Powerbooks are everywhere here at OSCON. It’s like an Apple ad all day. If developers really precede trends, OSX may be making inroads. I think Apple’s subtle embrace of open source is why. They are using it in their products (the whole BSD layer as well as many apps on top of it). They are extending it like in the X11 aqua window manager or Darwinports. The sum of it is that they have filled the void that desktop Linux isn’t meeting.
I run Ubuntu and Debian for my Linux boxes at home and we run Red Hat at work on our servers. I like Ubuntu very much but in my opinion, it just doesn’t even compare with OSX. There will be people that want the whole stack to be free and will require Linux for their desktop. For the rest of us, OSX is that perfect balance. I rarely come across any open source projects I can’t build and run on my Powerbook. And I can still run MS Office.
Apple should cultivate this symbiotic relationship. They should continue to acknowledge Linux (or any other *nix derivative) by providing features and interoperability. It may mean that Apple will never be as big as they may like in the lucrative server market but the consolation will be that they can be the desktop platform of choice.
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