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Part I
Part II

Part I
Part II

I assume that you haven't tried the N770 yet.

So from a developer's point of view, the choice of the X Window System ... is a good one.

That's the problem: You can customize it to look like Mac OS X. Mac OS X is Mac OS X without even trying. The main thing about Mac OS X is that it has more than just a pretty face (though it certainly has that :-). There's a standard toolkit for applications to access the functionality of the Operating System. There's very little set up, the user doesn't have to even touch a text configuration file or a tar command. And there are subtle things that make the basic Macintosh configuration just.... work. Apple was able to concentrate on making a full toolkit because they didn't have to bend over backwards to work with X11. The Linux desktop has some wonderful features, but I have yet to have everything working together smoothly.

The major problem with X11 is standards. Or rather, lack thereof. X11 started as a research project with no toolkit and no definition of other necessary standards. There have been a host of toolkits built on top of X11; GTK, QT, Motif, Athena, and many others. The more popular ones are reasonably well built and robust, but they will continue having interoperability problems. Copy-and-paste doesn't work consistently, the look and feel of applications varies vastly (compare XPDF to KOffice to Firefox), and there is absolutely no specter of a standard on sound.

When all of these factors come together, they can create a user experience that is almost as painful as flying by commercial jetliner on December 23. But just as I would brave holiday traffic to get to family, I'm willing to work on Linux because

This guy elaborates nicely on the subject: http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000271.html

There's an old saying "If architects built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." I'd suggest a corollary: "if doctors diagnosed patients the way programmers debug programs, no one would ever risk going in to a hospital."

Apropos to this review, I feel like I should mention that I wrote a stupid little Javascript program to automatically generate "Jade Empire" style names. So if you've been jealous of guys named "Sagacious Zu," now is your chance to get even.

The downside is that then you're running X11. And X11 sucks

I think there's a strong argument that doing assembly and testing of your own hardware simply costs more (when you factor in man-hours) and simply leaves you with a less reliable product, with no recourse when things go bad. I've talked about this in detail before, at least in terms of building gaming PCs, but I believe the same arguments apply to professionally-targeted server hardware. Of course there are people who will disagree with me because "building your own server is fun." But fun isn't why businesses deploy machines, generally.