I've been thinking lately about why I tend to like OSX so much despite its obvious faults and my qualms with some of Apple's design descisions. Oddly enough I've been thinking about OSX in terms of "the best desktop OS to come along yet".
I say that because I think OSX either fits or has the immediate potential to fit the entire gamut of desktop usage. For new users or users who really just do not care how or why their computer works it makes a lot of tasks plainly simple without beating the user over the head with simplified baby talk tutorials. On the other end of the spectrum OSX has the fine grained control and powerhouse features of a real Unix system.
For the more inclined user OSX supports a staggering by OS standards number of programming environments to run programs in or interact with. You've got the Cocoa/Carbon system to run your traditional Mac software, a good Java environment which is scores better than most, especially ones available at no charge with the OS, and to top it off it has a fully compliant BSD Unix subsystem which lets you run a multitude of ported Unix apps of various licenses.
Thats three native operating environments, all you get with a default Windows XP install is the Win32 environment. You need extra software to even run Java apps or POSIX compliant apps. Linux supports a semi-POSIX compliant environment but most distributions do not come with WINE or a Java runtime so you can't really count those as being out of the box. BeOS was POSIX deep down and supported the Be environment and had the potential for a bunch of ported GNU tools so that can count as two. OS/2 supported the Win16 environment and the native OS/2 one so thats also two.
It is quite a trip being able to run an app like iPhoto next to an app like Lyx while ntop is open in the background.
The end.
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