Yep.

Does Unity make me want to buy hardware that's hard to upgrade (save for buying a whole new machine) and make me want to abandon a host of software that I use regularly?

Nope.

edit: I very much enjoy using some proprietary software though. Windows 8, SublimeText, etc. If people want that kind of proprietary support for their Linux-like environment, it certainly seems like OSX is the only real solution atm, especially for people who can't be bothered to go do everything themselves (like me).

I know some people might brand people who pay for software as "casual scum" and whatnot, but I'm willing to trade my money for time and ease of use. I didn't mean to be a dick to the OP and certainly can understand why he would move away from a platform.

However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.

I don't think it is. Its about the entire environment - note how he talked about backups, printers, trying in Gnome, etc. I don't think he's saying Ubuntu is bad, but its nothing like the polished experience of a Mac. (FYI: I used debian from 2001, Ubuntu from 2005 after briefly trying Gentoo, and switched to Mac in 2011).

> However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.

Here's the thing - that's what everybody said. You know all those Macbooks you see developers with - they all dumped something to get there, mostly Ubuntu and Windows. The entire developer ecosystem dumped thousands of dollars of working hardware and poor OSes because Macs are really that much better.

Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.

I use Mint these days. Linux lets me get shit done, that's why I use it. I honestly don't know how people can stand using a Mac for "real work". I guess I feel the same way about Linux that you feel about Mac OS, Different strokes for different folks or something like that I suppose.

I live in a terminal (aside: iTerm2 is head and shoulders better than anything I've found on Linux), Photoshop, Xcode and IntelliJ when working--and when not working, literally-literally everything just works without me putting an ounce of effort into making it work. So that's why.

I can be productive on Linux, but spending more than five minutes setting up my environment just starts making me frustrated. (I have a four-monitor desktop, two-GPU that choked on Ubuntu 12.04; I spent a week on trying to get Ubuntu working, gave up, Hackintoshed the thing, and had it running perfectly within two hours.)

I do own an iPad and Mac Mini that I received as gifts, but I find them pretty unbearable to use outside of specific tasks (i.e. watching Youtube videos).

There is some OSX software that I like, such as Adium, SublimeText, and the default screencap tool, but I find the environment kind of annoying to work with and have a much easier time with Windows 7/8.

Overall, I give up just too much convenience and software (like MPC-HC, video games, driver support for appliances and game controllers, easy win-key + P,arrow keys,D,E,R,C,X) to be able to switch to OSX. Also that I value being able to swap out hardware and paying less for hardware in general (even if Macs often have sleek cases).

I know lots of developers who run linux on their macs. Many developers I know also switched to using linux virtual machines for serious development because dealing with the flustercuck of osx package management is too much.

I really want to switch back too, after 10 years of using osx primarily.

I was a huge Ubuntu fan until 10.10. That's the last one without Unity. After that, I started seeing all sorts of bugs especially display related. Unity killed Ubuntu for me.

I tried out Mint and that did not go down too well with me either. I finally tried out Lubuntu and that's what I use everywhere now.

- Did not need to setup wireless, wired at all. It just worked.

- For multi monitor support I had to install nvidia's drivers from the repo and set up the dual monitor config from their utility. (This is a PITA utility and I blame nvidia)

- For the age-old 'setting up the printer' in linux meme, I went to Brother's website, and followed 3-4 simple steps and I was set up and ready to go.

- Installed Virtual Box, vim, Gnome-Do and that's it.

A lightweight box which does everything I want of it. Waiting for me to customize it the way I want to.

I did this same thing on a $300 netbook (save for the VM, which I did not try). I added 8Gig RAM stick to it and was planning on replacing the 500GB 7.2k HDD with an SSD. An awesome *nix machine for about 350-550 depending on upgrades.

I do understand why people pay for Macs, the choice of spending money over time. To me, the option to move around between distros, the freedom to upgrade hardware and just the ridiculous value for money I get is why I choose Lubuntu.

The proprietary driver has support for xrandr 1.2/1.3 since version 302.07 which has been released in last may, so you're no longer confined to using nvidia-settings (in case of Lubuntu probably lxrandr). This also solves many issues with let's-go-fullscreen-over-all-your-monitors applications.

Nvidia drivers gained randr support in version 302. This allows you to use the program xrandr or, my personal preference, arandr to setup your monitors.

I have had no issues with multiple monitors after I updated the drivers.

He describes a seamless, responsive experience but I feel neutered AND I've had numerous unexplained crashes, application incompatibility and (by far the worst) ... I can't find substitutes for all the applications I rely on.

I'm not willing to call it bad, and certainly not unusable, but it's also not the paradise he's describing.

Executive summary: If you're going to be a power user on a consumer OS, you're going to have issues that require the brains that make you a power user.

I dual-booted Arch for a time on my Macbook and was just blown away at the difference in responsiveness. I also had the familiar ease of maintaining/installing/updating/changing my development tools instead of dealing with brew or Macports and XCode.

The thing that prevented me from running Linux on this MBP full time is the less-than-stellar Mac touchpad gesture support. I do think Mac OS nailed gestures and touchpad interaction.

