[landofredwater]

Does that mean that paying for an OS means your time has negative value?

Surely the time spent installing, configuring, and messing around with your personal desktop or laptop after already having paid for a complete OS is tantamount to buying a prebuilt PC, taking it apart, and putting it back together with a few missing screws.

Zero is still greater than any negative number.

[charcircuit]

The argument is that you will lose relatively less money from the time wasted. So instead of wasting $1000 worth of time, you only are wasting $200 of time.

An operating system that lets you waste less money, means that you will save money. Saving money is what can make purchasing something worth it.

[landofredwater]

As alluro2 pointed out in another comment on this little chain, you also get to pay less money for the guarantee of control over that configuration.

Phrased another way, you're paying more for a limited set of tools, it's not that you must spend $1000 worth of man hours to configure the minutiae of a Linux system, it's that exploring 100% of the configuration options on Mac (or even windows to a lesser extent) is so limited you only have $200 man hours of total possible configuration space.

Confusing analogy aside, you just have less possible room to move and thus people spend less time moving. That doesn't mean you must move on Linux, just that you have the freedom to do so.