In the last six months I've tried Elementary (closest), Ubuntu (Unity and Kubuntu), Mint (MATE and Cinnamon), and Fedora. None stuck. And it's not really the distributions' fault, but rather the applications and all the little things. Ricardobeat put it nicely elsewhere in the thread: design-by-committee. There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other and there is a sense of welcoming to applications with crap UX that do something important. I don't like that, and I don't feel like that's common on OS X (like, even their weird Calendar skin doesn't get in the way of a good application).

It's an OS built by a lot of different people doing lots of parts in different ways. I'm not saying that I was told anything different, that's what it says right on the tin. But I find that doesn't make for a great user experience. (To Elementary's credit, activities where you can stay within the Elementary suite of applications are really pretty nice! But that makes being thrown outside at the likes of GIMP even more jarring.)

You should take a look at Xfce, by far the most consistent and not-in-your-way DE among the popular ones since Gnome2. And with some themes that actually look good (like Greybird, default in Xubuntu).

> Ricardobeat put it nicely elsewhere in the thread: design-by-committee.

I feel there is a common misunderstanding what this term actually means. I'm a Linux user and I don't like most DEs and most themes, but I wouldn't imply there is no leadership among their creators or that the decision process is completely flawed. Actually I think they know exactly what they are doing, the fact that you and I don't like it it's another thing.

you tried but doesn't sound like you gave them a real chance.

I gave them as much of a chance as they deserved. I already own a Mac with an OS I very much like. If you don't impress immediately, you're not going to get traction.

And it's not like I'm new to any of them. I ran Linux nearly exclusively from 2005 to 2009.

> There isn't a feeling of focus from one end to the other

Like what? I hear this repeatedly but it's with a helping dose of handwaving and a lack of specifics. I guess I just don't see that. I use VLC, Gnome-terminal, Sublime Text, Pantheon-Files, Chrome, Firefox and that's basically it. They all act the same as I expect in any desktop environment and I've literally never had a meta-moment of worry or thought about something being "off".

Gimp is awkward on every platform, what does that have to do with Linux DEs?

Off the top of my head, talking about the Ubuntu 12.04.1 I use daily on two different Thinkpads:

I have to log in and out or reboot pretty much every day to solve X or window manager problems. There are a variety of focus and window ordering issues. Coming back from sleep each one has different display twitches; nothing worse than the usual Linux user contempt, but definitely unpolished. The Unity stuff is going in a good direction but I don't think they've been doing a ton of user testing; it also frequently feels clunky to me. Network Manager is slow to find networks and regularly crashes. Device support is so-so: the Android tethering that is support to magically work never does; plugging in a phone or a tablet frequently requires command-line incantations and is often buggy. One of my devices has a touch-screen; a minor kernel upgrade broke this a couple months back, and it is still broken.

I think they're right to go for a better UI experience, but right now I think they're in a valley between the solid but ugly Linux experience I was used to and the solid but friendly experience that Apple has inspired them to pursue. Right now I think it's flaky both in a usability sense and in a technical sense, which I find thoroughly disappointing.

>I have to log in and out or reboot pretty much every day to solve X or window manager problems. There are a variety of focus and window ordering issues.

These aren't specific. I honestly don't know what you're talking about here. I've logged out of X to solve a problem once - that was checking "Use the NVIDIA driver" and then rebooting. The only time I've ever rebooted to "fix" an "X problem". That having been said, I won't defend compiz for a second. That was a mistake and they're sinking more and more money into it to my disappointment.

>Device support is so-so: the Android tethering that is support to magically work never does

My Galaxy Nexus, Droid 1, Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 3g - I tap USB tether and about 5 seconds later Ubuntu tells me it's connected. (Unless this has regressed in 12.10, I haven't had reason to use it lately.)

>Network Manager is slow to find networks and regularly crashes.

You can get NM to crash? I hope you've filed a bug report because that is a major issue.

As long as we're talking about things that make me crazy about Linux, here's another fine example.

You asked a question. I took some time to give you an answer. Did you thank me? Did you acknowledge the information as relevant? Did you ask follow-up questions to better understand the situation? No, no, and no.

Instead, you seize upon the parts you can most easily argue with. You use scare quotes to imply that I must be an idiot. And you tell me what work you think I should be doing.

It's not my job to educate you. It's not my job to convince you of things you don't want to believe. It's not my job to file the particular bug reports you think best.

Your behavior here exemplifies the arrogant, self-centered, argumentative idiocy that has repeatedly driven me away from participating in open-source projects. I've got better things to do than to fight with people on the internet. Especially anonymous ones.

X is pretty weird sometimes, you switch displays, or suddenly connect a third display, the only way to fix it is to reboot X. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I honestly don't know X well enough to debug the problem, so restarting X is just the faster solution. I'm guessing you probably don't us X on the road as much, I feel like this is a normal thing for me -- restart X to solve problem with weird display.

Ah, if "on the road" means plugging and unplugging external monitors, you've caught me in my "oh I should have thought of that" spot.

I haven't had to do that in a long while. I have a permanent desktop machine so my laptop is only for at coffee shops or working at a friend's place. I can certainly understand how hotplugging can be a disaster. Thankfully, I have noticed an improvement with that with Nvidia's more recent driver releases, even possibly as late as the ones resulting from their work with Steam.

Anyway, I've been running Wayland builds on and off for a month now, let's hope that paves the way for minimizing these problems even further.

You never have to plug in your laptop to do presentations or anything? I feel like I do that all the time... plus you never know what type of lcd projector they are using. Sometimes a guy comes and tries to help you, but when they notice you're running linux they sort of back off.

Are you using a proprietary graphics driver? With Intel graphics, none of these problems seem to pop up.

If you were perfectly happy with the out-of-the-box experience for Linux, why did you need homebrew/macports on OSX?

I've never had any issues with homebrew whatsoever. It's just a thin wrapper for build scripts, it's pretty easy to dig in and see what's going wrong.

I'm not that crazy of a dev and there were at least 4-5 things that straight up wouldn't build in homebrew or lacked scripts. Basic GNU tools shipping with Mac OS X are vastly out of date (and in some cases buggy) due to GPL issues. I finally gave up after an afternoon of fighting getting GDB signed to be able to debug my Golang app and wound up installing a VM, adding a new SSH key to Github, setting up my dev environment and debugging it in linux in less time.

I used OS X because I had a MBA. When classes were over I decided to see how much work Linux would be on it given that Mac hardware and linux don't always get along. Basically everything worked out of the box though, minus a powersave script I ran.

Well, let's just say a lot of things don't work in linux either. Depending what you're building, sometimes it's reliant on a certain gcc version, or distro. Generally speaking, compile from source is usually the last resort if the package can't be found via apt-get, and occasionally you'll have to tweak the makefile or the ./configure script settings. Any time you're building something that isn't extremely popular, you're likely to get build problems.

So far, the ratio of build issues I've run into in OS X to the build issues from version mismatching in linux is approaching infinity.

egrep, gdb, and the few other things I fought last month in brew were not uncommon things. They were all things that were preinstalled in Ubuntu. Furthermore, I haven't had to build anything from source other than the projects I collab on in years.

I don't know why we're quibbling about this, it's generally accepted among Mac devs... it's a small price to pay if you like the OS X user experience. I haven't for some time now so the developer tools lacking and the competition of better linux DEs have tipped that scale. Trust me, I still love my MBA.