>Apple, by controlling the framework, is able to make it work more or less seamlessly.
This is more or less the crux of everything there is to love or hate about Apple.
This is more or less the crux of everything there is to love or hate about Apple.
However, the one that connects to my display(s) is simply a tool for running Chrome, Skype, FaceTime, Mail.app, TweetDeck, Spotify, and SSH, and, as such, should not ever break or otherwise hinder the incredibly simple tasks which ARE ITS ONLY JOB.
This is why the only computers I own that I touch on a regular basis all have fruit on the back. It's a very simple calculus.
[0] Hangouts are luckily the VoIP of choice for most I work with
Think about what your laptop is doing that we would have had no hope of doing with desktop Linux just a few years ago (if ever, depending on the hardware).
Sharing access to video capture and audio hardware between software written (sort of) by Apple, Microsoft (Skype, so -ish), Spotify, etc. would have been unthinkable. You would have been restarting your primary machine if you made the mistake of starting any two apps that tried to grab your QuickCam at the same time.
Interesting. My personal workstation runs Windows and I too effortlessly SSH and RDP into many headless or virtual machines to dick around and (occasionally) to do actual work. Hey, I also run Chrome, Skype, TweetDeck, Spotify, SSH and the like and I have been for years...on the same install of Windows. It's like your calculus doesn't work at all in my universe.
Actually...I don't think you're doing calculus at all.
Also, have you ever seen the source of Chrome? It's not that simple. Lay-people think it's simple, but software developers know better.
My workflow would work on Windows, too, aside from the fact that it'd suck. (Example: Unplug an external USB audio interface while a song is playing. OSX skips a beat and then plays via internal speakers, at the previous internal-speaker-volume-level.)
I could travel with luggage that isn't Pelican/Incase, too— but I don't.
Need I say more? :-)