I'm an Operating system agnostic, although I've got a pretty strong bias toward the BSD Family. At home, I've got WinXP Home, Solaris, AIX, OpenBSD and Ubuntu L

I'm an Operating system agnostic, although I've got a pretty strong bias toward the BSD Family. At home, I've got WinXP Home, Solaris, AIX, OpenBSD and Ubuntu Linux all up and running right now. I have a MacBook that I tote to and from work, currently dual-booting OS X Leopard and Ubuntu Jaunty. I've dealt with Macs quite a bit: this MacBook replaced a very old G3PowerBook (OS X 10.2) in 2006. I have several 68k macs as well, but they've been shelved for ages. My wife has Windows 7 (MSDN RTM release) and Vista dual-booting on her laptop, and Ubuntu/Win2K on one of her old gaming rigs that's past its prime. At any rate, there are many things Linux could take from OS X. In just a few years, Apple built a very solid GUI with configuration tools that completely eliminate the need for a command-line interface in all but the most catastrophic of situations. Given how powerful the OS X CLI is, I'm surprised to find that a lot of Mac users never use it, and some don't even know about it at all. "Terminal" is just another one of those tools for the Genuis Bar technicians, like NetInfo Manager and Apple System Profiler, right? Still, people who are generally good with computers (take my dad, for example) are forced to learn about a whole new world of syntax and configuration files when using any Linux distro -- no matter how "friendly" people say it is. I like having a rich background of operating systems, but I can easily see why people coming from a non-Apple background get befuddled when faced with a Mac. The learning curve is pretty easy, but it definitely takes more than a single weekend to figure out The Apple Way to do things. Of course, the reverse is also true: the Gnome, KDE and Windows interfaces aren't intrinsically intuitive for those who've never used them before, either. Of all the OSes that I use regularly, I'd have to say OS X wins by merit of being mainstream enough that one doesn't often need to struggle in order to get things done. I like The Apple Way better than I like The Microsoft Way, but it's all personal preference. While I don't mind the occasional need to hunt down dependencies and compile code, or edit a config by hand, it's preposterous to believe that anything requiring such tasks will ever be taken seriously among normal computer users. Linux is getting there, but it's been an insanely slow process compared to the competition.