It’s come a looong way, believe me. Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) is rock solid and works great. It’s funny, I never hear the “Apple’s going out of business” stories anymore.
Really though, all operating systems have come a long way. XP was a nice facelift over Windows 2000, although 2000 was the real step forward. I’m looking forward to Longhorn in a few years, although I think Microsoft is bloating it up to provide features that they think will make us upgrade. That’s the problem with a marketing-driven company where the revenue is based on upgrades and new product sales. They have to think up “features” that we may never use or care about. In fact I just postulated a theory that Microsoft could market and sell a slim word processor with just the features you absolutely need and probably make it profitable. I’d buy it. Maybe.
Also, Linux is getting better. My last install of SUSE Linux went great–I put it on an old Acer but then repartitioned my PC laptop hard drive and put it alongside Windows XP in a dual boot scenario. the only problem is that anything I install has to be hand-built and compiled. Linux will never succeed in the consumer desktop market if it doesn’t have binary, self-building installer files. You shouldn’t have to hack into the command line to install a printer.