Second, I also agree that the greatest asset a piece software can have is being extensible. We have seen the runaway success things like Firefox and Eclipse have had. Yes, I am perfectly aware that they did not invent the concept, and this was being done 10 years ago by emacs, or whatever. But these are more “mainstream” products that have brought the concept of extensibility to people that would normally never consider the concept. They also have very cool ways of deploying their extensible plugins or extensions, that I personally had not seen in practice before, but I could be wrong.

Even though it’s not free (as in beer or as in speech), the iPhone/iTouch is bringing extensibility to the smart phone market. Although palms and other similar devices have had this feature for a while, it has done it in an elegant way. Now everyone is rethinking what a cell phone is, and how they use it in their daily lives. I think the new term that is trying to be coined is “palm top computer”, because it really stopped being a phone a long time ago.

I think in 10 years we are going to look back and declare that the iPhone/iTouch is going to be most important computer related invention of this decade. Not only for it’s own merits, but for everything else that will directly, or indirectly come out as a consequence of it’s existence. Ranging from products that run on the device, to products that competitors make as a response.

Third, I also think that intelligent software can be a very interesting third frontier. We have to be very careful what we consider software intelligence thought. As clippy and the Office collapsing menus have shown us, something that has the intent of making your life easier can very quickly make you pull your hair out.

I consider myself an (AI wannabe) ^ 2. I am also fascinated by the subject (but which geek isn’t). I have some books on it (not that I have gotten around to reading them yet). Making adaptable software is definitely a place where we can grow.

As far as the OS you are looking for, you will never find it. I am sorry to say it’s just not possible. All the popular (and not so popular) choices we have today will make you compromise on one or other thing eventually.

I will recommend what I have recommended to you dozens of times. Get 4 – 8 GBs of RAM (you already have some good horsepower), load XEN or VMWare ESXI (they both run off the metal, without an underlying OS), and run 2 or 3 OSs at a time. Do your editing in Linux and listen to music on Windows. Do the activities that you like on the OS that you like. We have the technology and the hardware resources to do it.

The only drawback to this kind of technique is that you will have administer all the OSs, which can be a pain in the ass, especially for a person that is so picky like you. I don’t have a solution for this. I simply recommend that you take one OS (your pick, I don’t care) as your main OS, make sure that one is up to date, and solid. The other ones don’t really matter. You can keep snapshots of them, if the get corrupt, you can just restore them at any point in time.

Of course, I think you are just going to continue with your merry go round of OSs anyway, irrelevant of what I say.