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My experience of Linux these days, under Ubuntu, is that it's no more quirky than Windows or OS X. You're probably blind to many of OS X's deficiencies because you've become used to all but the most intrusive of them.

Problems that you personally have with it are no doubt vexing, but I've had stuff just as annoying with Windows and OS X.

My feeling is that Linux is finally there with Ubuntu. Yes, it lacks some core software, but on the other hand it has some unique features (ease of installation of free software packages particularly) that at last give it the chance for some competitive traction.

I used OS X for a few months a couple of years back and came away hating it (in fact I sold the iBook and replaced it with a Thinkpad running Windows for a perceived performance gain at a lower price). Not all users are equivalent.

2 comments

I'm not sure where you missed the fact that I can't play full-screen DVD's (both discs and iso's) in ubuntu (I would venture to say a very important feature for the desktop/consumer OS) without it playing back at around 10fps. If I boot into Windows on my other partition, I can playback multiple DVD's fluidly.

On the same machine.

Finally, I'm not an OS fanboy of any persuasion. In fact, I've only been using Mac's for the last two years (though I cut my teeth on them 15 years ago). I use all three platforms almost equally. Linux, Ubuntu in particular, is the weakest experience of them all. In fact, I would put even BeOS in front of Ubuntu in terms of consistency.

Finally, I've done a shit load of hardcore UI desktop development over the last dozen years, so I have a sensitivity to it, I guess. Linux is just not there.

I have gripes about OSX, but at least when I drag a window it doesn't turn black, or it can resize the window in real time. All of the native apps have the same consistent UI elements. Basic fundamental shit.

  > I'm not sure where you missed the fact that I can't play
  > full-screen DVD's (both discs and iso's) in ubuntu (I
  > would venture to say a very important feature for the
  > desktop/consumer OS) without it playing back at around
  > 10fps.

What video card / drivers are you using? It sounds like you simply don't have accelerated video drivers. I frequently play 720p video fullscreened in linux. The same goes for your comment about not being able to resize a window in real time. It sounds like you a have a fairly broken linux experience.

Completely agree with you about UI consistancy, though.

"I'm not sure where you missed the fact that I can't play full-screen DVD's (both discs and iso's) in ubuntu"

No, I didn't miss that.

Something doesn't work for you under Ubuntu on a particular hardware platform? Sorry, but that fails to convince me as proof that Ubuntu's not ready for prime time.

Windows has stupid failings on some hardware. Apple dodge the bullet by controlling their hardware but I'd be surprised if Hackintoshes (or Darwin) were consistently stable on all arbitrary platforms.

Does not work for me != Useless.

Neither Windows nor OS X dies when you close the lid, and when you install any of them on a new machine WIFI just works. Always.

I install every new version of Ubuntu as soon as it's released. Once sleep/resume, WIFI, sound, the trackpad and power management all work without tweaking drivers, I might actually keep it. So far that hasn't been the case on any of the machines I tried.

(I should add that I'm no big fan of any OS so far)

My experience installing OS X on a random machine is that wifi doesn't always work. But, installing it on a mac, it always works. The same thing can be said of installing linux on a random machine. But, installing linux on a mac, wifi always works.

Well, I have never installed OS X on anything but a Mac to be honest. But when installing Linux on my Mac WIFI did not work and once I got it to work it was destroyed by the next automatic Ubuntu update.

Weird, my experience has been exactly the opposite.

I reinstalled ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus notebook less than 2 days ago without any of these weird things happening, wifi, sound, trackpad, power management and sleep/resume all work perfectly without the need to tweak anything.

Coincidentally, with Windows XP I've always had to tweak the power management so that my machine was "always on" as when I closed the lid, it would sleep and when it came back, things just did not work right.