I guess when I install the latest Ubuntu, it'll give me that as an option during set up? Identify all my families computers and ask if I want to use them as redundant storage nodes? I guess it's smart enough to do bandwidth detection and therefore QoS too so it doesn't clog your internet connection when it's syncing? Let me get right on purchasing that mobile app for my iPhone that syncs my data with my Linux desktop. And I guess streaming my media from the cloud to my TV is just a matter of plunking down $99, unpacking and plugging in my linux box to my TV too? I guess I can have that secure cloud for free as well? I'm gonna go online right now and pick out my system to get that rolling!

Oh wait, this is a fantasy dream I've been peddled for about a decade that still doesn't exist.

Come join us in the real world where grandma doesn't have a sysadmin for a grandson in every house, doubly one who's prepared to spend countless hours configuring and maintaining this hodgepodge you're describing.

Browser stats show Linux on the desktop is becoming irrelevant, mostly placing below "Other".

Continue to try to sell your snake oil, I think most folks have stopped buying.

Java is shit?
Well go you, I guess they'll be hiring you as the Google CEO then, seeing that such a critical decision that has lead to an OS that is becoming dominant in the mobile market was so obviously wrong. I wonder then why it's used by HPC companies? Why in some cases, code written in Java and running using the JIT runs faster than it's compiled counterparts. Maybe it's not Java that's shit but the Dalvik VM? But then you wouldn't really understand all that would you because, well, Java is shit. Such insight and eloquence is clearly an indication of a deep understanding of compilers and runtimes. Why don't you just run along back to vim and gcc, go back to fighting in the playground with the other children over whose desktop MP3 app is better, and let the adults get on with real development.

If you're the engineering type and like building graphics, Illustrator is the shit. Inkscape is pathetic in comparison, and for really awesome graphics, staring with Illustrator will give really amazing results, really fast. Build your page pixel perfect by the numbers, alignments, excellent fonts, path merging for compound objects, Live trace for awesome illustration style graphics from images, define slices, then hit export for web. Hey-presto, graphics for the web and an HTML template.

Photoshop is a nightmare for the uninitiated. You need a manual, but once learned, it beats the crap out of GIMP. Even my artist wife who hates learning new stuff left GIMP behind in a cloud of dust after being given a few tutorials on Photoshop.

You don't really need to maintain something that has the lowest defect rate in the industry, and the best service in the industry. I have had seven macs in 8 years (family and diversity), and only one failed. It was the screen connector on a white mac book that finally gave out after 6 years of usage on planes and road trips. Not too shabby. When I was building whitebox, I had something major go about every 9 months on each system, sometimes precipitating an entire system upgrade because the legacy part was too expensive to justify it.

Mac Pro, yeah, I don't get that either. They really do seem like a major money pit.

Yes, but does it fit in a children's shoe box, operate near silently, have a nifty remote, HMDI out, wireless internet and bluetooth, and look awesome? Or is it trailer park trash; loud, overweight, ugly and unemployed half the time?

My first mac mini was because I was doing audio recording. Fan noise really ruined recording. Do you really want to hear your whiring fans watching a movie during the quiet bit? Or you could brag about how it's in a room on the other size of wall, which most people don't have the skills to wire up. That was my first Mac, and it's been more mac every purchase since.

Sorry - but my actual real world benchmarks show that's just not true, we had to almost double our projected hardware requisition for HP hardware when our Mac benchmarks turned out so have been so much faster than their PC counterparts with what seemed like almost identical hardware. My calculator can show that the cheaper thing is often wrong as well: add up a high gamut IPS display, all those juicy extras that most forget like Firewire 800, a high quality bluetooth keyboard and mouse, non-budget level hard disks, power management that means your computer doesn't sound like a 747 landing in your office most of the day, a truly compatible CPU, USB sockets that aren't so close to each other that half are useless and you have to buy a hub, which can really suck, built-in webcam and microphone that aren't awful, time saved because deliberating between four models can't take more than about 10 minutes, then you can walk into a store and just pick one up, one year walk-into-the-store warranty, and more often than not, an iMac looks possibly cost-effective. Now pile software on that, compare Numbers, Pages and Keynote to Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Garage Band for free, iMovie for free, iPhoto for free, OS upgrades for $30, not $100 or more and my iMac is positively a budget solution!

And we haven't even started on laptops.

Get Joe the Code Monkey to install his IDE with git support, a git client and then he installs cygwin because he likes it. Then watch as he spins his wheels for a week trying to figure out why his SSH key doesn't work, and goes hunting around every directory and every board to figure out why, then gets fired for low productivity. This is not a hypothetical situation, and it was a day I was glad to have a Mac.

