I ran Ubuntu with gnome after Unity came out, tried Linux Mint, LMDE, pure Debian, then back to pure Ubuntu with Unity. Nothing worked as well in 2013 on my several year old laptop as it had several years before, when I first got it - sluggish, slower, "crufty" feel.
When it came time to upgrade hardware, nothing rivaled the Air in terms of weight, capabilities, "feel".
I thought it would take me longer to feel "at home" on OSX, since I'd been a UNIX guy for ages, and was quite comfortable with XP, Win7, and, of course, Linux.
But it took minutes. Many, many "oh wow" moments. Right now, I am 3-fingering back and forth between FF full screen as I write this and FF streaming a bowl game. Gestures are the bomb.
Getting Linux to the point where it "just works" like my Mac just works takes time. My Mac "just works" out of the box. The longest thing it took me to figure out was how to get tab completion to ignore case.
And that's another thing: The OSX community is more up to date and more consistent on their platform than the Linux community. And they're more polite.
Google the same thing on both platforms. Under Linux, you'll find many old and badly wrong answers and many more "I think it's this" written by people who barely understand the question and haven't bothered to test their hypothesis. More recent answers will generally be worse, sadly. And there will be much snark. Much much much.
The answers from OSX users will be fresher and more consistent. It used to take me hours to wade through all of the Linux resources to figure out where the quality lay.
It takes minutes on OSX - the community is simply better and more consistently informed, and more polite and more helpful.
EDIT: Bear in mind that "the user experience" includes the hardware. This beast is just that - a beast, and a very light one at that. I never get the impression that I'm going to break my machine or that it will respond oddly. Overall, the OSX GUI plus UNIX under the covers with all the CLI I love plus the Air HW is an awesome UX.
Interesting, complete opposite for me, was on OSX for a few years, a dream compared to previous Windoze experience.
But, I grew tired of Finder, of spinning beach balls, eye candy, manually resizing windows, and generally mouse clicking around what more and more seemed to me like a McMac than the world's greatest OS.
What kills it for me on Linux are the tiling WMs. Try Awesome or i3, absurdly good user experience (using the latter here), particularly in a multi-head setup. Have about 15 terminals open here on one monitor, snapped into a quadrant grid with each panel consisting of a few sub tabs. No mouse needed, no manual resizing nonsense, no cluster fuck of randomly layered windows to sort through.
Throw in an expose-style docker for Skype, Rhythmbox, Gnote, etc. floatable apps and you're golden.
Love me some Linux, only point of OSX is to fire up a VM and see how my web apps look on the iThings in Xcode hardware simulator ;-)
There are a lot of addon applications that make window management much more palatable in os x. Even if you don't use all the whizbang consumer features in os x there is still a lot there as a result of the continual iteration and a complete focus on the desktop user. I don't think Linux and Windows have had anything like that kind of focus at all. The applications for os x also seem to be much higher quality than those for linux and windows. I honestly couldn't go back to windows or linux at this point even if I wanted to go back to a tiling window manager.
> But it took minutes. Many, many "oh wow" moments. Right now, I am 3-fingering back and forth between FF full screen as I write this and FF streaming a bowl game. Gestures are the bomb.
Let's not get carried away here. When they work, it's nice, bit sometimes I have to do the gesture twice to get it to work (on a last rev MacBook Pro). I still find myself using the Ctrl + Left / Ctrl + Right key combos more than the gestures.
I've also noticed my "Spaces" getting randomly swapped (e.g. Desktop 2 & Desktop 3 swap places) without any (to me) rhyme or reason.
When it came time to upgrade hardware, nothing rivaled the Air in terms of weight, capabilities, "feel".
I thought it would take me longer to feel "at home" on OSX, since I'd been a UNIX guy for ages, and was quite comfortable with XP, Win7, and, of course, Linux.
But it took minutes. Many, many "oh wow" moments. Right now, I am 3-fingering back and forth between FF full screen as I write this and FF streaming a bowl game. Gestures are the bomb.
Getting Linux to the point where it "just works" like my Mac just works takes time. My Mac "just works" out of the box. The longest thing it took me to figure out was how to get tab completion to ignore case.
And that's another thing: The OSX community is more up to date and more consistent on their platform than the Linux community. And they're more polite.
Google the same thing on both platforms. Under Linux, you'll find many old and badly wrong answers and many more "I think it's this" written by people who barely understand the question and haven't bothered to test their hypothesis. More recent answers will generally be worse, sadly. And there will be much snark. Much much much.
The answers from OSX users will be fresher and more consistent. It used to take me hours to wade through all of the Linux resources to figure out where the quality lay.
It takes minutes on OSX - the community is simply better and more consistently informed, and more polite and more helpful.
EDIT: Bear in mind that "the user experience" includes the hardware. This beast is just that - a beast, and a very light one at that. I never get the impression that I'm going to break my machine or that it will respond oddly. Overall, the OSX GUI plus UNIX under the covers with all the CLI I love plus the Air HW is an awesome UX.