That's actually how I feel about Linux; it's a social monoculture and nobody seems to care a whit about anyone that isn't an ubernerd that wants to fiddle endlessly with a poorly designed/integrated OS.
...except Canonical has done a ton of work over the last decade to make Linux accessible to casual users. That said, your viewpoint is the party line in the webdev crowd. And at this point, I'm not sure why I should give a flying fuck, because there isn't anything that Canonical or the Linux community can do to convince Apple devotees otherwise.
I've been using Linux for the past several years without any issues with its design or integration, and I haven't had to "fiddle endlessly". And I'll continue to do so, regardless of what most everyone else thinks and says. Although it is quite hilarious when people express amazement at the fact that I don't own any Apple products.
- Dropped the entire Linux desktop software stack.
- Wrote a well-integrated top-down designed set of frameworks that provided a consistent API for desktop software, with binary-level ABI compatibility across major releases of the operating system.
- Promoted and encouraged the distribution of standalone applications that included all their dependencies, including distribution via an app store.
- Dropped the use of package management for anything other than OS components, especially for managing application dependencies.
- Leveraged their well-designed set of frameworks to advance the state of the art and simplify the lives of developers, making it easier to ship "great software" for their platform as compared to others.
As it is right now, Linux is a cess pool of poorly maintained, unstable, poorly designed, rapidly shifting crap. There's almost no centralized vision, and what centralized vision does exist is almost entirely co-opted and captured by massive ubernerds that don't seem to understand the first thing about producing a viable platform that end-user application developers would want to target.
What Canonical has done is put lipstick on a pig; it's not enough to throw money at making the operating system acceptably attractive to just end users.
I will also note that I'm not a 'webdev', but I am a destkop and server-side software developer. I came to OS X by way of IRIX/Solaris Desktops -> Linux/FreeBSD Desktops -> Mac OS X 10.0.
My preference isn't borne of ignorance, although I think Linux's failings have a lot to do with ignorance from Linux/GNU developers about how the professional development world produces a coherent platform.