"The core issue seems to be that the virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk (and, consequently, back from disk)."

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...

It just seems like some engineering effort could be spent to improve this, but it's sucked for the last two Mac OS releases.

Try CentOS /Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux 6.3 in a VM or booting a live version off a USB. You may be surprised. Same apps/kernel family as 10.04 and support until 2017.

If they could just nail this down, I'd never boot Mac OS again on my MBP.

There's something in the wiki but I have no mac, so I don't know what I'm talking about: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook#Touchpad

But I also admitted it's usable, so I'll live with it for a couple years.

The problem is probably: "Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking."

If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.

On the other hand, not everyone wants to read man pages, they'd rather something that "just works"... which Mac does way better than Ubuntu, unsurprisingly.

Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup

I don't know about others but for me one of the above is clearly superior and really the biggest reason for it being my OS of choice.

Ubuntu's supposed to "just work," but when it doesn't, you're screwed. Arch "just works" because a very knowledgeable community has probably been through what you're going through and took the time to write down what worked.

I was doing this back in 1994-1999, while I was a single geek guy with lots of free time at the university. Nowadays I have better things to do with my life.

Either a distribution works out of the box in a given hardware or it lands in the dustbin.

Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?

For me, I just did not have the time anymore. I was fed up with getting audio to behave consistently, compiling libdvdcss after every upgrade to be able to play DVDs, the Word and PowerPoint that people sent me and came out misformatted, overhauls of desktop environments, rewritten device management infrastructure (hotplug / devd -> udev), hand-mounting of encrypted disk images because it was broken in the desktop environment again and the list goes on and on.

I decided that my time was worth more than the 499 Euro for a Mac Mini (in 2007) and I never really looked back.

[1] I wrote this book: http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf

That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”

Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following:

> The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead.

Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist.

Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…) As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends.

All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts:

- A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems. (I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!)

- A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast. Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things. Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful, but will it ever displace the elephant in the room? It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm.

Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools). The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system, which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway. However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing. For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far. Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option. Apple has the better option in by default.

When there are literally hundreds of buttons available to press or adjust to tune Unity or Gnome, that exceeds my threshold.

1) I live in a remote place. Getting stuff shipped here is very hard and finding "Ubuntu-friendly hardware" is simply not an easy option, at all. I find it odd that Ubuntu is purportedly an answer for those who live in rural or remote areas, yet those are the areas where it can be extremely difficult, or expensive, to get specialized Linux-friendly hardware.

2) I've spent lots of time digging through documentation, reading about packages and messing with various pieces of Linux over the years. I am constantly SSHing around to various boxes for development and administration. I'm no stranger to config files, man pages, or Linux.

3) As I grow older, I'm finding that my time is definitely equatable to money. This is especially true as a freelancer. There was absolutely a thorough amount of "is this worth it" over the course of months, if not years, before taking the plunge.

Ultimately: the time and frustration investment reached a threshold where throwing money at the solution became a viable and intelligent alternative for me. I'm not advocating that this decision is for everyone, only telling the story about how it became the decision I made.

? what specialized hardware? Buy a PC or laptop and install Ubuntu. Unity is not configurable as old Gnome but it runs fine and actually is attractive .. I still miss right clicking on a panel and adding my own stuff but in general it works fine.

Specialized hardware? I call BS. I just bought a new PC with the release of Steam on Linux. Guess what? Everything I connected works but the fancy new Gig Ethernet for which the driver has already been checked in and will be available in the kernel soon. My headphones for Google Voice, my USB drives, printer, the fancy new high speed video card from nVidia, it all works great. You decided to try Mac. Cool, enjoy, for me I enjoy computing on Ubuntu even with Unity.

The builtin wireless works great too BTW, and web cam.

I'm glad Ubuntu has worked for you! Really, I am. I don't dislike the project, or Open Source at all. The hardware available to me didn't work, unfortunately, so I experienced what I did.

I don't like Unity I think it sucks, I just use KDE, but you could also use XFCE or Cinnomon or Awesome or any of billion other choices.

I would like to emphasize couple of points which have hit closer to home for me:

- Everything is not related to hardware compatibility; same hardware works fine on some distros and doesn't on others. Trying various distros may be time consuming and frustating for some.

- Its the "tinkerability" of Linux that draws people for whom degree of customization/control trumps most other factors. Ironically even when they have spent weeks getting the setup perfect, the exact same mentality leads them continuously trying new/latest things/"improving" et. all and that leads to breakage. Sometimes telling them to stick with what works and not tinker is a like asking a player to not play. Of course, this is not a generalization and there are users across the spectrum ranging from out-of-the-boxt to compulsive-tinkerer.

When Unity didn't leave me with any other choice to move from Ubuntu (and the main reason I stuck around wasn't Gnome 2 as most would say; it was apt-get), I tried XFCE/LXDE etc. For me, none of these provided the right mix of customization, aesthetics, features and stability as much KDE did. Though its eats up a bunch of RAM, it leaves plenty room in my almost 7 year old Compaq nx6320 laptop with 3GB RAM. I use OpenSuse 12.2 and not withstanding Yast etc., they sure know how to integrate KDE in a distro to provide a smooth & seamless experience.

