“Some in the Linux community appear to be ready to fool
themselves that a pre-installed Linux system with a really nice
GUI, like GNOME or KDE, will be a nice system to roll out the door
to Mr. Dan Q. Friendly in Indianapolis. But sooner or later, his
system is going to hose up, and he’ll be faced with the dreaded
prospect of rescuing a Linux OS … a feat that has about the same
allure for an ordinary user as the first day on the job working for
Section One.”
“I have installed AU/X, Rhapsody, MacOS X Server, MacOS X DP1
and MacOS X DP2. Without spilling any secrets, I think I can say
that all of these Unix OSes, well except for Rhapsody, clearly
exhibited the fact that Apple engineers understand how to write
software that can properly supervise the installation of a Unix
operating system. The Red Hat people aren’t there yet. Not even
close. And so, if one of us Macintosh/Linux hybrid geeks walked
up to Steve Jobs and said, “Hey Steve. Linux is hot on your heels.
What are you gonna do about that?” His response would probably be
something like this.”
“Linux isn’t a mainstream OS. MacOS X will be.”
“And he’d be right.”