Euh… mean? Start a war by expressing my thoughts? You are a silly man, if a war starts from this then you are starting it. Expressing thoughts is a democratic paradigm.

I'd say get a Gui friendly OS to interact with ( and tastes differ so get one that fits you ) and get a renderfarm that can be maintained by you or somebody you know and/or can afford. Its no use having 10% faster renderings if you have to spend 10% more manpower into getting it to work. But if that's no issue then go for it.
Get the fasted for the lowest price, just include all costs in the calculation ( so yes, windows is 300$ to start with? So I can work 3 hours for that, that's not enough for me to learn what a /etc is. )

Has anyone else noticed this? It is not only between windows and linux but a matter of evaluating exactly what kind of scenes one is about to render, glass like objects or not.

Of course I hope that someone on the development team is aware of this and check things out if there is a way to speed ray tracing option in blender. Linux was so slow to render glass that I got suspicious there might be a bug in the (ray tracing) rendering pipeline.

Now with virtualization programs such as VMware, it is easy to make a basic disc using easyvmx or some other creater, booting it up in the free vmplayer and installing as if it was a different pc in a window.

I've been using ubuntu as my main os and xp in a window for quite some time and i'll never go back!

For example:

"nice -20 blender"

Will tell the Linux kernel that "blender" will use all processor cycles.

A nice value of "0" makes the processor values equally shared across all programs.

And a nice value of "20" means it will do it very slowly in the background.

Where nice values used in these tests?

so every time you upgrade to a new computer, keep windows on the one you work with, and use clusterknoppix on the old one(s) then you end up with a jbon (just a bunch of nodes)- private renderfarm, to witch you can parse your (test)renders while being able to continue working on your main station.

(PS the cluster-stuff at freaks.jenus.nl is about a year OLD, in about a month there should be newer stuff)

I hope despite my newby intelligenge those who do KNOW will tribute to a blender-clusterOS linuxdistro withoutX (mosix or XEN)either at my site or their own; - the point being: IT IS OBVIOUSLY NEEDED !
(for anyone, and especially the glory & power of blender (blendrix?))

Going back to the platform argument, you gotta do what works best for you. I've seen more of these silly platform supremacy discussions for longer than I care to, and it's like those Kirk vs. Picard guys, really.

I'll stay in Windows because I've made a significant investment in Windows, and that's that. If I start a render farm, however, you can be sure I'll end up with Linux machines, and if I other digital artists join, I'll probably have a few macs in as well.

Whatever works.

You don't mean to start an OS war, do you?

I was just about to answer you in full length, when it came to my mind that this could be an even more evil april fools posting.

Ingo.