This article says what I have failed to put into words in the past.

”There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.

For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source communit”

(Via Ask 37signals: Why OS X and not Linux? - (37signals).)

I use Mac OS X on the desktop and open source for deployment for the exact same reasons.

With every new major release of Linux and Solaris, I take a look to see if either is coming close to the desktop experience I now enjoy.

Call me a fanboy or part of the cult if you like, but it really is true that I get more done using the platform I have than any other.

I need to post a list of the tools I can not live without, that I have not found true equals for on Linux or Solaris.