I used elementary myself for about half a year as my main system and have a bit of a split opinion on it myself. On the one hand, I did find the design to be ve

I used elementary myself for about half a year as my main system and have a bit of a split opinion on it myself. On the one hand, I did find the design to be very appealing - and contrary to what you claim, I haven't seen as nice a design anywhere else in the Linux world. (I may not be an old hand yet, but I've come around a bit.) I love how the whole desktop just works together to produce a very satisfying visual experience, and some of their homegrown apps are really sweet (specifically the text editor Scratch, but also the file browser). However, I can also confirm what you say about bugs - a vanilla Ubuntu LTS is quite a bit more stable than eOS is. Having said that, most of the bugs I encountered on eOS were either avoidable (by switching the browser to Firefox, for example) or I could live with them. The one I found most annoying was a bug in the music app that didn't let me save songs to a playlist. I did actually dig into the source code for that one, but eventually gave it up and went back to trusty old (terminal!) mocp. All in all, I enjoyed using eOS, but when the time came for me to buy a new laptop, I decided to go back to Ubuntu. ElementaryOS is a great project that deserves more attention (and more programmers working on it), but unfortunately does still feel too much like a perpetual beta. I'll keep my eyes on it, hopefully some day I'll go back, but not just yet.