Gnome contributor Miguel de Icaza writes, among a lot of things, the following in his post about why he left Linux behind for OS X:

As long as you had an operating system that was 100% free, and you could patch and upgrade every component of your operating system to keep up with the system updates, you were fine and it was merely an inconvenience that lasted a few months while the kinks were sorted out.

Only a few months, huh.