Furthermore, media players aside, don’t forget most of the high-quality codecs we use today are all open source (XviD, LAME, ffdshow, x264, Ogg Vorbis to name a few)

@Steve: You’re right. They all have a technical friend (in this case, me). But I’m pointing out they needed me with Windows too. And with linux they BARELY call me now.
I can’t say anything about Apple because I haven’t tried. But I would love to.

Perhaps … until they figure out that 99% of apps or games they have heard about and want to try don’t run on their new and shiny Linux, and they are left with poor , perpetual-beta style, substitutions.

Still if Linux get easy to install(it is already virus and breakage free a lot), and use, I suspect a lot of people to go over in droves(they are so crazy about money, and many people want a computer but do not want to spend money on it ever), and world is full of stingy people who view desktop as just a entertainment TV.

I am too bored of configuring PCs for my girlfriends and friends who are boys, but I suspect they can break anything just to eat my time away.

IMO all the benefits you’ve mentioned there apply to the Mac, except that an ordinary person can set it up and maintain it (it’s really very friendly right out of the box), and the general interface and environment are more consistent & friendly outside of the usual suspects (browser, email, Open Office). Plus, it’s much harder to screw it up with an update (although not impossible). If Linux can nail those things, then it will have a shot at being a direct desktop choice for ordinary folks. Right now it still needs a tech standing in the wings, which the Mac doesn’t really unless there’s a hardware issue. Windows is getting better at this too, although it still has a feel of being ‘PC user centric’. Still, it’s good that there’s competition – even as a tech I’m at the stage where I just don’t want to bother with PC configuration issues anymore – I’ve ‘been there, done that’ over the past almost 20 years, I’m kinda sick of doing it. I’m all for stuff that just works and gets out of my face

I used to agree, but I disagree now.
Here’s my little story: I’ve had a couple of friends that I was sick of going to their homes to fix their PCs because it was full of viruses, stopped working unexpectedly, BSODs, was going too slow, one of the kids miss-configured the system, etc.

So, one day I said (a bit angry and joking at the same time) “enough! I’ll install you linux and don’t bother me again!!” He asked what program that one was. I laughed and explained him what “having a different OS” means. He didn’t actually get it right until he saw it running.

The thing is, after I personally tunned the Debian box with KDE (the default settings **sucks** for an average user), he was happy, and I left his house.
I was expecting him to call in 1 week (as he’s been doing the last 3 weeks), I was sure he would tell me that he didn’t understand linux and wanted me to remove it.
……………he didn’t call. I had to call him, and to my surprise, he said he was really happy with it!!

He spread the word among his friends, and I had to install them linux as well (many of them still dual-boot to play video games in windows), and haven’t receive a complain since.

They all praise the “virus-free”, “stability”, and “how fast it is”, while the cons is that they occasionally find an Office file (mostly *.pps) that OpenOffice can’t display correctly, and the lack of video games. But they’re all satisfied because of the pros. None said anything about the prize difference. It was the least of their concerns.

Other software they praised as being better than WMP or even Winamp, was Amarok.
They all were used to Firefox (because I’ve recommended it long time ago) so that wasn’t a problem.
They also found very usefull that in order to screw the PC, you have to enter a password (the root login).
One of them had Vista and I asked him curiously because Vista also asks when you’re doing something wrong. Surprisingly he said that Vista was too invasive and that he hits OK without reading, but in Linux that doesn’t happen. Prompts aren’t that often and if he sees one, he knows that he is actually doing something he shouldn’t be messing with. His words, not mine’s

One of them said that the “linux version” I installed looked nothing like “that thing that came with my PC” when he bought it (came bundled with GNOME Ubuntu) and this one was much better.

My point is, these was feedback from average, non-saavy users (_very_ positive, for my surprise) Something that started as a joke ended up as a solution.
But I admit I have to hand-edit many settings for ease-of-use after the default installation. None of my friends were ready to install linux, even less to configure it correctly.
This a point that needs to get improved a lot. (A LOT)

I wonder though, what their opinion would be after trying Mac OS X (but none of them has a mac…)

This autumn/winter should be interesting – I intend to upgrade my Mac to Snow Leopard and my desktop to Windows 7; I won’t be touching either of them until they’ve been officially out in the wild a few weeks but I think they’ll stack up pretty well against each other. Win7′s interface looks nice (thanks to some more OS X copying, sprinkled with a few ideas of its own), and they’ve allegedly gotten rid of the dead weight that made it slow & annoying at last, while Snow Leopard has relatively minor tweaks but has been made even leaner & faster (and it already put Vista to shame) so right now I can’t predict what will happen. I expect it’s inevitable that some of the gains the Mac has made after the train-wreck that was Vista will be eaten away, but the iPhone effect is still rampant, and more people are starting to grok that Windows (and even a desktop) isn’t the only practical option for computing now. I’ll still run both for sure, and the Mac as a laptop is still top-notch (if you’re into powerful, portable & stylish).

If you don’t like the dock, you won’t like Windows 7, since that takes the same approach (one icon per application, re-use the same icon for shortcut and running tasks). Of course they also have a version of Expose and the difference between switching tasks and switching documents, which I hated at first but now I totally love – it’s much more efficient when you have a lot of windows open.

I started off hating XCode because it was so unfamiliar but I really like it now. I still prefer Visual Studio, but that’s mostly because I use Visual Assist, which makes Intellisense actually work consistently. Also VS’s debugger is still slightly nicer, although XCode’s is almost as good now. XCode’s CodeSense doesn’t work as well as Visual Assist, but it’s on par with vanilla VS. Also, XCode has shortcuts built-in that I have to buy Visual Assist for normally, like the ‘Open Quickly’, ‘Switch Header/Source’ and others. I’ve also found my builds to be somewhat faster on XCode, even with parallel builds enabled on VS. So, still a win for VS, but XCode really is snapping at its heels now in a way that only Eclipse (with Java) did previously.

“the whole things just doesn’t make sense compared to pure simplicity of the way it is done on Windows.” I understand this view, but it’s really just because you’ve had years of acclimatisation to the Windows way of doing things. I found it very hard to get used to at first too, but I stuck with it and resisted the (natural) urge to flee back to the familiar, and now I love it. Like I say, you might think the same thing about Windows 7 at first since they have made some very similar changes.

Have you tried the OpenGL profiler? You say the GL dev environment is superior on Windows, but in my experience you have to buy gDEBugger to get GL tools like this on Windows, it’s built-in on the Mac.

@nikki: I agree, and this sort of thing works very well for back-end tools. But, I believe a user-friendly experience can’t be created in a piecemeal fashion, because it’s a design task rather than a development task.