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I switched to using Ubuntu on my personal machine about a year ago. I was seriously excited.

My experiences:

- Utter inability to consume streaming video, be it Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.

- Complete madness wrestling with the built-in, broken version of Ruby.

- Real difficulty finding any clear, accurate documentation.

- Out-of-date crappy versions of libraries available through apt-get.

- Printing? Ha.

- I can't play Minecraft, which is a Java game.

- GMail freezing on load 3 times out of 5.

Rather than liberating me from the bondage of win32, it has made me feel like a third class citizen of the digital world. The consequence? I am buying a Mac.

Edit: I wouldn't usually complain about a downvote, but this is a list of difficulties I have experienced when using an operating system. What do you object to?

Can you provide some specific errors that you're encountering?

- Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, sounds like you don't have Flash installed, or no 3d acceleration (no video card drivers? What videocard are you using?)

- What's broken about the built-in version of Ruby? (I don't use Ubuntu or Ruby, so I'm sincerely curious.)

- Documentation for what? What are you looking for, how can we help?

- Apt-get, Ubuntu has a strict release cycle. To get the latest unstable stuff, you'll probably need to upgrade to the latest beta or alpha.

- Printing, I've had mixed experiences with this depending on the printer. I've given up on paper, can't blame you.

- If you can't play Minecraft, then you may have a weird version of Java installed, or no 3d acceleration (no drivers?).

- GMail freezing, what browser?

When posting complaints, avoid framing it in such a way that it's impossible for anybody to help. If no one can say anything about your experience because there's a lack of information, then people can't relate your experience to their own or debate the applicability of it.

> - Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, sounds like you don't have Flash installed, or no 3d acceleration (no video card drivers? What videocard are you using?)

I am 100% certain you can't get netflix to work on linux. Also, flash sucks on linux. I am tired of flash on linux. Asking what video card you are using is a cop out.

Yeah, but Youtube ought to work fine; it's wfm on every Linux box I've ever been anywhere near. That suggests that something else is up.

NetFlix needs Silverlight's DRM, which Moonlight on Mono doesn't have. On the one hand, it's not really fair to blame Linux for that but on the other the end-user experience is that you can't have NetFlix on Linux. It sucks, but that's the way it is.

I think it's only fair to mention that this is on my netbook - it's reasonable, but not the most powerful machine.

Netflix doesn't work because of no Silverlight.

Hulu and YouTube are unwatchably slow when fullscreened. They work perfectly fine under Windows on an older machine. In addition, having a YouTube chrome tab open slows everything to a halt.

The built in Ruby is an older version, and it conflicts with any new version you install unless you use something magical like RVM. It's very confusing for someone new to the Ruby toolchain.

The installed Java VM doesn't seem to work with Minecraft, and getting it to work involves doing things that remind me of DOS gaming back in the 90s.

Gmail has been freezing in Chrome since updating to the latest version of Ubuntu.

None of these are killers, and the OS is generally fast and awesome. However, I have the choice between spending 10% mental overhead wrestling with my machine and context-switching to deal with bugs, or spending $2k and buying a Mac. Cumulatively, I feel the Mac will be cheaper.

I know this is completely unrelated to the main discussion, but have you tried RVM? I'm not an experienced Ruby developer, but I had some issues with the default ruby installation that RVM fixed completely. Try installing it directly from their site (its a one liner) instead of from repo.

EDIT: Had some issue posting.

RVM is indeed a life-saver. I wrote a blog post documenting RVM setup on Ubuntu a while back - may be slightly out of date by now, but it's here: http://www.bootstrapp.in/39074927

> - Utter inability to consume streaming video, be it Netflix, Hulu or YouTube.

I'm sort of curious what version of Ubuntu you installed. I've installed Ubuntu 10.4, the default install, on a number of machines and have had zero problems with streaming video (Hulu or Youtube). I've had issues playing encrypted DVDs, but I think I just need to install a codec or something.

> Out-of-date crappy versions of libraries available through apt-get.

This is an inherent problem with the very concept of a distribution, and doesn't really go away with OS X.

Generally if you want bleeding edge software, you're better off building from source no matter what the distribution, although you might be able to tweak your sources.list to use unstable repositories.

