This is a critical point. There are probably people on this board who were born after Ubuntu/Linux desktop UX received attention.

For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

I used to schedule time after updating to fix my broken X11 server

You're suggesting there are younger than 11 year olds reading hacker news?

Wouldn't surprise me if there's at least one. Always outliers.

Only speaking for myself, but I initally switched to OSX right from FreeBSD because of the similarity . At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BSD (mainly because of yahoo I think) and the ports system much easier to use than rpms for instance.

Otherwise I only saw Solaris or commercial types of unix (like what came with IBM servers) in use in companies I directly worked with. I understand that linux was already rising pretty strong, but tried and true Unix/BSD systems were definitely seen as the more 'serious'/professional choices.

>> At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BSD

Which was interesting because then Linux became faster, and had things like better SMP support that didn't get improved in BSD to give it the performance edge until 2007 or so...

In the beginning (10.0 - 10.2 timeframe), OSX was pretty much broken if you wanted to work on software that was destined for Linux. Even the existing software was PITA to get running on OSX, you were fighting both autotools and OSX linker and libraries at once.

Not strictly true, it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project.

(Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned sexy laptop.. and I used it for developing apps for Linux and SGI Irix without much hassle.)

> it was quite possible to write code on OSX that could be run on Solaris and Linux easily enough. You just had to not depend on autotools too much, and understand how to use the OSX linker/libraries properly in your project.

You had to take care to use libraries/APIs that were available at all three systems (no dlopen() or dlsym() at the time in OSX!), and take quirks of the OSX linker into account.

(Disclaimer: I was getting angry at Apple at the time. In a few years, they went through OS9->OSX migration, getting rid of Classic mode in emulation and now switching to Intel. They were breaking compatibility again; it meant buying new software like MS Office again - looking at the PC side, they didn't have such problem. So PB12 was my last Mac for a long time... until 2015, actually).

I don't really consider that to be the early adopter phase of OSX. If you go by the whole technological lifecycle theory that'd be the innovator phase (though realistically I think it was mostly just the most die-hard left of the old guard Apple fanatics).

To me it's when the Intel macs came along (10.4.4 I think) that new adopters really started picking up steam, but the ecosystem they helped build wasn't really there yet.

At least, that's my perception.