I've been working with computers since 1976 or so. In that time I've used a variety of environments - in rough order Basic/Four (everybody has a past), CP/M-80, MCP, MP/M, v7 Unix, VAX/VMS, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, and then several more modern UNIX derivatives. I only started using Windows in the late 1990s, and then only casually.
About four years ago I decided to get a new home computer and to try running Windows on it. I chose Windows mostly because I wanted to run X-Plane (a flight simulator) and use it to practice IFR (instrument flight rules) procedures. That, and I'd never used Windows on a day-to-day basis and wanted to see what it was like. The machine was (is) an 800 MHz Duron processor with 256Mb of ECC memory, and an NVIDIA graphics card. I installed Win2k on it.
Much to my surprise, that machine ended up being my primary home machine, probably because it had the largest monitor and was in the most convenient location. Other than X-Plane, I generally used it to log into UNIX boxes (using PuTTY), to play MP3s, to rip and burn CDs, for web browsing (using mostly Netscape) and to occasionally play a few other games. I installed Palm Desktop on the machine and used it to download updates to the AOPA Airport eDirectory - which puts information about every airport in the country on my Palm handhelds. Occasionally someone would send me a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint document and I'd use the Windows machine to view or print them. I also tried several email readers, but none of them worked satisfactorily because none of them could handle several dozen mail folders, some of which had several thousand messages. So it was never a satisfactory machine for reading mail. (Maybe this was a blessing, because as far as I know the machine was never infected with a virus, and I didn't have any sort of firewall. I did however take pains to disable every network service that wasn't needed.)
I found the Windows environment fairly annoying. Overall I'd say that point-and-drool interfaces are nice for programs that you rarely use, and really inconvenient for programs that you use often enough to be familiar with them. I got tired of having to pull down menus to perform common and simple operations. Drag-and-drop is okay when copying one or two files - really a pain if you need to do a lot of rearranging. (I installed Cygwin almost immediately and frankly I don't see how anyone can stand to use Windows without it.) Having to click to move keyboard focus is very annoying - it effectively adds a mode to what should be a modeless environment, since you have to keep track of where the keyboard focus is. Having the current focused window always on top is even worse, since it prevents you from looking at one app's window while typing in to another. These two "features" make Windows's windows a lot less useful than the X window system on UNIX systems. That, and the machine was never very reliable (in comparison to other systems I've used) running Win2k - it crashed more than once a week.
When the final decision in the DOJ vs. Microsoft trial was handed down, I made the decision to stop using Windows. It's been obvious to me for some time that Microsoft has grossly abused its monopoly. This has caused severe economic hardship to much of the computing industry, not to mention billions of dollars of losses to its customers and to ISPs because of deliberately poor security. If the US government wasn't going to see justice done I felt that I needed to do my part, and that meant getting rid of Microsoft software. So I bought a new hard disk, installed NetBSD on it, and put that on my home machine that had formerly run Win2k. My old Compaq laptop had spare disk on which Win95 was installed, and I made a decision to stop using that also. I would learn to do without Windows.
It really wasn't difficult to find suitable replacements for most of the old functionality. NetBSD has the capability to mount NT filesystems, so I was able to read my old files from the Win2k disk without having to transfer them. Installing onto a new disk also let me move gradually at first - I set up dual booting so that I could switch back and forth when I needed to do so. OpenOffice can read most Word and PowerPoint documents satisfactorily, and it's free. If I'm writing a document to be printed, I tend to use emacs to edit it and groff to format it, since those ancient tools still produce nicer looking output with less effort than any WYSIWYG word processor I've ever seen. I tried several web browsers on NetBSD and initially settled on galeon, though more recently I switched to Mozilla. Xmms makes a generally acceptable WinAmp substitute, even to the point of using the same skins. I wrote some scripts to rip and burn CDs that were easier to use than Easy CD Creator, since I didn't have to deal with a point-and-drool interface any longer. Sylpheed is a much better mail reader (at least for my purposes) than anything I found on Windows. I use pilot-link to backup and install new software on my Palm handhelds (one for daily use, another for the flight bag). I found a package called piconv which converts certain kinds of files to and from the format that pilot-link stores them in, and I modified it to export my Calendar and ToDo lists to web pages whenever I sync the Palm. mplayer works reasonably well to view videos when I need to do that. There were a couple of glitches installing NetBSD, but they were no worse than when installing Win2k.
There were only a few things that I couldn't easily replace. The X-Plane problem was eventually solved when I got a PowerBook G4 to use while travelling. The same X-Plane CD contains both Windows and Mac versions, and the Mac runs X-Plane much better than Win2k ever did (the fact that it's developed on a Mac might have something to do with that). The audio driver for NetBSD used to have an annoying bug that it wouldn't always initialize the sound hardware properly, so sometimes it would play at the wrong sample rate. When that happened the solution was to boot into Win2k, and then immediately reboot into NetBSD. But since NetBSD hardly ever crashed that wasn't necessary very often. AOPA's Airport eDirectory absolutely requires a Windows box running MSIE to download updates. However, this isn't much of a loss since I always carry the paper version of the directory with me anyway. I find I can read the paper directory while flying, but trying to fly the airplane while looking up an airport on the Palm is too much juggling. Occasionally there's a website that is dependent on MSIE or some new version of Flash. Generally, I avoid doing business with sites that insist on using MSIE. And most of these web sites are accessible from the Mac running Safari. The Mac has problems of its own, including a lot of the same user interface bugs. But it's certainly better than a Windows box.
Bottom line: there is life without Windows. For me it has been slightly easier than life with Windows, and it keeps getting easier.