Here is an old post of mine about hardware and macs i resurrected and had to do with OSX vs Ubuntu ...
Umm… the backwards compatible thing is bunk. I’ve run Leopard on an old 1GHz G4 PowerBook. Yeah, it was slow, but come on… you’re not going to be running Vista on P2 and you sure wouldn’t want to run KDE4 on one either.
Software changes, everyone thinks eye candy is cool, and hardware is cheap. Computers are faster now, space is pretty much a non-issue due to high capacity and low cost drives so guess what… *everything* bloats. That’s not unique to OS X. I dare you to benchmark KDE4 to KDE2.
That being said, I’ve been using OS X on my desktop, full-time, for years (since 10.2 or 10.3, don’t remember which). Paying for upgrades is minor. Apple has done the work, they’re entitled to some reward for it. I would *hope* the same attitude is present to some degree in the OSS world and people reward the folks who put together their OS by buying a boxed copy or making a donation or giving back to some degree.
The quality of apps on OS X is nice. I’ve been using (and working, daily, on) Linux for almost a decade now. For a server, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s rock-solid and works well. On the desktop, however, I still find I need to monkey with it too much to get things either a) working or b) working right. Doesn’t matter which distro (personally, I’m not at all a fan of Ubuntu finding it less hardware-friendly than some other distros, like Mandriva). When I was younger and was new to Linux, fixing this stuff and learning was fun. Now I’m older, have a family, have more steep work demands, and I just don’t have the time. I need my computer to work, and I need it to work well. I don’t have time to fiddle with it.
And OS X gives me that. In spades.
I’ve also never been afraid of spending money. I’ve donated to various projects, I’ve paid for multiple upgrades of vmware and komodo. If something works, works well, and saves me time, then it’s worth spending money on (well, if the price is reasonable). Apple’s pricing is reasonable considering how often they make a release. They’re not gouging… just look at Windows for horrid examples of that.
I say if you want to use OS X, use it. I do. Want to use Linux? Go for it. I use that too. I run OS X on my primary workstation and one laptop. Mandriva is on the other two laptops and my two servers. pfSense is on my firewall. The VPS I have runs CentOS. Who cares? Use what fits best. If I thought FreeBSD would make a better desktop than OS X, I’d be using it… regardless of cost.
Cost is in the eye of the beholder. If Linux is free but causes me wasted time because this or that didn’t work, or this kernel flaked out and decided to kill my network card, well.. it’s no longer cheap. My time is expensive.. just ask my clients. $150 or whatever I paid for Tiger is nothing compared to what it saves me in terms of time and sanity. And the money I’ve paid on commercial apps (like Launchbar, VMware Fusion, Komodo, EagleFiler, DayLite, PathFinder, whatever) has all been a worthwhile expense to me because they work, work well, and save me time.
And, FWIW, I use irssi and mutt. Compiled from source. I have fink installed. It compiles fast. I use screen like a crack addict uses crack. I ssh to my Linux boxen to do administration. I mount NFS shares. I do the same stuff I did on Linux, without the headaches. $150 every two years is peanuts for that.
Now i will admit that since the newer releases of Ubuntu my attitude towards it has changed.