spend extra time to learn a new system *AND* spend extra money to buy that system, all to do exactly the same thing - pointless exercise.

As far as security goes, AFAIK I've never been hacked, never been virused. Got a virus scanner and firewall going, and that seems to take care of business. Plus I'm fairly sensible about what files I open, what sites I go to, and how I access emails (hint: if you use web-based email then you're a whole lot safer, whatever system you're using).

Macs *do* get viruses and *do* get hacked, just not very often. But the major reason IMO is not particularly that Macs are secure. More importantly, it's that it's not worth a virus writer's time to code up a virus that'll only hit 6% of desktop/laptop computers and 0% of servers.

Graham.