When I first saw and used Mac OS X I was truly impressed. Finally UNIX with a decent GUI. But after some time I found that MacOS X is far more unstable than Win2000 and certainly extreamly more unstable than my Linux-box.

All linux-distributions comes with a lot more stuff as well. Often good and nice stuff such as php, MySQL etc.

Ofcourse, the old problem of Mac-programs lagging behind their windows cousins in respect to functionality still exists and will probably do so even in the near future. There is still much more to earn by doing a good PC-program than there is to earn by doing a Mac-prog.

The best solution for me is still a Linux-server for housing daemons etc and a windows desktop for desktop apps and developmental tools (for generating for example webpages for Apache on the Linux-server).

MacOS X in nice, but it just doesn't reach the levels of either w2k or Linux in their prime areas.

Another problem is that, althogh nice looking, aqua isn't as good as w2k when it comes to GUI functionality. The dock is a good example. It's about worthless. If you starts a number of terminal windows and close and open them randomly you can't find any given window in the dock without opening just about all of them. Very irritating! Windows taskbar is far better - an open program has a fixed position and you can always find the program at that position. I can't seem to find a nice way to group programs on the dock either...... Another problem with the Mac GUI is that the menu row is fixed on top of the screen. With large screens that means that you have to move the mouse _far_ every time you want to use the mouse for accessing the menus. Futhermore you don't see the menus of other open progs... Some sort of legacy from the first Macs I suppose, but when they rewamp the whole OS they could have fixed those things as well. Letting every window have its own menu-bar just fits better with a multitasking OS...... Some other frusrating things are the change of /home to /Users, the lack of case-sensitivity, the problem if you drag files to a "closed" symlink to a folder.... and so on.

Another frustrating thing is that aqua lacks many of Xwindows functionality....

I hope Apple will release the GUI for other platforms, because as I said, it's the best GUI for Unix. This could be Apples second chance of turning the whole industry.. They missed their last chance - if they had released MacOS for IBM PC back in 1985 they had probably been the largest software company on earth, but they didn't. I suppose they will do the same misstake this time, and think that PC users will by macs....

I don't expect them to release the GUI for other platforms - but I hope.

After all, even BeOS was released for the PC. And if they release aqua for PCs, you will get UNIX with all it's bells and whistles AND a nice GUI with existing programs and not only promisses. That, I can promisse, will be a hit. I for one would certainly by it.