Why the fsck are all of you people commenting running OSX? We were fighting for a free, open OS, remember?

I really can't understand why hackers, coders, etc are happy to sign up to the shit Apple are doing. I do understand that "normal" people love Apple, but I just can not understand why coder people, who grew up learning to code in a GNU world (like me) can succumb to go Apple.

I'm someone who used desktop Linux exclusively for 10+ years before switching to a MacBook Air running OS X.

I made the switch because I no longer had the time and interest in maintaining my OS - I wanted it to just work. Much can be said for Linux distros' improvements in hardware support over the years, but it pales in comparison to paying for a superbly built computer (even Torvalds uses an MBA) and never having to think about hardware compatibility or OS breakage again. That's worth the (significant) premium in cost for me, and it is worth it for many others on HN.

(This is only on the desktop side, obviously; I use an Android phone and run Debian/Ubuntu on my servers.)

I used that same excuse to switch to Mac, but found that OS X really didn't "just work" and that there were tons of things that needed extensive configuration to get to work properly.

Now, I'm on a Chromebook Pixel, and I can say safely that it's the only computer I've EVER used that really lives up to the "just works" mantra. To top it off, it actually is Linux inside, so for someone like me who uses a Linux VM on OS X most of the time, all I have to do is install crouton, do startx and go with Gnome 3 (which is quite polished now).

if you're bypassing the ChromeOS by installing a full Linux stack then aren't you undoing the "just works" part and you're back to the same issue of "maintaining" an OS. And its a very expensive machine for what you're getting. The Air is less expensive for more hardware, and you get a real operating system.

Not quite. Around 70% of the time, I'm in pure Chrome OS. The 30% I start a GNOME 3 session is to edit in Sublime and do some light image editing, and since GNOME 3 is pretty much full-GUI now without many config files, it's one setup and done.

Can you switch without a full reboot?