"Then Steve talked a bit about the foundation of OS X being BSD Unix, very similar to the foundation of Linux. This produced a few chuckles from the crowd... it's a bit like saying that the PalmPilot has similar foundation to the original Mac, based on its use of the 68K processor, and a programming trick known as A-Traps. The reality is that the BSD foundation is well hidden (as it should be) from users of Mac OS X. And in any case, anyone who has ever used Unix/Linux knows that it's the antithesis of the Mac experience - extraordinarily difficult to set up and learn, command-line driven at its heart, runs best when it's set up as a server and stuffed in a closet. Sure, there are movements afoot to change this - UIs with poor names like KDE allow Linux to look like Unix stuffed into Windows. It's ugly and non-standard. So why mention the similarity of OS X's underpinnings to Linux? One has to wonder. Perhaps to drive up Apple's stock price? "Internet! Linux! Internet! Linux!"