[ylee]

> Apple delivered an OS that the “year of the Linux desktop” folk had been (and still are) trying to deliver for years.

Indeed.

I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it,[1] but OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

(I wrote the above on Slashdot in 2012 <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)

[1] People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.

[gmac]

100% agree on the unreliability of older Mac OS. In the late 90s my university computer room offered a mix of Mac and Windows machines, and I only ever took a Mac if that was all that was free, because there was a good chance it would at some point show you a sad Mac face alongside a cutesy and uninformative crash message, while losing the essay you’d half-written (or, hopefully, only the unsaved changes).