Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

That's great to hear, I had just assumed Compiz wouldn't be available on Unity. I don't think I could live without Compiz Grid and Compiz Negative.

Edit: I see Unity is actually built with Compiz. Somehow I missed that on the Ubuntu Unity website way back when I started reading about it to evaluate it.

There go my hopes that someone would enshrine a sensible scheme for keyboard shortcuts. On new GNOME installs, I remap shortcut modifiers to

Super for actions that operate on the window. This is actually pretty straightforward since most of the default shortcuts can just be adjusted so replace Alt with Super, e.g., Super+Space to invoke the window menu, Super+F4 to close the window, Super+click-and-drag to move the window from anywhere on the window, Super+Tab to tab through windows. It also helps to dealing with this mentally when you realize that Super maps to the Windows key for most keyboards.

To pull the perspective back, Super+Alt is used for actions with a scope wider than one concerned with the current window, like desktop stuff. Super+Alt+Left/+Right for switching desktops, Super+Alt+F2 for bringing up the Run dialog, Super+Alt+T for opening a terminal, Super+Alt+F1 for GNOME menu, etc.

This has the added benefit of freeing up any combination of Ctrl and Alt to be used by applications. This can actually be a big problem, otherwise; I've run across many applications that assume Alt+Function key shortcuts, which cannot be used since they're bound to some global action in default Ubuntu (GNOME?) installs.

They haven't tried to "force KDE/GNOME to work together on a notification API". They did their own thing, then later on adopted and modified a KDE protocol (which in the first place didn't even do the primary thing they were aiming for -> menus), then complained about GNOME not adopting their code (which is a separate issue to the protocol).

They're basically doing their own thing now, not paying a lot of attention (let alone contributing) to upstream projects.

Pressing Windows + key in a non-Windows operating system always seems so counter-intuitive to the everyday user.

I'd like to think so, and they're doing a great job, but I can't help but feel they're a few years too late. I suspect general email & browsing is going to happen more and more on tablets and phones and people will only want full-blown computers to run specialized native apps, most of which will probably never be ported to Linux.

Of course, thanks to Android, Linux will be more relevant than ever in this scenario.

I hope so... I could easily have a dozen family members switched over in a heartbeat - if only iTunes were readily available (and not having to use vmware or such...).

Sadly, until then they're S.O.L.

I recently bought a new netbook and rather than waiting a couple of days or installing the beta to upgrade later I put an older release on. 10.04 in fact, rather than 10.10, as that is an LTS release and I was in a cautious mood.

I BitTorrented the 64-bit Desktop edition it as soon as OMGUbuntu broke the news on Twitter and it took me around half an hour (for 700 MiB).

I wonder whether there'd be major security concerns if a torrent layer was stuck over the main centralized backbone? It could probably reduce bandwidth costs for hosting and provide better speeds to people, though keeping the "swarm" updated might be kind of tricky.

http://torrent.ubuntu.com/releases/natty/release/

It's classic or aught.

There is no easy way to answer this question. You can definitely get a more powerful PC for the price. With the Mac, you are buying some brand, some better construction, and a lot of better customer service. You are also buying OS X, which may or may not be attractive.

I used Linux for many years as a primary development machine, and it was great. Ubuntu is doing a good job solving the "there is no good desktop for Linux" that was pretty true five years ago.

That said, I prefer my Mac because I get almost the same ability to play at the command line (I spend most of my day in Emacs right now, including running my shells there), but I also get a refined experience when I'm interacting with applications outside of development (e.g. Garage Band, Pages, Keynote, etc).

In the end, I didn't switch for development, I switched for all the time I use my laptop when I'm not developing. For me, it was worth it, but YMMV.

I've been researching this setup the past few weeks, and it appears the only issue was that the linux gfx drivers for the HD3000 gpu (embedded in the i5/i7 Macbook Pro Sandy Bridge cpu's) were still alpha/beta quality, but apparently that's fixed in Ubuntu 11.04.

I'm still see-sawing though. My other option is to get a tricked out custom Sager with the latest Nvidia GTX 485 gpu and use it to start farming bitcoins (and perhaps learning CUDA). The embedded HD3000 gpu in Intel i5/i7 gets very good performance for an on-chip gpu (google for it), but is not in the same league as the 485 GTX.

