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The hardest thing to me about ditching Mac would be that Apple is the only company capable of doing a user interface.

ALL other user interfaces by ALL other vendors suck.

For some reason, no human beings on the entire planet other than those that work at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino are capable of doing a UI.

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This is a massive exaggeration. I went from OSX to Ubuntu and I am more productive on Ubuntu in interface terms. The dock is very silly and graphical when you have quicksilver or gnome-do. Chrome is a better browser and browser UI experience than Safari in my opinion (and lots of people like firefox and opera more). The Finder vs Nautilus differences aren't big enough really, there are pros and cons to each. Apple stuff is well designed until you want to go past just cookie cutter customizations and then the openness IS the UI because I define it to work how I want to.

The same caries over to other things. Sure the install and uninstall of applications on OSX is a great UI. But apt-get just seriously leaves it in the dust. The problem with linux was never that it had a bad UI or was too customizable. The problem with linux was actual hardware bugs in drivers, lack of office, lack of flash, lack of games. Which have mostly been addressed asides from games (which is a sore point for Apple too). UI is far too overrated over actual features.

And it's all based on a myth. Steve Jobs ringing up SUN over their looking glass and threatening with UI patents is just ridiculous. As are the claims to Apple fame with interfaces taken from Xerox.

So yes, I agree Apple are very good, possibly the best at UIs. But my points are 1) UIs aren't as massively important as people say, 2) Apple's "innovations" have been overrated 3) your statement that "no human beings on the entire planet other than those that work at One Infinite Loop in Cupertino are capable of doing a UI" is just ridiculous.

As much as I agree with the "it's not that bad" opinion, I can't understand why do you say "UI is far too overrated over actual features". No "standard user" will want to know about apt-get. They have synaptic and others. Normal users don't want to use the console at all. Command line is good for developers and power-users - and that's a minority. Majority wants to work based on recognition, not recall because they don't care enough to remember things.

I agree, that's why Ubuntu comes with the "Ubuntu Software Center" which is basically a frontend for those tools my grandma could use.

What Apple really has down about UIs is sparseness. "Exterminate features." I loathe clutter, both in real life and in technology.

When something on a mac looks like it should be able to be frobbed, dragged, etc., it usually can and in exactly the way that it seems like it should.

This is not the case on Windows, Linux, or anything else.

For me, Apple's UI advantage comes from two things:

1. It's way the hell better than Windows. No competition here. Windows is horribly clunky, and if you disagree with me, try using both for a while.

2. It has less of a tendency to plunge you into pesky little technical details than Linux. I personally don't mind fiddling with a config file every now and then, and the more recent Ubuntu versions are getting surprisingly good about this, but Linux still demands more effort to get a good, productive environment going. And Flash support still sucks.

Of the two, I prefer Linux in terms of usability. I doubt most non-technical users would agree. (Chrome, though, is just unambiguously better than Safari in every way. I use both regularly and don't want to dislike either of them.)

I can't stand the Mac UI. In every way that it's better than Windows, there's some way that it's worse. The dock is a terrible interface element and having a menu at top the of screen may have made sense when screens where 512×342 pixels but makes little sense with giant resolution screens and multiple monitors.

I'd say the all user interfaces from all vendors suck, including Apple.

There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution. Try looking up Fitt’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law).

Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets… no matter how fast the mouse moves towards them, one can never overshoot them vertically. Menus in Windows and most *nix environments require both horizontal and vertical precision.

Furthermore, why are you bothering with the Dock when Exposé and Spotlight (or Quicksilver, Launchbar, etc.) offer great power user alternatives?

Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

> There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution.

I understand the original reason for it. However, hitting the menu is an extremely large distance from what you might be working on now. I'm typing this on a multi-monitor machine -- this app is totally self-contained on one monitor. Why must I move my mouse across two monitors just use this app's menu?

> Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

I can't stand how you can close all windows on a Mac and still have the process around with the only indication being a slightly difference in the menu bar. Amazingly confusing.

Now this may be personal preference but it still shows that the Mac GUI isn't some ultimate model of perfection that everyone agrees on.

