Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

Continued...

In my opinion, OS X is the best example of what a beautiful and functional GUI can do for an operating system. Can you imagine what it would be like if OS 9 was the default OS on all of the new Macs? Ick. Beautiful machines deserve beautiful software, and Apple has developed two solutions that complement each other very nicely. Do you think as many people would be interested in Macs if something like OS X never saw the light of day? Fat chance. In this example especially, interface really was almost everything, at least initially.

Linux has also experienced some dramatic interface improvements. It’s gone from being an OS that only geeks used to being an OS that everyone can use. As was the case with the operating systems discussed above, early versions of Linux were (especially) rough, and it was hard to make sense of what was going on.

It may still be hard to completely understand what’s going on when using certain Linux distributions, but at least the interface has become something that has the potential to immediately attract curious users. To be honest, sometimes the interface within Linux can even give OS X a run for its money, which is surprising, to say the least. If you want to really be impressed, just look at some screenshots or watch some video of XGL running on Linux. The really amazing thing is that, unlike Windows, these effects don’t necessarily require the latest and greatest graphics cards and processors to run correctly. Linux is famous for making due with very little, and the interface is no exception.

Even with these advances, some users reject all of the bells and whistles and use an environment that isn’t a resource hog. There are people who still prefer Windows 98 and 2000 over XP just because of the GUI alone, and if there is a chance that they do use XP, they immediately set the visual style to Classic.

As is the case with life in general, no matter how foolish it may ultimately be, first impressions strongly influence how something is received. It doesn’t matter if you’ve built the most powerful OS on the planet, if it isn’t visually appealing, and the GUI can’t be customized to fit the user, then you’re going to lose potential customers.