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Apple has a closed market. If you want to buy a new Apple computer, you *must* use OSX. The hardware sales support the OS development effort.

The Intel hardware platform is an open market, where each Linux vendor has to compete with other operating systems including other Linux distributions, and very few of them have some other source of cash flow to support a full-blown OS development effort.

Just a guess.

Sure, you just aren't looking in the right places. Walmart sells PCs with Lindows as the only OS. Walmart has expanded their offering many times since the rollout last year. Many other countries in the world are selling millions of PCs pre-loaded with Linux from differing vendors. Right now I would say the buyers are mainly either cash strapped internet only users or tech savy countries supplying Internet PCs to their people so they can get on-line.

There is already a group of windows clone penguins marching on the windoze monopoly. Try http://www.lindows.com/, http://www.xandros.com/, http://www.lycoris.com/, http://www.libranet.com/ ... and on and on.

RedHat never was after the consumer PC market others were and are. Red Hat just went where their money is, the server market.

Now as far as Novell and SUSE, this is a big deal. When you marry the Ximian desktop and red carpet with the second biggest commecial Linux distribution, then add Novell's worldwide sales and support, things are getting interesting. SUSE currently has offerings on the shelves of most of the big retailers. Consider 60% of PCs sold worldwide don't go through what we would call retailers in the US.

I think what you are seeing is that the 'pay penguin' is making it's market debut as support and upgrades sales. Not as free software. Money is being made in penguinville.

I wasn't a big fan of IBM when they wanted to rule the world of computing and am not a big fan of m$ now that they want to rule the world. Mono-culture in the marketplace is bad, whether it is computers or cars. Market choice rules.

Can anyone explain to me why Apple can turn BSD into OSX but nobody seems to be able to do something similar with Linux on intel?

IMHO:

Linux is a committee effort, Apple is proprietary, it can move and decide faster.

Now someone like Novel could "do something similar with Linux on intel" but then it would be a proprietary system as well.

"Free" Linux is going to be slow in arriving with a "standardized" desktop that's suitable for consumer/home non-tech users.

Remember also that Linux is not Unix, so there's still some ground to catch up for it.

I also remember in the 90s when the holy grail was to bring Unix to the desktop with a decent GUI. It broke down in the various standards battles with each vendor trying to get its product to become the standard. (It also didn't help that Microsoft joined competing groups and gummied up the works.)

So, what Apple has done is quite remarkable and gives it a lot of room to grow bringing more and more features of FreeBSD to its product through new interfaces.

It's a remarkable product, IMO, and should logically be the alternative to Windows on the desktop for non-tech users at least until Linux is able to provide the same ease, simplicity, security and functionality to the consumer market.

FWIW.

Why, FREEBSD is far more stable than the best Linux implimentation out there... Linux gets a lot of press, and such, but FreeBSD is a far more stable OS.

IF linux community joing the FreeBSD community, you would without question have a stable reliable desk top OS inside of 3-5 years....

BSD has already been turned into a reliable desktop OS by Apple, so doing the same with FreeBSD on intel is not a huge leap.