Chicks_Hate_Me's Journal: Why OS X isn't THAT Great

First of all, I'd like to say OS X is probably the best desktop based Unix OS out there. As far as the "just works" factor goes, it beats anything I've ever seen, but for me, it isn't THAT impressive.

One of the biggest reasons is that it is commercially supported, when you have a big company like Apple putting all it's Software Development brain power into a new OS, what can you expect? It doesn't surprise me that they were able to do it. How many large companies are supporting the development of a Desktop-based linux Distro...*hears crickets* exactly! There's talks of IBM supporting UserLinux, but nothing currently has been released. Of course there's the factor of it using a whore of a license called the BSD license. Which allows anyone to take community supported code, modify it and not having to release the source code. So you basically steal the hard work of unpaid coders and use it for your own profit (sorry, I just don't understand the logic behind the BSD license.) Then there's the biggest reason why OSX is as successful as it is, Apple owns the hardware and the software. This is the main reason why it "Just Works". The list of Apple Hardware and third party hardware for Apple is much more limited than say linux and the 11+ architectures it supports. With all the hardware it supports, it's more likely to fail or crash. Now back to commercial support, third party vendors are also more likely to release drivers for OS X than Linux, which makes sense because Apple takes up more of the desktop marketshare. Though it would make sense if these third party vendors would open the code and let the Linux community figure it out on their own, unless they're hiding something...(aka falsified benchmarks.)

So is OS X so totally sweet like everyone thinks it is? I personally don't think OS X by itself makes it great. It's looking at the whole Apple market, and then you'll realize why OS X is so successful.