Why even worry. I build a new computer last year completely blind. Everything on it worked fine in Linux. Linux has far better hardware support now than windows does

And throwing money at the solution became a viable and intelligent alternative for me is the way to go when the box is a tool and not a object of tinkering delight.

1) UPS considers it international shipping making the cost extraordinary.

2) Generally speaking, it's very common that I'm considered "outside the US" on various websites.

3) Lots of websites don't have USVI to select as a possible destination. Even entering a proper zip code doesn't yield helpful results.

In regards to the "object of tinkering delight," you've sort of illustrated one of my points in my post: it's not a delight anymore. I've got things to do and projects I want to work on. I don't get delight from digging into drivers or code or projects anymore.

I very much concur. I do enjoy tinkering, but with what I do these days, I need the OS to not be such a giant obstacle.

I mean it might seem to be like that at the beginning, only to find out later that some software just worked better on Linux.

I can edit pictures for website development, I can use iTerm2 for programming in Vim and SSHing around to various boxes. I've been able to configure multiple local development environments including, but not limited to MySQL, PostgreSQL, PHP, nginx, Ruby, Django, and so on. Other various programs like my IRC client work splendidly and without issue.

The only thing that might make me switch back at this point is the direction OS X is heading in. I'm still on 10.6.8 and I refuse to upgrade until they make an OS that's faster and less buggy than the one I'm running. Lion and Mountain Lion don't fit that bill. Also, there's no backwards compatibility for Apps. More and more apps are becoming 10.7 only, which may force me to make a decision sooner than I'd like.

It took me about two hours to set up XMonad, and about an hour to tweak it to my liking. I haven't touched it in a year. AND since its configuration is stored in a file in my home directory like everything else, and not some random keys in gconf, I can link it into my Dropbox, and persist it across reinstalls. I've switched computers twice - it takes me about an hour to set up my whole environment.

I've used their proprietary driver now for years and on several different cards including one of the newest top of the line cards right now. They work great and deserve a lot of credit for their drivers, hardware and the configuration utilities.

This is insane.

Don't like Unity? Remove it. I'd like to see you pull the DE out of an OSX or Windows box and lay down a new WM.

I run Ubuntu server on all of my boxes, and the development systems that actually need a head get Fluxbox. I have never experienced anything like I see so zealously maligned from articles like this.

I should add to confront the other seemingly pointless gripe from the article: I'd rather have text configs over relying on a graphic config manager that I have to just assume works. Staring at a checkbox/ button/ dropdown and wondering why your config isn't sticking is just infuriating.

- I needed to install Octave for university (No I won't get the 89$ student version for one course). For this I needed macports or home-brew. I chose macports. To get macports to run I needed some developer tools. Direct links for the developer tools required an apple developer account but I also could get XCode. For XCode I needed an apple account. I don't have a credit card, so I needed the help of google for creating an account without one. Macports now installed several additional versions of llvm and gcc. Under Linux this is just a <package-manager> octave

- I wanted to use Inkscape and Gimp (No I won't buy photoshop for the extreme few occasions that I need to edit pictures). Inkscape doesn't find X11 when starting and Gimp has the problem that the compress dialog for pngs spawns under the main window.

- Old versions of Software. No python3 ssh-copy-id or java7 by default.

- Package management is really broken when something isn't in the app store. You can't uninstall X11. You need to keep the virtualbox installer .dmg to be able to uninstall it. Virtualbox in macports didn't work by the way.

- I have to use the command line to mount a disk with ntfs-3g, because writing to ntfs doesn't work out of the box.

- Everybody wants my to pay for basic things that were solved decades ago. I don't want to pay for your reinvention of the wheel.

The difference between Linux and OS X is that if I want can use something different, write patches myself or talk with the developer directly. At apple everything goes to /dev/ignore. With Linux on a macbook I have best of both worlds as linux support for apple devices is actually quite good.

The other issues are spot on.. I'll never understand what it is with everybody and their dog on the mac ecosystem wanting money - it doesn't happen anywhere near as much on any other platform's appstore.

Meanwhile, it costs money over on Mac OS. It certainly does nothing to help the perception of the mac ecosystem as one that's overpriced.

I was talking from the POV of the developer.

In many cases, you get what you pay for. I've used many examples of open source software. There are times and places where it's the best thing. There are areas where there is too little incentive for commercial companies. There are also times when you want ultimate freedom to do what you want. There are also times when you want to pay for a level of polish and know things just work. There are also times when you want to be the one doing the polishing and get paid for your work.

> Meanwhile, it costs money over on Mac OS. It certainly does nothing to help the perception of the mac ecosystem as one that's overpriced.

I don't see the logic in having a price above free being "overpriced." Free as in beer is not a right, nor is it some sort of ultimate good. Sometimes, it's also a sign of a broken market.

