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.
