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Comment by nolite | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if this is appropriate for your question.. but I've been using Ubuntu for 5 years now as my sole OS, as a programmer. I'm thinking of switching to Mac OS soon because I'm sick of hacking my computer to have it "just work":

- Every time there's a new release, and I update, it leaves me with a crashed unusable system. Its happened so much that I've scripted out my entire install and configuration process

- I have to kill Firefox in order to make sound work in VLC... wtf?

- My bluetooth mouse works 50% of the time

- Wifi doesn't usually work with the built in managers.. I often have to install wicd

That's the gripe side.. will report back later for more UI related improvement ideas

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I used Linux for six years as my primary OS, on OS X for a while now.

On OS X, the biggest annoyance for me, coming from Linux, is the lack of a consistent packaging system.

I don't like the MacPorts style of compiling everything on my own system, but being a Ruby programmer, I'm kind of stuck with it as well due to that being the way any Gem native extensions like to work too.

But really, that's about it.

It's a UNIX. It works. I never have to muck around with my config files, and pray that the next drop of the OS doesn't break my wireless / sleep / wake / sound card.

You could try homebrew, which could be described as macports done right - http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Better hardware support sure is important, but it looks like you have harware that was carefully selected as to bring the greatest frustration possible.

Ii dunno.. Nvida GTx 280, Asus Gene II, i7 920, Corsair Ram Desktop. Before that, a standard IBM x41 tablet. I'm not going that extreme here in the hardware side

> - I have to kill Firefox in order to make sound work in VLC... wtf?

Sadly, that's not a Ubuntu-specific problem. Recently, I had to borrow an openSuSE box for a few days and this was basically the first time I used client-side Linux in ten years and I was appalled. One of the many many annoyances was that only one program could use audio at a time. Like you described, I had to close Firefox after playing a Youtube vid, just to open VLC in a functional state (and this was on KDE I believe).

After all these years of not looking at the state of GUI on Linux I was extremely surprised by how little advancement happened in this time. I don't say this to flame, but I'd be really interested how things ended up in this sad state. The overall "experience" is just a nightmare.

I haven't had these kind of upgrade problems since updgrading from 7 to 8. Did you really have trouble upgrading to, e.g. 10.04?

It seems to me that there's some problem with your HW configuration (WiFi etc. - never had problems). Did you consider staying on some LTS. I've found 10.04 to be extremely smooth. If you don't want to have the trouble, just stay on LTS :).

I did. (9.10 to 10.04) I lost my graphics driver during the update and when I fixed it my sound card went for a toss. But a clean install of 10.04 solved the problems, so I don't understand why the upgrade can't work without problems.

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