They are some valid points on the article, for example i also used to face some trouble on my old computer when it came to wireless connectivity, or my old Lexmark printer wouldn't work with Debian or any Linux brand no matter what. HOWEVER those issues can't really be blamed on Linux (as the author tries to) but on the hardware vendors. That's why the next time i got a printer i choose a vendor who did support Linux, same goes for the wifi card of my new laptop which worked just fine also.

It helps if you know other people that use that distribution: that way you can ask each-other for advice when something doesn't work as you'd like it. Alternatively one can join a user's mailing list / IRC chat room, most distributions have one.

But even if your choice turns out to be wrong (i.e. Ubuntu) the solution is not to abandon Linux completely.

In fact I couldn't imagine being able to work on anything else than Linux these days, I just depend too much on it: from a working valgrind tool, to having the source code for the entire OS.

Anyway I've also been eying a Mac, but running Mint has been making it really hard to justify buying one.

Thinkpads have better battery life/build quality, but Ideapads have better specs for the price.

This was what moved me to the Mac too, and it's important to note that it's something that doesn't negate the years spent doing that investigative work of finding what to change to what. Those were extremely valuable, and they're the reason I can find my way around a Linux server faster than a lot of people. But, the day came when I was less interested in tinkering with the OS and more interested in tinkering with other stuff. It was probably around a point in the learning curve where learning wasn't happening as quickly, so it wasn't as interesting when something went wrong because I was less likely to learn something new and just as likely to be frustrated. So, I switched.

Thus, there are powerful institutional and economic forces at work against the success of a free-as-in-freedom consumer OS, and it pains me to see fellow hackers piling on.

Disclosure: I'm a Xubuntu user, and I have to borrow someone's Mac when I want to use the printer at my co-working space. So yup, the problem is real. But more people switching, just to earn a little convenience, doesn't help.

Or do like I do and have done for several years, buy any new PC you want or laptop and install Ubuntu and it just works.

I bought a Mac in 2011 my first ever after about 18 years of Windows PCs which included about 17 years of Linux. I still use both, I even have Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity.

Macs can be infuriating with some quirks such as no true delete key only backspace which for ex-PC users is labeled "delete". (Yes I know fn+delete=PC style delete).

On a Mac you click a file to highlight it then press delete key gets? Nothing. The intuitive reaction would be it deletes the highlighted file, nope. Sure command+delete but a mouse click and then two keys really? Very inefficient.

Transferring files to a USB stick such as an mkv refuses to move. Lots of space HFS, FAT32 or NTFS formatted? Nope, won't move.

The irony is that given the amount of spyware/crapware on Windows and foisted upon you when using Android, I actually feel more 'in control' of my computing experience than I ever did before.

The major thing that helped me take the jump was the presence of macports or homebrew - I love having a ton of open source software available on my Mac within essentially one command.

Same with Ubuntu although to be honest it just doesn't work properly, ever. Nothing whatsoever ever does what you tell it and it's a shit to maintain. I'm stuck with two LTS 10.04 machines and there is no long term support - they've shipped a broken MySQL version for 2 years. It's so reliable they turned off hibernate! Launchpad is like an arid desert when it comes to support. We even had paid support from Canonical and it was shit. All out Linux stuff is on debian now.

I've owned a few Macs as well and they've been the most hassle free devices so far although I've had some serious hardware problems such as a 2010 MBP catch fire on me. Before it caught fire, it was the only machine I didn't have to wait for all the time or argue with.

I now reside on a windows 7 x64 on a ThinkPad t61 with virtualbox running debian for dev work.

Persuade me to buy another Mac! What has changed in the last 2 years?

I've used both Windows and Linux for work before, and Mac is the only setup that's saved me time instead of wasting it. I found it worth getting used to.

I have worked on a FreeBSD machine for years and am now heading to a Debian box - I have been down this route before sadly - but I jus can no longer afford the time to setup and run a box that takes real effort to setup.

I may give virtualised machines one more shot but really I do just want it to work.

I love Ubuntu but it can be incredibly frustrating. Every day single time I connect to wifi or ethernet I get system errors. Slowdowns, especially with the unity dash, are so frequent that I simply don't use it. I know where all my files are so I usually just open a Terminal and run nautilus to the directory I want. If I can get away with it I run software from the terminal, or else I have it on the dock and remember the keyboard shortcut.

When I think about it, I never use any of the fancy gui. I don't use the open window viewer, or the worspace switcher, and, as I said, I try my best to just hide the dock and remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Still, it's free and so much better than Windows

Seems odd to change the whole OS Universe for a driver issue like this, but good luck to the original author on MacOS.

I changed from MacOS to GNU/Linux about 7 years ago and I miss exactly two programs; Preview and Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox. Oddly enough, I use two cheap no-name 1080p monitors hung from an Nvidia GT520 card with the Nvidia drivers installed by Jockey.

I suspect Bob Pike has the answer

http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/

First, buying compatible hardware (nobody complains that they can't run Mac OS on a Dell, so why do they complain about incompatible hardware on Linux when the Ubuntu has a certification program and there are tons of lists of compatible hardware around).

Second, understanding what's going on. AFAIK the "Gnome" listing in newer Ubuntu versions is really a compatibility mode of some sort, not the Gnome we all knew (and some of us loved). If you don't like Unity, use a different distro (like Mint, which is based on Ubuntu and thus is compatible with "Ubuntu" packages).

