Update: In the time I was writing the article, 3 more votes came in and it ended up:

MacOS X: 725
Linux: 725

So it was an absolute tie. Amazing.

i think it dumb that people are prepared to sacrifice power over an operating system like mac os x. Linux should of one by alot. I demand a recount.

i like to corect my mistake in the second line, instead of "one" it should be "won". sorry for the mistake.

Frankly, I can't imagine running Linux as a desktop OS on a daily basis. It's certainly come a long way but it's got quite a bit of catching up to do, IMNSHO, especially in the area of mature, polished applications. It's in dire need of a standard, world class UI, too.

OS/2 forever man!

Atari rulez dood!

I think Linux is pretty much ready for the desktop, at least for some users. Both KDE and Gnome are at an acceptable level of usability. Obviously OSX and XP are more polished, and have more overall consistency, but Linux is perfectly usable as a desktop, even now. I run it side by side with XP, and with a fairly small number of exceptions, there is little I can do on XP that I can't do on Linux.

I think some of it is what the user is willing to work with, but if Windows vanished overnight, Linux _could_ pick up the slack, and if it had a larger user base, the applications would follow.

Linux after Microsft

and others sux

that is my oponion

I didn't vote because it's moot anyway, but the comment "would be willing to leave the PC entirely to go to MacOS is impressive" is misleading. These voters were asked, if pc's didn't exist what would you use.

How come the abacus wasn't a choice.

All in fun
Chris

Yippee KaaJay Windows Lover!

They weren't ask if PC's didn't exist. They were asked if WINDOWS didn't exist what would you switch to.

I recently migrated my primary home PC from WXP to RedHat 7.3 and so far I'm very happy with the results.

Email and web browsing and pretty much the same between the two.

The main reason I switched is that with the release of WineX 2.1 (another subscription based company!) I can play most of my Windows games on Linux (Warcraft, Starcraft Half Life, etc.)

I initially tried Linux back in 1999 and found it too difficult to setup and run. Based on my expierences so far with RH 7.3, Linux has come a LOOOONG way and is very much usable now.

John

About 'switching' (very popular term, used a lot by Apple):
I recently 'switched' on work, from Mac OS 9 to Mac OSX. The results are good, now i can do more tasks simultaneously, such printing long sizer postcript files and convert to CMYK on Photoshop; the print jobs now are much faster. I also use a good enhanced desktop (not intuitive as OS9, but have a lot of improvements).
I'm trying to 'switch' on my home. On my Intel computer, i installed recently a Linux distro, and i'm very impressed: good desktop, i can run Some Windows apps, faster performance (and i have not well installed the driver-monitor modules!). Not all are happy on WIndows, sometimes i need to use the Terminal, but there's no problem to do all tasks, includig designing and painting.
I also checked my Mac computer, crashed recently, and my problem are the CD drive. For low cost, i can run again my Mac at home. Don't surprise if i don't upload some skins/icons here on the next months.

Hmm... there shoulda been an "OSX86" option. I love OSX, but couldn't give up that configurability with the hardware.

I doubt we'll ever see an OS X for x86. It doesn't make business sense for Apple, a mostly hardware based company, to do so... If Apple were to ever adopt Intel/AMD cpu's it would no doubt still be running inside proprietary boxes. There'd be no OS X to slap on a Dell, for instance.

As far as configurability goes, I don't think there's anything I can't upgrade in my Power Mac that I would have normally upgraded in my old Wintel PC. Hard drives, memory, video, audio, CPU upgrades, etc...