You're comparing apples with pears :)
Apple design an OS for a supremely limited range of hardware. Your comparison isn't fair.
In 1998, with a much more immature Linux and X11, it was in some ways ahead of the competition. I remember looking for a free computer in my universities' computer labs and when I had to settle for one of the old and slow 486DX machines, being able to run Netscape remotely on one of the Pentiums being used by another student just fine, fast for me and unoticeable for the other guy.
Windows NT was a joke back then. It has almost no hardware support. When Windows 2000 came out there were even graphics cards better supported on Linux.
But from the Windows 2000 lineage we now have Windows 7, even though Microsoft stood still for so many years with Windows XP.
Meanwhile, Linux gained eye candy, when you are lucky enough to get it to work. The desktop evolved, but Linux did not, and the gap is widening.
BTW: today the decent graphics card marked is mostly ATI/AMD and Nvidia. OS X supports a large number models from both vendors (even those that were never shipped by Apple). How does that fit with the notion that Apple has a more limited set of hardware to support than Linux does?
Which features of the 'evolved desktop' does Linux currently lack?
EDIT: it seems you've edited your text, and no longer speak of an 'evolved desktop', so perhaps my question isn't relevant anymore.
Reliability and usability. Pretty important features, IMHO.
I have no issues with reliability or usability on my current Linux desktop.
How many more reimplementations of basic functionality on the major desktop environments do we need? It seems like whatever the current window manager is, and however well it works, it'll be thrown out and a new one will take it's place, and take a few years to do what the old one did. We'll throw out the audio stack again at some point. X isn't good enough, so we'll throw that out. Since Wayland isn't network transparent, there will be twelve different ways to add it back in and five incompatible ways to run old X applications on top of it. When those aren't sufficient, we'll throw it out again and start over, ad nauseum. And this applies to most things on the system that are "good enough".
Linux on the desktop is stuck in the 90% category, where 90% is implemented (and as we know, this represents 10% of the work). It's always tempting to avoid the unsexy 90% of the work and write from scratch. The end result is throwing increasing amounts of the baby out with the bathwater.
I really feel natty is heading in the right direction.
While I agree generally that a lot of boneheaded moves occur on the Linux desktop (like Pidgin->Empathy), I don't think berating hardware support for not being equivalent to Windows is fair. Also, it's usually wrong; I have always had to install drivers every time I have installed Windows in the last five years, but I have only had to install drivers in Linux on a few occasions (MadWifi back before ath9k was around, Broadcom wireless on a friend's Dell laptop, uvcvideo before it was included in the kernel).
I want a linux laptop, with good battery life, stable suspend/resume, solid CPU performance, 3d graphics sufficient for light gaming, and a high-quality fit-and-finish. Which one do I buy?
If you do want to make the change, you might as well get used to the disparity now ;)
Edit: Installed neverputt on this machine. Works fine with the settings maxed out and the resolution at full screen.
And yeah, it's a complete tank. The only downside I have is that both models seem to have issues with Sandforce SSDs and resuming from sleep, but that's a hardware issue instead of an OS one.
Also, the mobile broadband does not work under Linux, despite the fact that the datasheet for the card says "Linux is fully supported". It will show up as a serial port (well, four of them) after you edit the kernel source (sierra.c) to contain this card's USB vendor/product ids. But without a firmware loader and firmware, you can't actually use the broadband. I feel that this will be fixed soon, though, as the Gobi 2000 is quite popular for Linux and this is the Gobi 3000.
The GPS does work.
Two months ago, me and my father spent two weeks to find one decent laptop for my sister member that was not crippled by a crappy screen, poor battery life, atrocious build quality or weight. And that was meant for a Windows system. We both have jobs, so if we had billed these hours, we could have easily got some really expensive gear just for that.
Adding to that the effort spent for researching hardware compatibility and configuration... This is just nuts.
To come back to the point, I want something that just works. I used to use Linux for several years. Like many others, I ended up with Apple at some point. I simply found out that I preferred to spend money on something decent over wasting time to find a cheap deal.
If you feel adventurous, burn a copy of Ubuntu on a USB stick and go to a computer store. Last time I did that I promised the salesman I wouldn't harm their display computers and the guy let me boot a lot of them under Linux so I could check what worked and what didn't.
I'll soon replace the Acer with a Vostro v130. It's small, light and has a configuration that comes with Linux preinstalled. I'll reinstall it immediately, but it's good to know it works.
I recently switched from a Mac and I definitely miss it at times but there is enough in the thinkpad/ubuntu combo to hold me over for now (openbox, good tiling managers, source code that is open to scrutiny etc).
It is totally fair, because each person has to decide whether they're going to use Linux or MacOS.
Saying it isn't fair is basically saying that MacOS is and always will be a better desktop choice, because Apple picked a solvable problem and the Linux desktop community didn't. I don't know that's true, but that's definitely what "not fair to compare Linux and OS X" means.
I think you're either trolling or are genuinely misinformed. If it's the latter, please accept my apologies.
Both machines are fully supported by Linux and the hackintosh is supported by community kernel extensions. Getting linux up and running for the htpc required a lot of fiddling with config files... adding refresh rates to X manually, custom ALSA configs to enable the audio device to show up correctly, accept the correct sample rates and stream 5.1 properly, adding extra PPAs to get video drivers that support one of the various forms of accelerated video decoding, scripts to shut down gnome when xbmc is running because it interferes with rendering for some unknown reason, messing with launchd because it launched programs that rely on all filesystems being mounted before they were mounted... that's just off the top of my head.
The hackintosh required a boot cd and a package for drivers that weren't natively supported. Once the drivers were installed, it worked. That's it. Everything that took days of tinkering and forum searching on linux just worked.
I have years of experience with linux and this was my first time trying OS X on an unsupported machine. So no, I'm not misinformed and no I'm not trolling, I thought HN was supposed to be civilized :/
I don't see how you can make a categorical statement declaring that as long as drivers are written for OS X, OS X is more reliable than Linux.
Hackintosh != most people's experience of OS X.
Your experience will be particular to the hardware you chose, and the implementations you chose to follow.
In the same sense, I wouldn't declare that Linux is more reliable than 'X' because again, there are far too may variables involved to make a fair comparison.
I think a far more pragmatic approach is to accept that Linux can provide a very robust desktop solution - if the necessary investment in time and research is carried out. Largely, imo OS X is successful because this research has already been carried out on the users' behalf.
That's a big qualification.