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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

Give one of the friendlier linuxes a try. Since you're used to working with a unix-ish environment, it will be pretty familiar. Ubuntu (and Mint) do a great job with their UI. With the quality and diversity of software available, I don't miss OSX at all.

The only caveat: libre Office sucks; I've switched to gdocs instead. Maybe it's a configuration thing, but the alternatives are just so easy now, I hardly bother.

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I may give Ubuntu a go again. Having a dual boot system was nice in the past, but I also found myself needing one thing that justified using Windows more. In high school it was Warcraft 3, in college it was powerpoint, Visual C++, plus others.

Now that I don't game as much and get to choose the software I use, Ubuntu might work out.

I do enjoy Apples approach to system UI, though. Windows and Ubuntu have always "made sense" where as OSX makes sense and feels nice. Something weirdly intangible that I didn't understand until I was an OSX user.

Graphics programming, 3D debuggers, 3D drivers issues and power management are other caveats.

Also audio.

Linux audio is pretty disappointing. It took me hours of googling and mucking around to get surround audio over HDMI working for my ubuntu HTPC.

I ended up having to completely disable PulseAudio which means there can't be any desktop sounds at all, but at least the audio works in surround from Kodi now.

Also every time I do an update I need to reinstall Nvidia drivers. Which might also break the fragile audio over HDMI setup, who knows?

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