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Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

So it's news that a feature supported on other platforms for anymore from months to years [1] will be supported on Ubuntu 5 months from now?

Huh. Colour me unimpressed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_%28computing%29

Full disclosure: I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years, switched to OSX on an Air a few months back, and cannot imagine going back to an inferior user experience on inferior hardware. Open source OS was an interesting experiment, begun to ensure access to my data, but given cloud apps with export capabilities and native OSS apps, I cannot imagine wanting to suffer another moment with an OSS user desktop. Server maybe. But even there my conviction levels drop....

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> I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years

> tester

That was likely the problem. People invest a lot of time in their OS, of course sooner or later they get burned out and fed up with all that, and then they move to OS X/Windows disappointed in Linux in general. You don't have to be a tester for Ubuntu (or other Linux distro), you can just use it with very little maintenance. Of course, you can select some more complex path with desktop Linux, but you absolutely don't have to do that.

That's a good point - but truth be told, I'd stopped testing a few years ago. I really only threw that out to show "my commitment" :-> - for a couple of years I did quite a lot of it - but work and other bits of life required me to wind down, so in the last few years, I've been trying to be "just a dumb user".

Being a dumb user - and a dumb power user - are easier under OSX, it's a lot easier to tweak than Unity, ironically - and needs less tweaking.

I'd call unity more tweakable in that you can get rid of it entirely and replace it with something else. When I was on Ubuntu, I used XMonad, configured to my liking, and no desktop environment. It was great, and better than my experience is today on OSX.

If you know how to, practically any linux distro is much more tweakable than OSX is. Definitely needs a lot more tweaking though, I'll grant that.

Also note that there are people who put linux on their mac book pros, which is something I'm thinking of doing myself.

OSX is hardly tweakable at all in comparison - what tweakability are you referring to?

For my part, I use ubuntu at home and OS X at work, have done for the last 8 years. And not a day go by that I'm not swearing at OS X for being unresponsive or otherwise annoying me, something that happens far more rarely with my lower powered home laptop running Ubuntu.

I used to have OS X at home for 3+ years too, but that's not likely to happen again, and each OS X and Ubuntu upgrade makes it seem less and less likely to me that I'd consider giving OS X another chance at home.

I have a hard time even imagining why anyone would prefer OS X unless there are very specific OS X applications you need, rather than OS features.

> inferior hardware

For an inferior price, you should add to that. It's kind of obvious that expensive products have decent hardware.

I'm not against apple and this is not Apple bashing (I'm even considering buying a Macbook) but telling the whole truth.

I cannot find anything on the PC side that rivals this stuff. $1000 buys something that feels solid, really well built. I've looked, I really wanted to stay on Linux, I was even willing to pay the Windows tax (but wasn't looking forward to the tweaking that was getting more and more necessary)...

...until I switched. Now I cannot imagine going back.

Could you find a similarly-specced, similarly-built ultrabook to the 13" Macbook Air at a significantly lower price? Because I've looked and I can't; the "Mac tax" is largely a thing of the past.

Depending on your use OSS might be an inferior solution to your needs specially if you're mainly a desktop user, but on the server OSS rules. OSS is not for everyone but if you need something custom nothing beats it, OSS is not about convenience is about flexibility. OSS gives you options that are simply nonexistent in proprietary equivalents. I can't imagine why anyone would choose to use a non OSS stack in a server unless they are already heavily invested in proprietary technology.

Fair point. I should have specified that I was referring to personal servers - OSX Mavericks server edition is pretty cool. For enterprise, different question, different answers.

Have you tried distros other than Ubuntu and desktop environments other than Unity?

Also, can you be specific about how Linux gave you an "inferior user experience?"

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.

> 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.

For the last issue, have you tried System Preferences → Mission Control → uncheck "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use"?

Did your previous notebook had an SSD drive?

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.

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