10.4 took until 10.4.11 to be stable. Snow Leopards wasn't great out of the box either. Marco's original post was nerd rage and the new mDNS solution. Was it annoying? Yes. Is it symptomatic of a larger issue? Hardly. I think, like may others, you are looking at this with extremely rosey glasses, especially given the comparison to Linux desktops, which in my experience (around 15 years) is still not as reliable as OS X out of the box or intuitive; too many desktops trying to do too many things too differently. Of course YMMV, but I'd argue it was likely due to confirmation bias.
I stand by the fact that this is nothing more than a meme.
Maybe I have the ole' tinted glasses a la Rose, but I don't remember any really bad bugs with 10.4. Spotlight was slow, iTunes broke yet again, but in general it seemed to work OK. Maybe because I was on a PPC machine back then?
I won't even try to defend Linux desktops, but I definitely notice just as many day to day issue with OS X than I did in the past, and really, I notice a lot more little bugs that really affect me. Like my multi monitor setup menu items disappear. And sometimes the windows don't render themselves correctly. Finder and smb etc..
Well, there was also the Lion period where you literally couldn't use fullscreen and multi displays... despite previous versions supporting multiple displays perfectly. Took them until Mavericks to sort that out.
I've had lots of issues with Mail.app recently too. Especially with older IMAP servers. Then there are also issues with the systemwide accounts.. ugh. I've literally filed over 100 bugs in Radar in the past 2 years vs a handful before that.
10.4 took until 10.4.11 to be stable. Snow Leopards wasn't great out of the box either. Marco's original post was nerd rage and the new mDNS solution. Was it annoying? Yes. Is it symptomatic of a larger issue? Hardly. I think, like may others, you are looking at this with extremely rosey glasses, especially given the comparison to Linux desktops, which in my experience (around 15 years) is still not as reliable as OS X out of the box or intuitive; too many desktops trying to do too many things too differently. Of course YMMV, but I'd argue it was likely due to confirmation bias.
I stand by the fact that this is nothing more than a meme.