Now, read this carefully: I am not bashing Microsoft Windows. Nor am I bashing UNIX. As a UNIX system administrator with 20+ years experience, and a Windows system administrator since Windows 1.0, I can tell you that there isn't a whole lot of difference in the work-load of efficiently running either environment. Sure, there are lots of annoying details in either environment, but it takes about the same time for an expert to load and configure a system. In the old days, UNIX machines were faster to bring online because of the prevalence of decent tape drives while Windows was primarily loaded by floppy - but that's about the only distinguishing factor I can recall. In other words, customers didn't choose Windows because it was better (or worse) than UNIX; they did it because Microsoft/Intel was careful to guarantee them a consistent software experience across a broad selection of hardware. Equally important, application developers flocked to that consistent software experience because it meant their products were cheaper to develop without the headaches of version-specific differences.
This is very true. In my own personal experience, I never even enjoyed using KDE that much mainly because there are too many changes in each new iteration of the desktop (or at least it seems so to me). Instead I used to use WindowMaker, which has not changed in years. I even got comfortable with the Windows Desktop, because it has not changed much at all since Windows 95. As rarely as I use Windows, 1995 is a long time, and well, I'm used to it now. I dont know about Mac OS X, simply because 10.3.8 is the first iteration of OS X that I have a chance to really play with. And just the fact that OS X is so much like WindowMaker that I had no problem getting used to it.
