Why don’t I ever see it mentioned that the dream of a popular UNIX system with a killer desktop is real … and it’s the Macintosh with OS-X!
Everyone is so focused on Linux that they forget that Apple brought UNIX to the desktop as part of OS-X and they made it nothing less than great. There’s no hype … well … there’s ALWAYS been hype … but Apple did hit it as hard as most UNIX vendors did, they brought it out and made it work.
I always loved UNIX from the first time I got my hands on it. UNIX is great. It’s definitely a programmer’s environment which makes it easy to do a lot of things.
I also loved the Macintosh. I had my hands on one of the early 128K models and loved it. I bought several including one of the early powerbooks and carried with me everywhere (even when that meant carrying a LARGE case to get it somewhere).
Windows has always been OK, but frustrating. I’d much rather be using UNIX for most things and Mac for things I want a GUI for, but I couldn’t afford to carry 3 computers to get what I wanted. Beyond that, everything I needed to work with was on Windows, not Mac or UNIX. So I’ve been carrying Windows laptops for years. That’s changed though.
With the advent of Parallels and the Macbook Pro, I could carry ALL of the environments I loved best with me and use whatever I needed to get my work done. Now OS-X has become my primary application platform with all of my normal apps there. However, Windows has a number of apps that I run, some of which go as far back as WIN98. I can run all of those easily under Parallels. For activities like Penetration Testing or low level network programming I work on the Linux platform because nothing beats the programming environment on Linux these days for this kind of work.