Between the Mac, Windows and Linux OS's, Linux is the most rapidly changing of them all, so your experience several years ago is likely dated. You might want to look again.
As for Matlab, I wasn't sure of your meaning. If you were referring to its availability, it does come in Linux, Mac (Intel) and Solaris versions, though I think some of the toolboxes are Windows only. If you were saying that the license is Windows-only, you should check again. It is often the case that the license is based on the number of seats, not the platform. If your licensing is indeed tied to Windows and can't be transferred, you could go virtual and run Matlab in Windows in a virtual machine. Sun's VirtualBox is free if you want to give it a try. I don't know about the other virtualization offerings, but Parallels has a way you can transfer your real machine to a virtual one. If you aren't using any Matlab toolboxes (unlikely, Matlab is notorious for needing a toolbox to do nearly anything useful), you could try replacing it with one of the open source programs Octave or FreeMat, which offer a good degree of Matlab compatibility and are multiplatform. The statistical computing and graphics package R is also multiplatform and has a Matlab emulation package. Of course, if you use Matlab quite frequently and at a high level, these alternatives likely will not work for you.
As a longtime PC user, I agree that Windows could be a better OS. But I'm not sure about switching to Linux. After checking several years ago, there were a lot of things that I have been accustomed to using Windows that I couldn't use with Linux. Is there a comparison between Windows & Linux on the web? What would I do with essential software that is supplied to me via a site license from my employer that offers only Windows versions? One such is Matlab, an engineering application.
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