Maybe Apple dropped the ball in newer versions, but my MBP stays pretty smooth under a load (MBP 1,1 running OS X 10.6).

Funny, that didn't work for me on Solaris, IRIX, or OS X either (you know, all real UNIX systems).

Agreed. Admiral Morgan would have been okay to use Windows 10 as long as it is within the terms of his Letter of Marque ;) . As soon as it expires though, his Windows license probably does too.

Considering how much resell value Apple equipment has you would be a fool to throw it out instead of selling it. Sadly for me, by the time a Mac stops being usesful it's well past time to sell it (I still have a Quad G5 in service as soon as I fix the liquid cooling on it, and my MacBook Pro 1,1 is still usable, just not getting new software).

Looking at the old vendors (HP, IBM, and Sun) apparently Apple is the only company that still even sells a UNIX workstation. Color me surprised.

Change the start menu back to the XAML style and it's pretty usable.

Since privateers are backed legally, they should be okay as long as it falls within the terms of the Letter or Marque

I was of the same opinion too. A Mac Pro is a cheap UNIX workstation.

I'm beyond the point of caring about whether software is free. I care if it works. I also care what I get paid to care about. For years, GNU/Linux worked better for me then anything else I had. In recent years, it has fallen behind in quality, and the infighting has gotten worse.

My friend, I never said I personally planned to stick with them for me. However, there are many things I like about Linux, and my own laptops run Fedora (I can't complain properly if I don't use it and send the developers feedback, now can I?) and Slackware. My home servers are now running IRIX and Solaris, and I have poked around with FreeBSD. For my current job I keep up with Red Hat and Solaris, for previous job I was mixed up in the major Linux distros (Fedora/Red Hat/Cent/Oracle, SuSE, Debian/Ubuntu/Mint), plus UNIX flavors (Solaris 8 - 10, HP-UX 11 - 11iv3, AIX 6.1 and 7.1, and FreeBSD). Fact is, I work with what keeps the bills paid.

Slackware counts as a fringe distro, let's face it. They are more like BSD then Linux. Gentoo is a meta distro, so that hardly counts. And Debian...let's see...did Debian adopt Systemd? Network Manager? PulseAudio? Should I continue down the list of Red Hat projects that are mainstream? Oh, and the Linux Standard base calls RPM the standard package.

If you think Linux is a free market you are mistaken. Red Hat IS Linux. They set the standards that everyone else follows.

Ah yes, the developers of GNOME 3, that explicitly said "Having users is not our goal" and still Red Hat (Fedora) shoved it down the users throats? The people who criticize the situation are in this not because of doing nothing, because we were working on actual problems for others. We are here because someone who needed to justify their relevance to the world decided to attack 1 - a problem that wasn't being complained about and 2 - to write his own solution (a developer that does not have a good track record either) and thus reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of open source init alternatives out there (SMF, launchd, and upstart all come to mind).

Plenty of us are, actually. And are running SAP, or any number of other enterprise applications that require stable servers to run on.

It isn't that simple. Using old versions isn't a viable option once security updates stop, and Slackware is not a option for a lot of scenarios (say running Oracle DB in the enterprise). Linux is not the novelty it once was