At first I snickered about how your comment implied that they were at par 20 years ago when the year of desktop Linux was upon us. But desktop Linux with GNOME

At first I snickered about how your comment implied that they were at par 20 years ago when the year of desktop Linux was upon us. But desktop Linux with GNOME 1.x and 2.x were actually pretty consistent any enjoyable to use. It was still different enough from the early unpolished OSX releases, but had its own strengths and some nice touches. OSX 10.0 was arguably a regression from NeXT and OpenStep by then seemed pretty close to NeXTStep in terms of user experience. Ironically as GNOME openly pursued a more Apple-like approach of reduced configuration and “smart defaults”, OSX just seemed to pull ahead. They couldn’t out-Apple Apple and yet GNOME sucked up so many resources and default installs from corporate Linux that other environments couldn’t really compete. I probably also just got too old to unironically run Enlightenment.