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Around the time this was written I knew a number of people who had bought a Mac because it was a nice BSD-like command line environment with a reasonable GUI. These same people also spent a lot of their times in ssh sessions to various Linux and FreeBSD servers.

MacOS 10.0 and 10.1 were buggy messes, but the successors were pretty good. Shortly afterwards, MacOS 10.4 and 10.5 improved on it a great deal.

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10.4 (Tiger) was fantastic because it was the first version where the UI and the underlying file system drivers and bash were in-sync - in 10.3 you could delete a file in Terminal but the change wouldn't show up in Finder.

MacOS just kept getting better and better until sometime around Yosemite or El Capitan, with a small hiccup with Lion.

I think they put a lot of extra work into 10.4 because it was also the first version that ran on Intel hardware. Lots of QC related to the platform transition from PowerPC. If all those $2500 MacBook pros had launched with a flaky OS it would have been a disaster.

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