It is my understanding that if you want all that JAVA speed that Apple tells you about in the ad's - you use "Cocoa" which is a class library for Mac OS X (and only OS X) written in Objective C. So much for JAVA write once.

Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly books) has been writing about users switching from Linux and other OS's to Mac OS X. Looks like the loser is Linux and not windows. Even I would like to play with it and see what it takes to program some DB apps. But I don't have the money and right now I don't see the market. I have not seen any company use MAC's as the standard desktop (graphic's departments are the exception).

Linux needs a desktop that "Just works" (it really would not hurt if it was easy to use and pretty to look at) and has complete integration at the application level. KDE is more like windows but is not very pretty or easy to use (neither is M$ windows) and seems to have plenty of integration. Gnome is pretty not to easy to use and from what I can see very little integration of apps.

John