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8150s1-clevo-p150hm-p-2981.ht...

iOS development vs bitcoin farming and CUDA is the tradeoff, still thinking that through.

As others have stated I think its what you do outside of development. Also you can look at the osx86 project if you're adventurous.

With a Linux machine, you'll have an environment closer to whatever server your application will run (nobody deploys on OSX and nobody sane deploys on Windows), which is a bonus. Plus, package management will save you lots of time. If you want to partition your machine on several environments, you can use Linux containers to do that and have many little Linux "servers" running without interfering with your desktop and taking up very little resources (much less than full blown VMs would).

Disclaimer: I am writing this on a Mac. I love Macs, but I work on Linux.

I spend 90% of my time in Ubuntu (mainly developing).

I honestly think that if you're tight on cash and you just need a machine for development, get as much CPU-cycles and stability for your money as you can, and run a linux distro.

What makes a big difference to me is the display quality and the battery. Apple tends to have very good batteries. That's why I personally would buy an used Unibody Macbook or Macbook Pro, one of the recent types with the long-life high-capacity batteries.

I do mainly Linux development work, on Ubuntu, using an older Macbook Pro, and everything just works great and is super smooth to use - in fact this is the best Linux machine I have used!

As others are saying, it sounds like the suspend/resume feature works well now. I can add that at least on my multi-monitor desktop Ubuntu 10.10 will reliably automatically adjust when I plug in or unplug one of my monitors. I found this out accidentally and it was really a pleasant surprise.

Of course, as always with Linux, both these features probably depend on how well your hardware is supported.

You see, when you buy a Mac you know every feature (including sleep) has been tested thoroughly. When you decide to install an OS on a computer you already own, you put the onus to test on yourself. I don't understand why people continue to make this unfair comparison. If you want a linux computer where sleep just works, by a preinstalled linux computer. System76 makes fantastic ones. They thoroughly test every feature. They test when new versions of Ubuntu get released. You'll have the same experience you have when buying a Mac or when buying an HP.

That being said...I know for sure there is a configuration out there that doesn't work...that is the beauty and benefit of a locked down ecosystem like Apple. They control everything and absolutely can guarantee the experience....and to be honest, if Apple can't deliver on that promise with the compromise of choice, they shouldn't be in the game.

So, I don't really think it is an issue, or nearly as big a one as people make it out to be. I find that if I stick to the bigger Linux friendly manufacturers (Lenovo) or the ones many people will buy (MBP), you will have good luck.

If you want to address > 4GB of RAM on 32bit, install the PAE kernel. I think the meta package is called linux-generic-pae.

Use 64bit if you want to run applications that will benefit from it.

EDIT: If in doubt, use the 32 bit one as it will give you less friction for general purpose desktop use.

http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode

At least for some things, in my experience.

Ubuntu (and Unity) is still Gnome2-based (I haven't heard anything, yet, concerning a move to Gnome3 for a future release).

So upgrading to Gnome3 is a one-way upgrade and will break your Gnome2-dependent environments. Although I've done a ppa-purge to uninstall the UGR packages and things seemed to have gone back to normal, pretty much.

I'd love to see some data one way or the other, but in my experience and among my friends and associates, people who buy Apple computers are incredibly likely to value the polished, "just works" factors of OS X and if they do care about being UNIX-like, it has them covered too. Then among those who run Linux as a primary OS, they do so without paying for the shiny Apple hardware. Again I stress this is a personal subset and I welcome it being corrected or confirmed by hard numbers.

At the same time, perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way: If you have a goal of being the best desktop experience, then better to pit yourself against the best?

Docks have been around before Finder adopted a dock. Beagle predates Spotlight. Workspaces have existed for as long as GUIs have for Linux and Apt has been around for over a decade, with the Ubuntu Software Center in its present form predating the Mac App Store.

I really like Ubuntu because it comes out with an update every 6 months so users keep getting the newest software but I can't stand this flagrant Apple copy-cat ism. Is there any Debian based linux that updates reliably and has a sane UI?

I also got native partition booting working very quickly in Parallels - I can boot both my native Windows 7 installation and my native Ubuntu installation - that are On Partitions Of The Actual Hard Drive. Took a tiny little bit of nudgework, but now it just goes.