I've been using Macs on and off for years, but not really solidly until OS8. I'm a UNIX sysadmin, so when the OSX public beta came out I jumped on it pretty much straight away, and have barely touched the "classic" MacOS since.
What I am not is a "typical" Mac user: I don't do graphic design, DTP, video editting, or even much by way of word-processing. I use my Macs as front-ends to UNIX systems where I do my "real" work -- I may view Web pages on a Mac, but I edit it with vi on a Solaris machine.
So the following surprises me. A lot.
About six months ago I bought myself a G4. The 867MHz model. With extra RAM. Specifically so I'd have a nice modern machine to run OSX. Until a few days ago, it still had the factory OS install (with updates) installed, as OSX as shipped worked just fine for me.
On a whim, I decided to try doing my usual stuff under OS9 for a day. I hadn't touched "classic" MacOS since having major eye surgery some time ago, and if you're going to badmouth something then you really ought to have fairly current experience with it.
The factory install of OS9 was broken in some ways, particularly with reference to file associations. But I was only going to use it for a day, and had heaps of stuff set up just the way I wanted under OSX, so a reinstall wasn't really called for.
That was a week ago. Yesterday I nuked everything on the disk, repartitioned, and did a clean OS9 install. I've left space for OSX, and grabbed all the updaters required to bring it up to 10.1.3, but haven't gotten around to reinstalling it yet.
Why?
Because the OS9 user interface is *so* much cleaner than OSX's. The main things I'm sacrificing are a commandline, which I can get on any number of UNIX hosts when I need one; simple PDF creation, which I'll take care of by creating a PDF print queue on my home e-smith server; and the convenience of tools like OmniDictionary in the Services menu, which I'm going to try to replace with some AppleScript.
What about proper multitasking and memory protection, you ask?
Well, to be honest there's the odd glitch, multitasking-wise, but not a lot. Switching Virtual PC into fullscreen mode causes Audion to skip, and there's a small slowdown in interactive performance when I copy a very large number of medium-sized files across the network -- as an example, copying 10GB of MP3s to an AppleShare server on my LAN -- but I don't do these things very often, so for the most part everything co-exists quite happily: right now I've got Audion playing music streamed from my home web server, NiftyTelnet with a bunch of SSH sessions running, Mozilla 0.9.8 downloading a few files, Virtual PC running the AudioGalaxy satellite under Windows95 in the background, and AppleWorks sitting idle with a spreadsheet open.
I've decided that I'd rather have the clean interface.
Having UNIX under the hood is nice, and if I didn't have shell accounts on hosts scattered all around the world, then I'd probably decide differently, but being able to bring up a local shell doesn't make up for the clutter and distraction in Aqua. And the non-UNIX-related enhancements in OSX, like access to CIFS and NFS volumes, and the Finder column view, I can live without for now.
I guess what I really want is a modern version of A/UX.