Hiya folks
) my reasoning for using linux is more longterm . From what Ive read it doesnt seem to matter what OS you use and in fact the whole ease of use thing plays a big part, however - I moved to linux
1: because I have used linux for a while
2: looking at it longterm at some point theres going to be a point where I perhaps have a small OS and am considering making certain parts the best way, perhaps trying to get my c functions done to some standards, so being able to look at and compile kernel source is handy. I suppose you could just maybe us vmware or something but still I have downloaded some kernel source and its good to see how some of the drivers are written in c.(I was considering this for a while but there was a poster on here earlier who made me commit to this)
So basically when Im stuck in the future with what c functions to add to make my driver compatible I can possibly look at one of the early linux versions and see how basic drivers are done, read the kernels documentation. In fact I was looking at a kernels docs folder yesterday and it provided a good lot of online links starting byu explaining kernel theory and then gradually on to more practical stuff
I will be using both windows and gentoo though
Obviously I dont want to get bogged down at this stage though so Im going through some of the wiki guides on linux and will be reading alot more theory , I just really want to give this a fair go so Im keeping all m y options open while stilll trying to make small steps of progress so plan:
read read and more read
have 2 OS's so as to be able to try relevant tutorials to their native system
Have 3 seperate small systems from seperate guides
Get to grips with memmory management
get a simple memmory system in place for starters
Start getting good at reading sectors from my FD
STart getting to grips with the IDT and writting code for HW ints
Read up on file IO
learn to store an empty file of x bytes on a fat32 disk
Learn to load more high lvl commands into a file so that they can be used kind of like in a shell enviroment - they enable me to type more abstract commands for creating a file, reading from a file - Im thinking at startup the commandfile on FD gets read into a part of memmory and when the enter key is pressed the line of chars gets read, checked against the commands in memmory and executed(Actually this prob a bad system , but its just to give people an idea of the many things I will have to do before being able to consider using proper good coders, kernel source)
Expand on my C Lib more
etc
someday consider making some systems to conform to well known standards prob years down the line , who knows
Point is just small steps
At a later date being able to talk to kernel programmers and the alike for linux is going to to heaps of benefit to me learning
(Just to finally say Im doing OS dev on quite a new system with PCIe cards and an NV chipset , so some of the drivers from one of the gentoo CDs dont work , I know I can fix this but moving to linux there may be a danger of getting bogged down with other things, just something worth bearing in mind for anyone thinking of doing it)
Both systems have the pro's and con's. I use Linux mainly for testing suspicious exploit sites, or when I want just speed and stability. In Windows, where only complete reinstall would be solution for, er, slowness (my disk contains at least 2 million of programs 
), I use Windows mainly for gaming, OS dev, main system administration etc.