[scoith]

Apple builds fancy gadgets and gathers a fan-boy population, and eventually starts selling more. This really doesn't say anything about Linux desktop.

This whole thing about backward compatibility and the discussion that surrounds it is just vague. Here's a practical "true story" for you: I'm using GNU/Linux for more than 10 years now, and it is still alive.

Never had any vague binary compatibility problems either, because I'm not strangely expecting to use an ancient binary version of Gimp on my current system. That's because FOSS is source oriented, not binary. I'm not suddenly trying to use a 15 years old graphics card whose driver is longer in the kernel either, because I don't use a 15 years old graphics card.

[diminish]

well said; the linux user is mostly a diy developer like me; I enjoy the fact that what I am running on my laptop runs on my servers and everywhere.. Windows can't do this, (So I was using windows server on desktop), OS/X is dead on server.. Linux is pretty much the only sane option for independent developers.