You must be a graphic designer :-) I thought, "What does attractive have to do with professional?" and then realized you meant designed by professionals, not designed for professionals. Professionals' tools tend to look beautiful to them and ugly to everyone else. Maybe this is a step toward changing that, at least for Linux. (Except I'll still have emacs taking up at least half my screen space, with its functional but butt-ugly syntax colorization....)
Nope, I'm a programmer. I just don't like brightly colored notification icons all over my GNOME taskbar. They're distracting - looks (and discoverability, and other UI aspects) directly affect usability, I'm surprised you say you don't get that.
As a counterpoint to your argument, I'd say OS X has more professional UI designers than Windows or the Linux OSs and is generally regarded as being more usable too.
What I'm saying is that beauty to the professional user and beauty to an innocent bystander are different things. A professional actually cares more about usability and certainly cares about aesthetics as they apply to usability. The way a professional perceives a desktop will be very different from the way a casual user does. But some people are self-conscious about that; they don't want their professional exposure to change the way they perceive things, or at least they don't want anybody else to notice. So they want a plastic consumer case for their Hole Hawg[1].
Not that OS X doesn't have a lot going for it on the desktop, but a major part of the appeal for developers is that they can have a great desktop they love without non-geeks thinking they must be a little weird to love it.
but a major part of the appeal for developers is that they can have a great desktop they love without non-geeks thinking they must be a little weird to love it.
Most developers (and sysadmins) I know positively delight in their reputation of being a little weird. I know that given two options I like as well otherwise, I'll usually pick the less common one. I still use OS X, though, having switched from Gentoo in 2003, and having tried Ubuntu and Arch for 6-7 months within the last year.
Sorry if you think I was being uncharitable. I suggest that stating that someone else must not be a programmer on a programming site may not be the best way to conduct a polite conversation.
