imho, Ubuntu's user experience (when your computer's hardware is supported out of the box) is now superior than both window's and mac's user experience. Mac's UX is not bad to the extent they have adopted a Gnome like desktop.
Where they strayed away from Linux, the UX is usually inferior, for example the very poor Spaces implementation and that bar at the bottom that doesn't have separate icons for the different opened windows of applications. When I'm on a mac, I'm always shuffling around piles of windows with no good way to organize them and change between them. I'm horrified when I have to press those side mouse button that makes it look like someone sneezed out barely recognizable small versions off all my programs on my monitor. It's like the computer equivalent, for finding a document in a pile of throwing the whole pile across the floor and walking around to find what you are looking for.
My pattern for trying out the latest & greatest Linux distros is something like this:
-- Install: Gets better every time. Rarely have issues anymore with the basics of video, networking, sound, etc.
-- First boot: Gets better every time. Things tend to look nicer, fonts are nicer, icons are better, defaults are more reasonable. Installing software is easy.
-- First week of usage: Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist. No amount of perceived freedom justifies downgrading my applications, dual booting, emulating, etc. Just not worth it.
> Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist.
I pretty much only use my home computer for entertainment purposes, so I haven't had these issues really. I will admit that I prefer to run foobar2000 and Firefox through WINE, but I've mostly been satisfied or happier with the Linux alternatives. There clearly is an issue with some professional applications (GIMP vs PS comes to mind); I'm just curious which ones you have in mind.
-- Logic Express: Not my job -- just a hobbyist. ardour is way too unstable and doesn't even compare to GarageBand in terms of features at this point.
-- OmniGraffle: Big part of my job. Better than Visio IMO. Dia is maybe on par with a 10 year old version of Visio at this point and I haven't seen any significant improvements in Dia in years.
-- iWork: My office needs are pretty simple so on features OpenOffice's feature set is good enough but it's always been buggy and clunky. Just stupid stuff like a dialog box drawing underneath and active window causing the program to appear to be frozen. Compatibility with MS Office formats is subpar even compared to iWork which isn't quite good enough for me not to keep MS Office installed.
-- Mail clients: I still prefer a desktop mail client and I haven't found anything I like on Linux. Evolution is clunky in the UI department. Thunderbird is clunky in the performance department. My IMAP store is kind of big (3GB-ish) so when I was using Linux I actually had to keep both Evolution and Thunderbird installed because one of the two handled big IMAP folders better than the other. (though at this point I can't remember which was which)
-- VPN clients: At this moment I have VPN profiles for Cisco IPSEC, L2TP, PPTP, and use both Cisco & Juniper SSL VPNs on a regular basis. It was too difficult to set them up. At some point Cisco offered a client that handled Cisco IPSEC but it would break every time I did a kernel update. L2TP/PPTP weren't a big problem though I had to fight to make split tunneling work properly. Juniper SSL VPN flat out did not work at the time though I've heard they released Linux support over the last 18 months or so?
There are a few other examples that would be pure personal preference. If I really had to I could use something else but basically I just don't want to. A more motivated person could probably overcome these issues.
I used to run Mac OS X, and there's still one or two things I miss about iTunes (album-shuffle in a generated playlist, for example) but Quod Libet fulfils my music playing needs nicely.
One thing I do miss is iPhoto. I'm stumbling along with F-spot at the moment, but so far as I can tell there are no decent photo-management tools available for Linux.
This is said tongue-in-cheek, right? There are many people with usage cases that require different things. Hell, I'm a developer and that doesn't come close to describing my workflow.
I don't think so. Ideas have flowed both ways, but I've been using Gnome since the 90s and OSX has taken more from Gnome in my opinion than Gnome from OSX.
I hesitate to go down this road, but what features do you think originated in GNOME and found their way into OSX? I think you're giving quite a bit of credit where it is not due.
I know it didn't originate in GNOME, but GNOME was perhaps the most popular environment using virtual desktops at the time that Apple introduced Spaces:
Really? Gnome definitely didn't come up with them, and most WMs have virtual desktops, but if you just launch X11 without a WM I definitely don't see any virtual desktops unless I'm missing something.
I'm a little rusty on this stuff (haven't messed with it for ~5 years) but IIRC you have the ICCCM specification and some non-standard but well adopted extensions[1] that define how a window manager communicates with the X server, and in this specification you will find all the virtual desktop goodies that every X window manager implements (including metacity, beryl, kwin, twm, fvwm2, etc).
In short, as far as virtual desktops go, what GNOME (metacity/beryl) does is the exactly same thing every window manager has been doing for the past decade at least, and the concept of virtual desktops (non-ICCCM+ implementations) goes much further back than that.
Agreed. There are some apps I miss on Linux (well, maybe just Ableton Live), but I find the experience superior overall too. Certainly this is partly because I'm a very command-line oriented users and Mac and Windows systems just can't compete in that respect, but I also find the gnome UI more efficient and ergonomic.
Laptops can still be a little dodgy though. Support for common desktop hardware is very very good in modern Linuxes but laptops can still require a bit of tweaking. If you want to run Linux on a laptop you need to either do a bit of homework and make sure you buy something that works well or buy a pre-installed machine with support. If a novice friend asked me for advice on switching I'd probably suggest the latter. Nothing takes the shine off a new machine like having to download and compile drivers by hand.
