OS X is not Linux

(And a Mac is Not a Server)

There's often a fair amount of noise comparing OS X favourably to Linux, since it's all BSD-ish Unix under the bonnet, and all the trendy geek tools run on it. But OS X is not Linux in two ways which matter to me (as an owner of multiple boxes of each variety):

• The window system is not networked. Any of my various Linux boxes (the firewall/router, the RAID file server, the application server) can run applications and serve them back to my PowerBook via X11. By contrast, the Mac still has a "stapled-to-the-chair" local windows system, and can't serve its applications outside its own screen. (There are things like VNC, but its performance is spotty, and there are issues getting a headless Mac to serve a full-sized desktop.)
• OS X is not free. I mean Free as in Libre in this context: by and large, we have to wait for Apple to roll out the OS and the base applications, whereas on Linux I can just go and get whatever bits and pieces, and whatever versions, I need. (On the Mac we're still stuck with Java 1.4.2, for example.) OS X is going the way of Windows in this regard: particular feature sets are tied to particular OS releases which are treated as products (i.e. paid upgrades): one cannot rely on all OS X machines having a particular feature, because some owners may not have paid for it. Or a machine might have been orphaned (as my Pismo PowerBook might well be once Tiger arrives). This is only incidentally an issue of price: it's mostly an issue of control.

Of course, one can turn a Mac into a server by installing a flavour of Linux on it (and I'll probably try that with the Mac mini), but one loses most of the benefit of the platform (at which stage, one might as well just go and buy a Shuttle), and support for some important components is still iffy or absent. (Java, anyone?)