> PS the previous email mentioned a steep learning curve and complex > environment as one of the reasons for diehard devotion to Linux et al, > but then why does that same atitude of zeolotry exist in the Mac camp > when (up to OS9 anyway) they didn't even have a command line > interface. They've always attempted to be the epitomy of > intuitiveness. Having extensive user experience with both "classic" MacOS (8.6) and various members of the Unix bestiary, I would say that what motivates devotion to either OS is the appreciation of elegance, just on different levels. In the case of MacOS, the elegance resides, nearly exclusively, in the user interface. The portions of the UI which are least elegant (the Chooser, having to "tell" each executable how much memory it must and may ask for from the kernel in its 'get info' box, 80% of application crashes taking the whole ship down like a magazine explosion on a cruiser) are exactly the places where it interfaces most directly with the inelegancies of the core OS design. In the Unix world, things tend toward the opposite extreme - preemptive multitasking, journaling file systems, RFC reference implementations for most of the networking stack - quite elegant. However, to talk to most of it, there's the dreaded CLI. Of course, the CLI *allows* you to appreciate the elegance embodied in the core OS design, but only after you learn to read it. It is my (continued, despite having Been Trolled) contention that Windows, as a user experience, offers neither enough elegant UI design, nor enough evidence of its inner workings, elegant or messy, to provoke "zealotry" in most cases. -- Chris Johnson Bidler