This is probably the opposite of my experience. I don't own any machine running OSX, so I can't comment on this, even if almost every experience I had with it

This is probably the opposite of my experience. I don't own any machine running OSX, so I can't comment on this, even if almost every experience I had with it has been quite bad. I never saw any of those problems running Linux (KDE on Chakra - and even running it on Nouveau). Yes, not everything is perfect yet, but it doesn't have anything wrong. I'm probably lucky to have only supported hardware on my PC. You should try a different distribution OP, or even only a different DE. I don't dislike Unity like the web seems to do, but I think they did some very wrong decision in the technical side of it. Like implementing it as a Compiz plugin (not exactly famous for stability and performance, and also it's tied to a single WM) and giving the user few options (Unity has been out since 3 versions now, so i don't think they're going to implement them soon).