Montecarlo is a suboptimal approach to high complexity algorithms of just about any type, not particularly an analysis technique. Because they produce inconsistent results, most folks avoid them preferring to use something else, in fact, pretty much anything else. SVMs have a higher predictability when you use an appropriate kernel function, or do good feature-space mapping, and normally with a reasonable grey area that can be delegated, most of your data can be filtered very quickly. kNN type solutions for certain problems are good, and then there's various gaussian resonance techniques as well. Fourier is good for some kinds of data, particularly those that have elements in the time-domain that are on a cycle, which is often true in time-domain situations. Decision trees can be very effective for probabilistic and deterministic risk systems, and there's always bayesian learning too. Sometimes what looks like Montecarlo can be pseudo-solved using simple ML with gradient descent, and if you use the stochastic gradient descent, it can end up being much much faster than Montecarlo, and produce better results. You still need a kernel function for most of those anyway, and some kind of pre-flight linear regression is often necessary too. ALL those things can be done on any platform as libraries exist, and tools too like Rapid Miner to do all of that.

All that said, Numbers does rock.

Why?

Every had a new machine? They all come with recovery partitions these days. Who doesn't buy a new machine every two to three years? If Joe Public's machine becomes unusable, they take it to the shop, or buy a new one. Even OS X comes with a recovery partition now, and theirs doesn't even wipe out user data.

See A, recovery partition

Most half decent backup software deals with this. Also see entry on OS X recovery partition which doesn't destroy user data. Add time machine and you're about home and dry.

Really? Most commercial software these days is activate over the internet style. Most will work fine when you reinstall, some may require you to have released the license before reinstall, and often a 10 minute phone call to the vendor will sort it, which is often less time than searching for the damn CD would take, or searching over endless posts about how Linux rocks to find the right driver module that got lost somehow randomly.

See OS X again, no drivers because Apple controls the hardware. It always works, 100% of the time, no worry, no concern, no downloading, no fuss.

Nobody cares that your 486 is still running el ancient Debian for two decades. Most people buy new hardware every 2-3 years and copy what they can, commercial software aside.

Erm, have you been paying attention at all? Ars just posted an article showing IE usage dropped below 50%. The other 50% isn't some other Microsoft thing, and a good chunk is OS X increases. I can show you five years of analytics data on a site with over 10mil page views a year showing a steady increase in OS X usage that is exponential, and it's a bigger exponent if you count iOS.

Linux has been the defacto standard in the server market for a decade. Anyone who has a clue installs Linux. I can think of very very few cases where I ran into a tech who had a clue who would choose to install Windows Server. People install it mostly because they have no choice or don't know better or spent too much on a college education in .NET.

Ever tried to get a Rails server running on Windows? Rails is the fastest growing segment in web-facing tech, and it barely works on Windows at all, and nobody cares.

Yes, that poster is mad, because 99% don't care what the heck it is, only if it works and works well.

Whilst the Linux Desktop lies in the hands of those who "scratch an itch", those who want to customize everything, those who want yet another MP3 player, it will NEVER become viable, not ever. It is at an all time low in visible internet usage. I wouldn't touch anything else other than Linux with a barge pole on my server, no doubt.

Stop wasting time building worthless desktop widgets, yet another MP3 player, and arguing over pointless crap like whether Microsoft or Google or Apple is the most evil. Wake up, use OS X for awhile, then build some cool shit for Linux.

But you won't. Because being right, being the most l33t, having the coolest MP3 player on the planet with the most bad-ass over-clocked piece of crap that only you and your mates care about is more important than figuring out what Joe Public actually wants or needs, and making Linux on the desktop a reality.

You had your chance a decade ago. OS X was just a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye, and Microsoft was about to embark on Vista, the most tragic piece of crap, worse even than Windows ME. If you couldn't get it together then, you've really got an uphill battle now.

For me, it didn't used to be "You" it used to be "Us". Then I decided to make cool shit, and suddenly Linux wasn't there for me anymore. Couldn't scan, couldn't print, couldn't read Word files, couldn't import PowerPoint properly, no Photoshop, no Illustrator, worse, no Visio nor anything like it, even AIM was a pain for awhile as Pidgin crashed over and over. I had a life, a job, and Linux wasn't there, and the real world didn't give a crap how "Free" it all was, and I was tired of being up all night trying to recover my X Windows config back to usable, or coax my network share back onto the network.

You want people to use Linux on their desktop, it's easy, build it so normal people like it. Build it so it has the next killer feature, and isn't copying the last one. Build it so you never see or need to see a prompt ever again unless you want to. Build it so that people aren't embarrassed when something doesn't work, because it always works. Beat OS X at it's own game, or better yet, re-invent the game.

And here follows arguments about the EULA, something that 99% of all people will never read, nor care to, as evidenced by Facebook.

You realize that in the computing world, everyone in this thread is the 1%, me included now.