Success Quote by Nat Friedman

Calling OS X "sweet" is doing a lot of soft-power work. Nat Friedman isn’t just complimenting Apple’s polish; he’s borrowing Apple’s cultural authority at a moment when desktop Linux still carried the whiff of hobbyist difficulty. “Simple and intuitive” functions as both praise and indictment: an implicit admission that much of the open-source desktop experience, historically, wasn’t. By naming those traits as the standard, Friedman frames usability not as an aesthetic bonus but as an ethical commitment.

The strategic move is the second clause: “GNOME shares a lot of values with it.” Values is a carefully chosen word for a business-minded open-source leader. It sidesteps technical one-upmanship (faster, freer, more configurable) and instead argues from design philosophy: coherence, restraint, default choices that don’t demand a user’s attention. In other words, GNOME isn’t trying to out-Apple Apple; it’s trying to translate the emotional comfort people associate with OS X into an open ecosystem without sounding like it’s chasing trends.

Context matters: Friedman emerged from the Red Hat/Ximian era when Linux on the desktop was still fighting for legitimacy outside server rooms. Apple, meanwhile, had turned “it just works” into a brand religion. The subtext is coalition-building: reassuring mainstream users that open source can feel human, while signaling to the Linux community that “intuitive” is not a betrayal of power-user ideals. It’s a pitch for adulthood in software: fewer knobs, more trust.