You were doing really well until "If you're scared of choices and shell prompts: OSX". It's not a case of being scared of choice and the shell, it's a case of having better things to do than spend hours getting everything working and then more hours fixing it when it randomly breaks, which has been the case every time I tried Linux on a laptop. Although really, any OS not written by excitable children would probably work just as well. When Apple piss me off sufficiently, maybe I'll try FreeBSD on a laptop.