Use what you like, and if he likes Mac OS then wonderful, but don't complain about things that are your own fault.

But the real shift is cloud computing - our computers have become thin clients. I realized recently that I no longer even care what kind of computer I'm using because I can spend almost 100% of my computer-time through the cloud, including work (ssh + web outlook + google docs), e-mail (gmail), and music (spotify).

Apple is perfect for me: their laptops have brilliant form-factors (especially the air), OS X has built-in ssh, and navigating around the OS feels very natural.

The experience on Mountain Lion is irritating enough for me that I am considering switching back to Linux (it works fine on my old laptop, even wireless). My current laptop is still running Snow Leopard and I think their next update will determine if I ever purchase another Apple computer again.

The other day I wanted to make some professional voice-over tutorials and I went to our local music store and bought a 400$ microphone and I was surprised when the guy in the store recommended Garageband for recording. But he was right. It is indeed a excellent piece of software.

I never have the same issues as this guy in Linux. I have been using Ubuntu 100% of the time for years.

Setting up dual monitors in Ubuntu is easy and has been for years. All you need is the drivers from the repo and use nvidia-settings

I don't own any machine running OSX, so I can't comment on this, even if almost every experience I had with it has been quite bad.

I never saw any of those problems running Linux (KDE on Chakra - and even running it on Nouveau). Yes, not everything is perfect yet, but it doesn't have anything wrong. I'm probably lucky to have only supported hardware on my PC.

You should try a different distribution OP, or even only a different DE. I don't dislike Unity like the web seems to do, but I think they did some very wrong decision in the technical side of it. Like implementing it as a Compiz plugin (not exactly famous for stability and performance, and also it's tied to a single WM) and giving the user few options (Unity has been out since 3 versions now, so i don't think they're going to implement them soon).

Of course, xmonad+dmenu+debian stable is quite a bit different from Mac OSX. If you are only worried about productivity though, it's hard to beat.

I don't have major issues with Linux. I've had a few teething problems with new hardware and occasionally there's a surprise, but nothing like the author described. In fact, for me, GNU/Linux is more of a pleasure to run than any other operating system I've used, including OS X. Having said that, I had major issues with Linux when I tried to make it my primary OS for the first time in 2006 and can empathize with the author of this article. I had such a bad experience that I went back to Windows XP and didn't make the full switch until early 2010; I haven't looked back since.

If anything, this article is a call to action to improve desktop Linux. We're all aware of the second class nature of consumer vendor support, and there are a lot of native apps that don't compare to their OS X or Windows counterparts, both in functionality and aesthetics. (GIMP comes to mind. It's ok, but it's nowhere near as capable as the current version of Photoshop.)

here is the rub: you are not working on your projects, you are working on AAPL shareholders' projects -- AAPL is a platform company with which they do as they please. Therefore with you also.

Need an OS update? If your machine is new enough (AAPL gets to decide if it still suits your needs or not), then consider yourself lucky if you didn't physically switch regions.

I have gone full circle from Windows to OSX to Ubuntu to Debian and now back to Windows, and to be honest, I've never been happier or more productive.

Frustrated with cygwin and practically nothing open source that compiles for windows with any ease or reliability I switched to OSX

I never really liked OSX for how they handle multiple monitors and 1 single menu bar for all open apps and always in the middle monitor. However for the most part, shit just worked. Until I needed to customize things, there would be random gotchas and dead ends with brew. I'd switch to ports and ran into similar issues. Frustrated with those random occurrences I thought why do I need OSX, just go straight to the source where everyone is using apt-get or yum

So off to Ubuntu land I went. It sure wasnt as polished as OSX is, really Apple knows how to polish things to a shine (at least in appearance) however packages always compiled for my programming needs, not a single issue. But then as I was trying to recreate functionality I enjoyed in Win7/OSX I kept running into weird errors with various desktop packages/enhancements. 3+ monitor support is just crappy. Why do I need some other program to slow down my mouse (which was already at the lowest possible setting and still humanly unusable). Ran into similar issues as OP. It's just a really subpar UX experience in Ubuntu. I realize it's free, but people need to be honest and admit it is not as polished as it could be.

I tried Debian and Centos, but same issues, theres always SOMETHING that annoys me.

I don't trust any distro anymore. Claims of "trust me, it 'just works'" always fall flat when you realize thats only for their approved packages which may or may not include what you want to use or use the latest version.

In addition, the programs available just aren't as polished. Everything just felt crappy to use, like a slightly more polished Mac OS9 program.

Then I discovered Unity, and not Ubuntu Unity, but VMWare Workstation Unity. I can run any OSX/Ubuntu/Centos program as if it was a normal windows app. I have access to a shell as can bash to my hearts desire. IntelliJ or Eclipse can remote debug against my VM. If I need to load up XCode I no longer have to dual boot, just launch it from windows via my hackintosh VM. Feel like using VIM, np!

I can simulate my own network. A VM for database, a VM for memcache, a VM for my app server, just like in production. I don't typically do this, but it's possible.

