Today I watched a well respected colleague break down into hysterics after a week of rebuilding his desktop. CentOS, Ubuntu, 3 or 4 smaller named distros, and back to CentOS. Stubbornly he tried to find a distro that gave him what he wanted out of a desktop, which was a seemless installation, an intelligent array of default settings, and functional software. He failed on all accounts. This is a man who has been in the industry for decades. He wrote Top. By all accounts, a greybeard, yet he failed. All he wanted was a desktop. Something to run Firefox, irc, and listen to music on , he ranted.

People don't run Linux on the desktop because it's the right choice. They run it because they're throwbacks with a strong anti-microsoft bigotry, and developing anti-apple bigotry. At some point they decided that the Unix way was the only way. The way of struggling to configure X windows, to beat one of the myriad of bloated, overly-architected swiss army knife desktops into submission. They seem to enjoy getting angry about the dozens of hours they spend per year begging their Linux desktops to just provide the basics of functionality that the rest of the world takes for granted.

Meanwhile, I smugly pet my Macbook Pro and think, "The five years since I switched from Linux to OS X on the desktop have been good to me."