Washington Post: The Next Generation of the Mac: X

“…The Aqua interface is wonderfully slick. Minimize an open
window, and it swooshes down into the Dock, the catch-all
receptacle that rides at the bottom of the screen. Default buttons
pulse on and off in a cool shade of blue. Dock icons smoothly swell
up as you sweep the cursor over them, then shrink when you move on.
Transparency and shadow effects give a sense of depth to the
desktop.”

“And it runs without the usual interruptions. One program can no
longer monopolize your Mac, and you can launch as many programs as
you want without worrying about memory allocations. And if an
application does blow up, it expires without taking out any other
applications. (Not that OS X itself is immune to crashing; a system
restart on Wednesday caused a “kernel panic,” which hurled down
error alerts on the screen for several minutes.)”

“The benefits of protected memory (what keeps one program from
wiping out others) and preemptive multitasking (what lets your
computer run multiple applications without tripping over itself)
are not new to Mac hardware. The Be OS was running on Macs way back
in 1996, and several versions of Linux have offered that for the
past two years. I’ve been using one of these distributions,
LinuxPPC, on and off at home since this summer. LinuxPPC is fast,
stable and customizable as heck, not to mention cheap–just $20 for
the CD-ROM and documentation.”

“But its rat’s-nest directory structure is nothing a Mac
user would feel at home in. Nor can it easily run existing Mac
software. Nor does it look remotely like a Mac. The very sense of
accomplishment you feel in learning to drive Linux is a profound
shift from the Mac ideal of frictionless computing.“

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