I just began reading this, and I don't like it that much. The random attacks against GUI seem unnecessary and distracting. But worse than that there seems to be quite a few factual errors, like:

"Under the hood Windows, unlike Mac OS, is DOS- rather than unix-based"

Last DOS based Windows was released like 15 years ago. At that time Macs had their own weird OS too.

"A general point about unix commands: they're often robust."

Unix commands, robust? You gotta be kidding me, they are great for quick ad-hoc hacks, but robust they are not. Just as an example here is how the common task of handling can fail: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html

"For example, with ls you can use an arbitrary number of arguments and it obeys the regular expression (more about these later) convention that an asterisk matches anything"

How this is an example of robustness? Besides globbing is not regular expressions. In regexp you'd use .* to match anything, not a bare *

> However, a file in Microsoft Word's proprietary and unknown formatting is utterly unusable.

While I'm no fan of Word, it is very much arguable that Word file format not anymore proprietary or unknown.

> I used to use Smultron until I found, unforgivably, that the spacing of documents when you looked at them in the editor and on the terminal was different.

Let me guess, tab width difference? Yeah, that is how tabs work and not really a fault in the editor.