Am I the only one who thinks that at the GUI level Ubuntu is better than OS X? (I use Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 8.04 extensively)
It looks like a toy for people with poor eyesight.
Unix machines have traditionally been used with big monitors. It's not surprising at all Gnome uses lots of pixels.
And there is nothing forcing you to use Ubuntu's default layout. You have literally hundreds of options to choose from. I tend to change look and feel more or less on a monthly basis.
I use Ubuntu because I have the free time to screw around with my home computer, but I wouldn't recommend it for people who don't have the time and knowledge to do that, unless all they ever want to do is use what it comes with out of the box.
Most people don't. At the very least, most (non-geek) people don't switch desktop environments often. The people that are 'too busy' will just settle on a desktop environment and stick with it.
When running XP, as I still do on my non-Linux laptops, the total vertical space wastage at the top of Windows Explorer is 65 pixels, including title bar, toolbar, menu bar and location textbox. This is possible because on XP the toolbars and menu bars have customizable locations, unlike Vista and above - I have screenshots in my blog here:
http://blog.barrkel.com/2008/08/venting-on-vista.html
Unless you are talking about a pixel area somewhere in the region of 8000x3000 on high dpi screens, the Ubuntu proportions are nowhere near acceptable.
There's a trick to window management - I use cascading windows on the second monitor, as I detail here:
http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...
Only reason I quit is that after speccing hardware that had OSS drivers (and was fairly underpowered to boot), drivers in Ubuntu still didn't work 100% (eg, connecting to external displays broke X render support) and this got worse over time (Intel drivers being replaced with much more unstable replacements).
I still develop for Ubuntu, but inside a VM.
Ugh, I had this same problem. Every time I upgraded Ubuntu, hardware rendering got another 10x performance decrease and more bugs. Eventually I couldn't even enable vsync, so I got horrible tearing while watching videos. I partially blame Ubuntu for this, since they could have held back Intel's driver updates. Ultimately though, it was Intel's fault for releasing ever-buggier drivers.
A lot of the bugs you're talking about were fixed in updates to 9.10, but I gave up and got a Mac way before that.
Switching acceleration architectures to something that's not from the '80s, allowing modern hardware to effectively accelerate the UI, allowing video to interact with OpenGL and so on needed to be done, and there was really no good way to do it painlessly.
My theory is that one's brain gets used to the particular fonts and may not like change very much.
This could just be my own aesthetic taste, but I think it could also be due to those companies having highly paid font designers working on those details.
Admit it. That's a draw.
This is handled by title bars in Gnome, OS X and Windows, not window menu bars.
"separates the data (what's inside the window) from the menus that act on that data"
The menus don't just act on what's in the window. At least some menu items act on the application itself.
In a multiple document interface with a system that ties menus to windows, the menu of one window acts on multiple other windows. The other windows are either sub windows shoved inside the main window or they are windows floating independently from the window with the menu, which means you need to return focus to the main window to use the menu.
In a single document interfaces, the same menu, application controls and all, is repeated on each individual window.
Furthermore, in both of those cases, once you close the window with the menu bar, you no longer have access to any controls for the application, which is why most applications in these windowing systems can't run without at least one window open.
As opposed to "application buildup" MacOS users experience since the OS7 days, when they are on a clean desktop and five applications running for no particular reason.