[bad_user]

OS X is different ... it is based on Darwin, which is a kernel inheriting parts from BSD ... but Apple fully controls its development and Darwin maintains binary compatibility. Also when they released OS X, they also distributed it with a compatibility layer for older OS 9 apps, and they also shipped the Carbon APIs for legacy code.

Unfortunately the Linux kernel itself breaks binary compatibility quite often, so you can't distribute binary blobs if you want to keep up-to-date (and you want that, since newer kernel versions have more hardware drivers). Linux distributions in general have a bad history on maintaining backwards-compatibility.

And without third-party proprietary applications being distributed for this "commercially supported" OS, it's not going to make any inroads.

[vetinari]

Mac OS breaks compatibility too, so there is nothing that could be better than on Linux side.

Actually, if you really care, you can still run a.out and glibc5 ELF userland binaries on Linux. On the other side, any m68k or ppc for classic apps are no-go on OSX, as well as some ppc-for-osx. Also for third party drivers, you need version for specific OSX point release, they are not generally very compatible.

There are also entire classes of hardware that are unusable on OSX, period. (I remember wasting particularly lot of time on trying to get IrDA run on OSX with a little bit more than just IRCOMM. On Linux, it worked out of the box.)