It's only true that you can't overshoot them if your trajectory is perfectly vertical. With a diagonal trajectory (which is usually the case), you can still overshoot the item you were aiming for.

Also, Fitts' Law says that the time to select a target is proportional to the distance and the size of the target. Putting the menu on the edge of the screen makes the effective size of the targets bigger, but in some cases it also means that they are much further away.

As I type this, the menu bar is about 4x further away than the top of my browser window.

"Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets…"

And they violated that rule in the dock, unless that's been fixed in the last couple of versions.

Although historically I have always agreed with you, I dare say Microsoft is starting to figure it out. Slowly but surely. Win7 is almost a pleasant experience.

Windows 7 is usable for two reasons:

1) They removed much of the "originality" that they did from Vista.

2) They copied more stuff from Apple, and a little bit from the Linux ecosystem.

Oh... and what's their fetish with that sickening shade of teal/blue? Yuck! It looks like smurf vomit.

I doubt that Microsoft has copied anything from the Linux ecosystem. And with Linux innovations such as moving the window buttons around for no reason and upsetting their users, I don't see why they would.

Linux fans need to relax a bit and realize they're number three for a reason and work harder not complain harder.

Edid: I'm sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe I've grown disillusioned with the difference between the reality in the trenches and fans extolling the features of product X, where X is any of Linux, Mac, Windows, iPhone, etc.

I just got my new laptop yesterday, and while some of this is surely due to the SSD or the New Laptop Smell, Windows 7 is EASILY the best experience I've ever had with a Microsoft product. The new taskbar looks wonderful, the design is up there with Apple, and everything is so freaking fast it is unbelievable.

I booted my other laptop to transfer some data over and waiting for Vista to load to the point where I could interact with Chrome was like pulling teeth.

I've started using it this week. Alt+tab becomes more and more broken with every release. There was a time when excel was the only application that didn't behave properly.

I honestly wonder what you mean by Alt-Tab being broken? Surely it does switch windows, doesn't it?

The stack doesn't work consistently.

In the old days, when you minimised something, it always went to the bottom of the stack. (Except Excel, which had a silent entry in the stack when you had more than one document open. Outlook has been bizarre for a while, too.)

In one of the NT4 service packs (I think) this changed so that if something minimised to the status bar (rather than the task bar) it worked differently. I'm not sure what Vista did, but XP was bearable.

Now there are lots of variables - different apps respond to being removed from focus differently, I've read that the number of open applications affects stack response to minimise also.

Windows used to be very friendly to rapid keyboard-only operation. You could drop things in the start menu and activate them with two keystrokes. Alt+tab was dependable. No longer.

Hmm. I changed the theme to classic mode and it seems to work like I expect it to.

    ALL other user interfaces by ALL other vendors suck.

I don't understand your enthusiasm for aqua (I've got a mac) but I understand what you're sayin in a general sense because I came to a similar conclusion about ten years ago.

If this is a big thing for you, I'd recommend the path I took after Be folded. Accept that complex user interfaces have bad tradeoffs (platform dependence, inflexibility). Find a full-screen tty you like (I use iterm because with apple+key + enter it goes full screen and gets rid of aqua) and return to living in the habitat of your ancestors!

A few things are inherently visual: paint programs, 3d games and movie editing. Everything that is not can be done effectively on the console. These interactions are often far superior to GUIs.

There's a learning curve. But once you're over it you'll have enormous power at your disposal and won't ever get locked in again.

Two things make this far easier than it has been previously:

1) Python. The standard library contains everything you'd want to do to push a system around. You can hammer out powerful tools in python in a casual manner and at a speed that has not been available to mere mortals before. You can get it on a variety of platforms.

2) Web browsesr. It's now easy to get high-quality web browsers on any platform you'd want to use. Where you do need to produce a GUI, you can knock up a trim webapp with html and forms.

> The hardest thing to me about ditching Mac would be that Apple is the only company capable of doing a user interface.

Some systems have a CLUE (Command Line User Environment).

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