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I'm currently using OSX at work and Vista at home. Over the years I've tried many OSs, including various flavors of Linux and BSD. I think I can answer your que

I'm currently using OSX at work and Vista at home. Over the years I've tried many OSs, including various flavors of Linux and BSD. I think I can answer your question very simply: they all suck, and you have to find which one sucks the least for you. For me, OSX is mostly eye candy any keyboard junkie should steer clear of. Also, it tends to be sluggish and not as responsive as other OSs I've tried. The spinning beach ball (I call it the pizza of boredom) is a very common sight. Linux is about plug and pray. Maybe, hopefully, if you're lucky, things work out well on your computer. I mean come on, Ubuntu, in 2008, made a big fuss about the new (yes new) screen manager that lets you visually control multi-monitor setups. Whoopie. Welcome to the '90s. Vista is rubbish. SP1 made it better but it's still annoying. If it weren't for the hassle, I'd switch back to XP. More than OSX, the eye candy is very distracting and useless. XP is old but darn good, kinda like an old pair of jeans. It has flaws but they're familiar and known-enough to be fixable. So should you switch from OSX->Ubuntu? Is your software Ubuntu ready? Are you ready to drop to the command line fairly regularly? Are you ready for a different GUI? It's certainly doable, and perhaps easy, but it's a lot of "easy" steps to be taken. That may be too much work for you. Good luck. Pierre

mosburger 19y ago
> For me, OSX is mostly eye candy any keyboard junkie should steer clear of. Actually, when I got my Mac, one of the things that really surprised me was how many other Mac people use keyboard shortcuts for everything. I think that, contrary to what one might expect, having a particularly mouse-intensive environment actually induces people to learn keyboard shortcuts more, to become more efficient.
- pierrefar 19y ago
  You're right, and I should have given an example of what exactly I mean: the menus. Using Excel under Windows, I'm the master, knowing how to get to every menu item starting with Alt-(menu shortcut). I don't even have to look and it gets done. With other software, I'm not as good, but still better than average. On Macs you can't drive menus like that. That's a serious productivity hit for me. One question I would love to have an answer for: is this fixable using some kind of hack or installation of a program or something? That would be awesome.
  - impiri 19y ago
    You probably already know this, but in case anyone doesn't... Ctrl+F2 highlights the Menu Bar and lets you arrow-key around. It's a cumbersome key combination, but I use it often when I can't remember a keyboard shortcut.
    - andrewtj 19y ago
      Rather than using the arrow keys to highlight menu options I tend to type the first few letters of the menu item. Eg, Window zooming in Camino would be done by hitting Ctrl+F2, w, <enter>, z, <enter>.
rbanffy 19y ago
Pierre... From what you say, it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac or with a modern Linux. True the monitors stuff is not mature, but multi-monitor machines are just now becoming more common. As for OSX being sluggish... What have you been using? a G3? And I find that dropping to the command line is fairly common with me because I am a programmer. My son uses my computer from time to time and he has no idea there is such a thing as a command line. Maybe your sample is skewed by a number of programmers using Linux more than any limitation of the graphical environment. I only agree with you about the Vista thing. It is the lousiest OS I have ever seen being pushed out the door. It's even worse than Windows Me.
- pierrefar 19y ago
  "it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac" Don't tell that to my boss - our company's IT system is all Mac :) Seriously, I've been a Mac user for 18 months, and now helping the company test Leopard for roll-out. I'm using a Macbook (the white variety) with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Yes it's still sluggish and I don't have any background software running. As for modern Linux, I follow the release cycle of the majors. Every six months, I download and test Mandriva and Ubuntu, and sometimes others like Fedora, PC-BSD, and Mint (my pile of test CDs is getting silly). This week, I want to play with SymphonyOne 2008.1 (just released) because the interface is intriguing me. Invariably, on my laptop which is 2+ years old, something is broken. None of them ever figure out my screen res (1280x800) natively. It's an ATI card, so my hopes are high now that AMD has opensourced the drivers. Vista vs ME. Hmm, never thought of that but I think I agree with you!
  - rbanffy 19y ago
    Your Macbook must have some serious problem. May be some overheat condition that clocks it down. My wife's Macbook (white, Core Duo) is not sluggish no matter what I throw at it. The ATI thing may explain your driver problems, but on my last notebooks, Linux was even able to figure out my Broadcom wireless, which is quite an accomplishment. For the last two years, I have little to no driver problems, but, then, I won't buy a notebook with an ATI video subsystem and I do prefer units with hardware that is known to work under Linux (the Vaios are very compatible, as are most HPs and Dells).

