Freedom of choice, being able to fix things yourself, ability to work on the same OS your server uses, being able to run old programs or on older/cheaper hardware -- all these and other things are not sentiments.
Why are you guys complaining about a guy choosing Linux over Mac? Is it because of the sentiment? :-)
They're complaining because the article is light on the why he made the choice, just that he made the choice.
I could imagine some interesting discussion about the relative merits between tcsh and bash given the stated history, but this has little if anything to do with crazy abstractions like graphical interfaces.