> Apple still makes money selling the computers that are running free OS X Mavericks.

Well you can install Mavericks on machines from 2007, that's money from quite a long time ago.

When you need to finally replace that 2007 machine, Apple obviously wants you to buy another Mac. Screwing over people with perfectly good hardware wouldn't do a whole lot for customer goodwill.

Exactly. That's when people think, "Well, if I have to change OS anyhow..."

I change my OS every few weeks or so... Distro hopping.

Or "Nixploration."

OS is not necessarily tied to a single machine.

It very much is for the average home consumer. Normal users upgrade their version of windows when they buy a new computer, because the new version is what comes installed.

Seems like a lot of effort, that. What do you get for it?

It's not as much effort as it sounds. My home laptop has had Ubuntu, Mint, Mageia, Suse, Fedora, Arch, Windows 7, 8, OS X 10.7, 10.8, and just today, 10.9 on it in about a month (it's a mac).

I have an external hard drive with all my documents, projects, music, movies, etc. on it. What's absolutely essential is recopied to my hard drive each time. It's kind of addictive to dive into a new operating system and learn it every so often. That's why there's a term for it - distro hopping.

It's good for some things. It gets you very good at doing rote computer tasks because you do them over and over in slightly different environments each time - install homebrew, update ruby, install rvm, configure common programs, tweak preferences and small aspects of the OS, etc.

As a result, I can wipe my entire hard drive and bring it back up to my workflow speed in less than 3 hours on a linux distro I roll myself via Arch.

All that said, I like OS X, so I'll be sticking with Mavericks for a while now.

I'd be interested to see your thoughts on each distro, even if it's just a sentence or two. Switching quickly, while obviously making some types of perspective difficult to develop in such a short timeframe, probably makes it easier for you to notice some things most people wouldn't through more typical usage habits.

Bragging rights on HN.

Money from quite a long time ago is worth more than no money at all.

> Microsoft makes no money by giving away Windows 8.1 for free to consumers.

Of course they make money from it. That's very naive of you to think that they don't.

I'm sure with Bing they make at least $0.25 a year per user.

And with the number of users Bing has that's literally tens of dollars each and every year.