mosburger 19y ago

> For me, OSX is mostly eye candy any keyboard junkie should steer clear of. Actually, when I got my Mac, one of the things that really surprised me was how many other Mac people use keyboard shortcuts for everything. I think that, contrary to what one might expect, having a particularly mouse-intensive environment actually induces people to learn keyboard shortcuts more, to become more efficient.

pierrefar 19y ago
You're right, and I should have given an example of what exactly I mean: the menus. Using Excel under Windows, I'm the master, knowing how to get to every menu item starting with Alt-(menu shortcut). I don't even have to look and it gets done. With other software, I'm not as good, but still better than average. On Macs you can't drive menus like that. That's a serious productivity hit for me. One question I would love to have an answer for: is this fixable using some kind of hack or installation of a program or something? That would be awesome.
- impiri 19y ago
  You probably already know this, but in case anyone doesn't... Ctrl+F2 highlights the Menu Bar and lets you arrow-key around. It's a cumbersome key combination, but I use it often when I can't remember a keyboard shortcut.
  - andrewtj 19y ago
    Rather than using the arrow keys to highlight menu options I tend to type the first few letters of the menu item. Eg, Window zooming in Camino would be done by hitting Ctrl+F2, w, <enter>, z, <enter>.

rbanffy 19y ago

Pierre... From what you say, it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac or with a modern Linux. True the monitors stuff is not mature, but multi-monitor machines are just now becoming more common. As for OSX being sluggish... What have you been using? a G3? And I find that dropping to the command line is fairly common with me because I am a programmer. My son uses my computer from time to time and he has no idea there is such a thing as a command line. Maybe your sample is skewed by a number of programmers using Linux more than any limitation of the graphical environment. I only agree with you about the Vista thing. It is the lousiest OS I have ever seen being pushed out the door. It's even worse than Windows Me.

pierrefar 19y ago
"it is glaringly obvious you never spent any time either with a Mac" Don't tell that to my boss - our company's IT system is all Mac :) Seriously, I've been a Mac user for 18 months, and now helping the company test Leopard for roll-out. I'm using a Macbook (the white variety) with a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Yes it's still sluggish and I don't have any background software running. As for modern Linux, I follow the release cycle of the majors. Every six months, I download and test Mandriva and Ubuntu, and sometimes others like Fedora, PC-BSD, and Mint (my pile of test CDs is getting silly). This week, I want to play with SymphonyOne 2008.1 (just released) because the interface is intriguing me. Invariably, on my laptop which is 2+ years old, something is broken. None of them ever figure out my screen res (1280x800) natively. It's an ATI card, so my hopes are high now that AMD has opensourced the drivers. Vista vs ME. Hmm, never thought of that but I think I agree with you!
- rbanffy 19y ago
  Your Macbook must have some serious problem. May be some overheat condition that clocks it down. My wife's Macbook (white, Core Duo) is not sluggish no matter what I throw at it. The ATI thing may explain your driver problems, but on my last notebooks, Linux was even able to figure out my Broadcom wireless, which is quite an accomplishment. For the last two years, I have little to no driver problems, but, then, I won't buy a notebook with an ATI video subsystem and I do prefer units with hardware that is known to work under Linux (the Vaios are very compatible, as are most HPs and Dells).