On top of all that, I can snapshot my various VMs so easily. I no longer have to worry about really messing something up with a custom build. If somehow I just destroy something, restore is a click away and takes seconds.

Additionally, with web work, while services like BrowserStack are very good to have I can do this natively in Windows w/o viewing pages through flash. I have an XP, OSX, Ubuntu, and CentOS VM (I've never noticed any FF/Chrome differences between Ubuntu/Centos, I just have CentOS b/c it closely mimic's Amazon Linux)

Now there can be times I'm sure where a specific browser on specific OS version will still need BrowserStack (b/c who wants to manage all those VM combinations) but this covers 99% of my local testing.

Shit just works, for everything, b/c I have a VM I can use for anything specific. Plus there are just more native windows programs that plain work better.

The cherry on top, if you ever want to play some crazy game resolution in eyefinity, I can suspend all VMs and my PC has all the cpu/ram it needs for games.

Virtual machines are just a godsend to me. I get the best of all worlds and the pain of none (well except making sure java/flash is up to date so I don't get a virus)

I think it's pretty important (not for you specifically, but people who might read this comment) to note that Cygwin has gotten leaps and bounds better over the last few years. If you haven't tried it since 2005 or so (I sure hadn't), you may be pleasantly surprised.

I hope my post didnt come across that you cant do _anything_ with cygwin or brew. I just ran into enough issues that like OP all I wanted was to sit down and work and that pointed me to bare metal linux. Later after being frustrated by the desktop environments I found pleasure in having Windows manage my windows (as well as all the windows only apps) and let linux run in a VM that all I needed from it was a shell.

So as long as my VM is running in the background I can click a shell icon in my quick launch bar that lives right next to command prompt, putty connection manager, and github's git shell (which I use for projects that are win based and dont need a vm, like some .net). The shell is just like cygwin only you are limited to what you share on samba (or vmware folder share if you use that)

> I have an XP, OSX, Ubuntu, and CentOS VM

If you don't mind me asking, how much RAM per VM?

I've not tried a beefy 8 core OSX to try Final Cut Pro on yet, that would be interesting to see performance output.

All VMs run in bridge mode, connected directly to network so they have their own static IPs, makes it nice if I want to connect to a database on a VM

I also bought a separate SSD to run all these VMs off of

Note, that if you prefer OSX to Windows from a UX perspective, you can do the same thing with VMware and run Win7 in a VM. Really we all want linux for coding but a better desktop of our personal choice without having to read a ton of docs and deal with random bugs/gotchas for specific this or that's.

> When I purchased a printer for my computer? Of course Ubuntu had no idea what to do with it.

In 25 years you haven't figured it out that you need to check for compatibility/support before buying hardware?

I took some care when getting hardware to have it work with my Ubuntu computer, and I don't have any major problems with it.

Now, 12.04 used to be buggy at first, but now I can even play intense 3D games without problems on it!

In any case, it's so much easier to code on than on a mac, I really hope that good laptops that work well with it start costing less than $1500.

I'm more impressed by an OS that can run on any hardware than an OS that needs specific hardware.

I use Mac, Linux and Windows but to me lack of choice in OS or ability to modify anything isn't a good feature or one to boast about.

Also, it really feels like Homebrew is a better apt than apt ever was!

other than that, there's nothing in this post worth discussing. it's just internet filler.

All software is shit and operating systems are big software.

I have one apple product a 2GB shuffle, I love the hardware but it's an awful thing to force your users to sync their music only using iTunes. When I first purchased it I could get it to sync only with iTunes from a windows machine, however now that it is a bit old I can use Rhythmbox from ubuntu to do the same. While hunting for tutorials on how to sync my ipod I ran into this from the ubuntu site:

>Apple closely guards and purposely obscures the workings of iPods even going so far as to alter it from time to time to intentionally make it difficult for non-Apple software and hardware to interoperate with iPods. Nevertheless Ubuntu works very well with iPods, except for the newest generation iPod Touch, iPhone, 5th generation Nano iPod and any other future generation Apple portable devices where Apple changed their systems so that they no longer show up as generic storage devices. To work with these new-generation devices, look at this article on using Ubuntu to sync with your iPhone/iPod touch. Most firmwares are supported with the installation of Ubuntu software to get them to work. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPod)

I cannot in good conscience buy anymore Apple products. The idea of changing your software just to break the syncing of existing tools made by people other than you (who made it without your help) is just unfamothable to me.

> NDISwrapper. Unfortunately, I had to end up Googling around for hours to find a solution consisting of modifying the driver itself before the USB adapter would work. Once it was actually working, it would just randomly stop every once in a while.

No, you didn't "have to do that". You could have invested $10 and get an usb wifi adapter from a company that doesn't produce highly proprietary windows-only hardware. With buying the original usb adapter you were giving a company money that contributed to the vendor lockin for windows. You personally contributed to the problem.

> Next, came the display. Ubuntu, for some reason, labeled my two monitors as “Laptop” and treated it as a single screen.

No, ubuntu didn't do that. The nvidia driver did that.

