linux

While microsoft and apple were stealing from their rich neighbor, Xeros, linux was at home eating Cracklin' Oat Bran. Linux is an OS where files have no association to programs; all configuration and settings are stored "wherever" in text files that grow to be megabytes long; most shell commands are so abstractly named that you would never be able to use them without knowing how they work.. or first reading its "manual page". Linux is an operating system of inconsistancy. Theres over a thousand distributions of linux, and over a billion different modified versions of it. Programs come shipped as source code that you must compile and configure (by way of large scripts that attempt to figure out how your system is running.. since nothing is standard). Very few consumer hardware companies support linux because there are far too many different scenarios they would have to support. Linux is great as a server OS, but its when people try to use it as an everyday OS that it turns them into babbling idiots that stop caring about what a program does and start trying to figure out and change how it works. Since linux was created by people with no aesthetic differentiation... most GUI's you will encounter look like a poor ripoff of windows 3.1.