Benchmarks
When OS X first made its appearance in 2001 and for many years afterwards, the performance of xnu, its kernel, and many of its subsystems was ridiculed as it was way slower than its competitors. Elitism, slower development cycle, closed source etc. aside, Apple has managed to make Mac OS X much faster than the leading linux distributions in the span of a couple of years, while at the same time the desktop linux projects and companies struggle with reinventing the wheel and fixing regressions. The situation on the desktop today for linux users is — comparatively — worse than it was a decade: traditional strongholds are gone [e.g. performance] while usability, stability and features are more or less unchanged for many years. Sad for Open Source, sad for competition.
Xorg GNOME KDE have so many layers that make it all seem a like huge elephant or a giant turtle. Focus is THE issue in the FLOSS world because focus means sth not happy which means getting payed to do so
@Niko: Layering is definitely not the problem here. Chaotic layering is part of it. I don’t think this is about the money, it’s much deeper than that; people are willing to spend hundreds of hours for free on stuff they like, but they are not willing to sit down and fix major design issues with FLOSS because they are comfortable in their 1970s UNIX environment with some cheap eyecandy sprinkled on top. When I was younger I, too, was willing to spend hundreds of hours tinkering with my machine and software and [it seems like a lifetime] about seven years ago I ‘switched’ from using predominately linux and BSDs to OS X [I had already dropped Windows from my computers a year earlier]. The switch was liberating in some ways, despite the fact that OS X was — at the time — taking its earliest steps. The pace in which it has improved is more or less showing how much more the FLOSS community could have achieved if it managed to convince [viz. pressure] hardware vendors into releasing their specifications and at the same time focused on solving the real issues affecting the average user [not the average linux hacker].