> I was forced to use the NVIDIA display configuration utility.

Yes, because nvidia did not implement the randr freedesktop.org standard. Recently they implemented it I think but for a long time the proprietary nvidia driver was stuck with buggy and nonstandard configuration.

>Onto the windows manager.

window manager

I have used ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 for a few days so I don't have any long term data.

> Beyond the frequent crashing for no particular reason, #

I don't think I have seen a crash. How frequent exactly?

> there were constant glitches. Leave the computer for a while and come back? Title bars for windows would become glitchy and unreadable. Restoring a window from being minimized? Sometimes it’ll just be white. Go ahead and minimize and restore it again to fix.

Sounds like bugs in the nvidia driver.

> Icons randomly disappearing from the dock, requiring a restart of Unity? Yup, pretty consistent there too.

I haven't seen this but at least it sounds like the first actual problem in ubuntu's unity.

> Not only this, but the experience felt laggy. On the beefy machine it was running on, I expected the performance to be smooth and responsive but it was quite the opposite.

Do you have a video from the laggyness? I have used 12.04's and 12.10's unity on a nvs 300 which is a really slow card and it felt fine.

>At the login screen, it’s possible to select GNOME instead of Unity so I gave that a shot, assuming going back to GNOME would work. As soon as it booted in I was greeted by a monitor that didn’t work and a window full of error messages.

"booted in"?

Any screenshot?

> After Googling around for a while, I found some configuration changes to make in my xorg.conf file and was able to actually get it working.

Which were? No seriously, what could you possibly change in xorg.conf that would make gnome go from only displaying error messages to work?

> I was met with even more errors and problems

Like what?

> so I decided it wasn’t going to work for me. I decided to switch back into Unity.

Fair enough. But if before you change to completely new hardware with a completely different operating system and gui, there are still other alternatives to consider like KDE.

>When I came back? All of my settings were gone. All of my changes to use a sane Alt-Tab in the CompizConfig Settings Manager, my keyboard shortcuts, everything.

That's interesting. I just deleted my compiz config and started ccsm and by default it used the flat file backend for the configuration and it stored its setting in ~/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini

Perhaps ubuntu had set the gconf backend by default... But unless you deleted either ~/.config/compiz/ or ~/.gconf I don't see how that could have happened.

> Extremely frustrated, I decided to give the Mint side of things a try and give Cinnamon a shot. Again, a few weird problems

Like what?

> Cinnamon didn’t quite fit the bill either. I ran into a display issue or two and found myself actually missing a few things from Unity

Basically half of what you write is absolutely worthless and can be loslessly summarized with "I had some problems".

> When I purchased a printer for my computer? Of course Ubuntu had no idea what to do with it.

But you still gave a company (again, you don't say which one) money for highly proprietary windows-only hardware and then complained about it?

Here is the thing: Companies develop new hardware. Then they sell that hardware and they give you some windows specific software with it to make it work. How do you imagine it starts working in linux? The driver doesn't simply spawn out of thin air, someone has to write it. And if the company producing that hardware doesn't do it, then someone else has to do it. The problem is that there is too much different hardware and not enough people to support every single existing piece of hardware. What you are expecting is magic. Keep that paragraph in mind, I will come back to it later.

> Of course there was a run around necessary to get it working.

Sigh which was?

Also, workaround.

> Even the mouse had problems. My old Logitech MX500, for one reason or another, would spam the logs in dmesg whenever I was using the scroll buttons on it

With what messages? I'm getting a bit tired of asking the same question over and over again... (I'm using a similar logitech mouse right now and it has worked fine for 5+ years now I think)

> Sound would skip while listening to music using anything Flash or HTML 5 related like Grooveshark or Pandora.

Almost surely a bug in the alsa driver. Unfortunate for you, but at least it's a real problem.

> The whole system would lock up occasionally pegging a quad core CPU for no reason at all.

Interesting. Which process would use all the cpu time?

> Sometimes, it would just crash entirely.

Yes, but that happens on all operating systems with buggy drivers. I still sometimes get bluescreens on a windows boot from the amd graphics driver.

> When I’m at a computer, its because I want to get things done. Gone are the days where I have time to tinker around and spend countless hours Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking. This is not a good direction for an operating system to go.

Sadly you have not given a single real example of you doing this, only a very unclear anecdote about the xorg.conf that doesn't sound right from the beginning.

The bad thing is that I would agree with the sentiment that recently the linux experience became quite buggy. But not really for any reason you described.

> iPad. It was incredibly powerful,

"powerful"?

> had a beautiful screen,

Yes, probably.

> and was light years beyond any tablet experience in terms of responsiveness,

Well, android tablets are often a little bit laggy, but not to the point were it actually annoys me. Light years, really?

> design

Maybe it's because I don't really give much on design, but I have a hard time taking this seriously. "The iPad is so good, it is light years beyond any tablet experience in terms of design!". Doesn't really work for me.

> and construction.

This may be an actual advantage. A Nexus 7 for example bends and breaks the display quite easily so I would appreciate a better constructed tablet.

