domtyler said:Macs are as above but far worse.
In what sense? After all, the guts of the Mac OS are an open-source BSD fork. It doesn't get much less proprietary than that! Apple just made a bunch of modifications to it (and released them) and then slapped their own GUI on top of it.
domtyler said:Linux is showing real promise and has come a long way, but has so far failed to deliver the promise.
I think that depends very much on your point of view. But it's true that the GUI on most Linux distributions is poorly designed - but this is mainly because the designers take their cue from Windows rather than current usability research. Or even established usability research for that matter - to look at Ubuntu you'd think they'd never heard of Fitts' Law!