Imo
Difference between those three os's, if you want to just call linux an os, is in a word, everything. Windows is for everyone, mac is for the the people tired of ms junk and have a lot of money, and Linux is for the advanced user. well... doesnt have to be it's user friendly but it still is a bit.
Windows
Pros: Windows has a large software base so any program you ever want can either be cracked or purchased. Everyone knows how to use it, as everyone has. its already installed. everyones an expert. its the Kcar of the os world.
Cons: It's built with no love tho. from the ground up it's just not solid.
the windows filesystem ntfs frags fast, the registry bloats fast, it's insanely heavy on resources proven by running a linux distro on the same system.. it's prone to corruption from malware and viruses. its designed to fail and designed to push the hardware industry. Look at vista, why was it so heavy? thats why.
Linux
Pros: Faster by far, all the software is free and in one place, you get a new os usually every 6 months which means a total upgrade, updates are more frequent and pushed out quicker because its open source, no virus issues as it was designed with security in mind, ext4 filesystem has no frag issues so no defrag. it doesnt slow down over time. doesnt suffer from bloat. its totally customizable. it's a multiuser os, so it can handle the load. memory and cpu seem to be better utilized. amazing support for new and old hardware. drivers are usually just there so no searching. its not windows.
Cons: picking a distro is daunting, theres a lot of them. issues with suspend hibernate so a bit of tweaking, games for some, it's power hungry on battery, it's not windows so for many thats a con. no start button control panel etc. file system layout like c: d: is different and thats confusing at first. if it breaks you have to fix it. it doesnt run exe files. you can get wine but..
MAC
idk i've never used it. it's built on Unix tho, specifically freebsd. osx is just a face so it was designed by the best underneath. research unix, you'll see what i mean. it's actually called darwin, and those freebsd guys are crazy paranoid about security.
Basically if you dont care and just want what everyone else has, use windows. If you want to get the most out of your pc, try linux. hell you dont even need to install it to try it, you can put a live distro on a pen drive, reboot, and take it for a spin without messing up windows.