> “I’m not building anything in iOS, yet. Maybe I’ll hate the OS and be stuck with a $2,500 bad decision. Walled garden. Non-customizable.” Those were the thoughts that were keeping me from taking the plunge.

Why? You could have still always installed linux on it and would have kept your status quo with just an expensive computer.

> The unboxing was, of course, elegant and easy as my previous Apple products had been. The physicality of the product was awesome.

What the fuck did I just read

> What I found was absolutely shocking: it was far more customizable than I had ever dreamed. Want to move the dock around? Sure, go ahead. In Ubuntu? Nope.

Wrong.

A little bit more correct: In Ubuntu's Unity without changing to one of the numerous alternatives? Nope.

Correct: In Ubuntu's Unity without altering the source code they provide you? Nope.

> Ubuntu had introduced the ability to launch a program or find something from the dash and I had started to like it, even though it was buggy and extremely slow in a lot of cases. Spotlight? Completely blows it away. It’s fast, responsive, and gets me to the program or thing I’m looking for every time.

I don't have a direct comparison but so far I am satisfied with quicksand from kde. Remember: The article supposedly describes how ubuntu pushed you away "from the pc", not just from Ubuntu, or even just Unity.

When comparing the performance, have you also considered that you are comparing a not so new computer with a brand new machine?

> Every device I hooked up to the machine worked flawlessly. Printer? Plug it in, it finds what you need, and you’re good to go.

So you can buy literally any printer and mac os will make it work? I mean, that's what you expected Ubuntu to do, do you still have that expectation?

> Monitor? Plug it in and it recognizes it correctly and makes it available to start working right away.

Just a quick reminder that your problem was never with ubuntu but with software developed and supplied by nvidia.

> OSX was everything I wanted Linux to be and more.

I think it is quite important to say that you don't care about the free software stuff. I think it is one of the biggest reasons to use linux.

I'd say 1 to 2 crashes per day. These are application crashes, mind you, but when 12.10 has been out for ~4 months, an updated system should not be crashing that often.

Just a limited research of recent crashes reveals more than 6 in as many days (_usr_lib_upower_upowerd.0.crash contains multiple crashes):

treddell@aspire1:~$ ls -lh /var/crash/*.crash -rw-r----- 1 root whoopsie 1.6M Feb 24 10:13 /var/crash/susres.2013-02-24_10:12:33.916825.crash -rw-r----- 1 treddell whoopsie 1.6M Feb 26 20:22 /var/crash/_usr_bin_gnome-terminal.1000.crash -rw-r----- 1 treddell whoopsie 3.7M Feb 27 10:13 /var/crash/_usr_bin_nautilus.1000.crash -rw-r----- 1 treddell whoopsie 2.5M Feb 22 17:25 /var/crash/_usr_bin_pcmanfm.1000.crash -rw-r----- 1 treddell whoopsie 4.8M Feb 21 20:43 /var/crash/_usr_lib_sublime-text-2_sublime_text.1000.crash -rw-r----- 1 root whoopsie 401K Feb 26 14:10 /var/crash/_usr_lib_upower_upowerd.0.crash

What I am saying is that Ubuntu specifically has become so much less stable since 11.10. It's unacceptable for a desktop OS to have multiple program crashes every day.

Initially I thought it's just me trying to resit the changes Ubuntu is brining to my computing experience and others are coping just fine with it. But then I realised it's just probably Shuttle who is designing Ubuntu for his personal needs, I decided to leave it to him :-).

As of now it seems okay to use OSX. Certainly better than Win and a lot better than those Linux distros in GUI/UX context but incompatibility(or every other day moving mountains to make it work with other ecosystems) with non-iHardware might just be the one single reason(there are lots) that should have stopped me from buying that Mac but I bought it anywa. Quality apps were a reason and of course I wanted a taste of it.

Purchasing the Mac has actually been of benefit to me. Now, I know that it's not going to be another Mac when I upgrade(considering Apple is not opening up it's orchard, though I am not sure on it) and no I'll never buy an iPhone or an iPad(I am sure about it, if 'innovation' and prices of these iDevices are on the current tracks) because I don't need them or even if I need such a device then there are better and more powerful devices out there in less than half the price.

- KDE. There are probably better solutions, but it works.

- I bought my computer after reading up on supported hardware.

- My Mac has had more problems with latest printer installs than my Ubuntu installations. (Samsung and Xerox both stopped publishing drivers for their old printers for new Mac OS versions?!)

- The (simple) killer features to support, to get my money: apt, high-resolution displays and Emacs. [Edit: To be clear re apt-get -- macports, homebrew, cygwin etc are just not apt enough.]

- I still hope Unity gets better than Gnome 2 and will e.g. run the devices that replaces my iPhone/iPad. (The answer to the next question: "No, I don't also believe in Santa..." :-( )

- Right now I have no idea if I'll go Ubuntu, Debian or Mac next. (Comments advertising Arch Linux made me curious.)

I don't see why everyone feels the need to constantly throw their own opinions and use cases in for why one OS is better than another. If Ubuntu doesn't fit your needs and Mac does... good. Don't see why stuff like this gets so many upvotes though.