Debian Sid and Archlinux are functional rolling release distros.

And Gentoo.

You're still making the same tradeoff, though it's less obvious.

Sure, but building everything from source yourself is a lot of effort to maintain. You can go with something like NixOS, but it's also a hassle to use because nothing is in the "standard places".

If you generally want the latest release of everything, then go with a rolling release distro. You can build old versions from source or through namespaced legacy packages.

If you generally want year-old packages, then go with an incremental release and build your own version of those things you need the latest release of. I have found this to generally be more effort, but I tend to want the latest compilers and base libraries (not least because I want issues like reduced header promiscuity to cause breakage on my machine first instead of handling the support tickets when it breaks on a user's machine).

maybe it's all relative, but for all its problems Ubuntu's flash support is infinitely better now than it was even a couple years ago.

I think it's probably true that if you're not somewhat 'nix-aware, there are still gotchas here and there -- but I've found a quick google search almost always comes up with some good suggestions, one of which usually fixes up whatever I'm complaining about.

Compared to the downtime I've had with viruses and malware on Windows, the constant need to be vigilant and to teach (or fail to teach) my less technically inclined friends and family how to protect their machine, Ubuntu is clearly the winner.

I'm either not having the problem you described or it's not related to the OS.

- Youtube is horrible for me to watch in Germany, but that's the carrier's problem.

- I'm a ruby user, but not a developer, so I can't tell much about that.

- Documentation depends on what you're searching for. Ubuntu itself provides a great set of documentation and community wikis. The forums are also very helpful, so is askubuntu.com.

- As said: Ubuntu follows a strict release cycle regarding the library versions.

- Printing works perfectly fine for me with any printer I tried so far. If your printer does not work, complain at your printer's manufactorer.

- Minecraft runs perfectly for me.

- Gmail works perfectly for me.

> I want an OS that starts up and becomes invisible until shutdown, and I never want to touch the mouse.

This.

That's the same reason why I love Ubuntu as my desktop. I'm hardly doing anything outside of the browser, except for coding and writing with Vim.

> I lose a few hours of productivity every few months in exchange for massive productivity gains while working.

Even though upgrades aren't that frequent on other platforms, they do exist. Every two or three releases I take the chance to make a fresh start and it's incredible how fast I can set up the desktop to fit my needs. Ubuntu's/Debian's excellent package management is a huge time saver.

Yes. Ubuntu is particularly good in that regard. I've tried to run Fedora for a month and, man, is that thing brittle or what?

Indeed, I'm in the same camp. I've run into hurdles getting Linux installations to work, but nothing near the headache I've had trying to get a proper Emacs setup.

I've been using some flavour of Linux as my primary OS for over three years now. Windows 7 seems like a big improvement over previous version of Windows, but I have driver issues like you wouldn't believe, whereas Ubuntu works flawlessly on first installation on the same hardware. OSX is nice, but it's just uncomfortable because it offers a lot of what Linux offers, but in a rigid, UI-driven way that you'd expect from Windows.

For technical users, (technical users like me, at least) Linux is still where it's at.

I did the same as well after I got fed up with Windows bloat and, to your point, the way that windows is more for home users whereas I want it to get out of the way as well. And since I mostly use my box for coding, I also just got tired of working with Python on windows as well as consuming all of the developer tools as it is just natural on Linux/Ubuntu. Note that I don't do any gaming or anything.

My install experience was pretty flawless. I have moved 2 desktops and 3 laptops over to Ubuntu(10.4, 10.10 and 11.04) and have not had any real problems except for a 3d acceleration issue on a 10 year old ATI video card. Been going for about 6 months this way and really find it painful to work in Windows now.

I used to be a linux only hacker since a child. Then I bought my first Mac (the first flat screen iMac) and fell in love. Recently I installed Ubuntu to my work laptop and found several workflow enhancing applications.

My work desktop is a simple two monitor setup with xmonad, several urxvt terminals, vim instances and two browsers of choice (firefox and chrome). I love it because there's no distractions, only code is visible and browser when I need it. I even use mutt with Exchange (a very perverse setup through davmail, thank you corporate policies) so I don't get notifications for emails which would distract me from programming.