While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI coupl

While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI coupled with an underlying Unix system. I know Windows has got Cygwin, it just "isn't the same" though. My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work with it. After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to (including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully" functional). Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI, Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13" Black MacBook that day. Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something does break. That's good software. Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop (speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes). I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love interfacing with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.