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Interesting that you say "crazy UI fantasy land". It wasn't until Ubuntu 11.10, and now 12.04 that I thought desktop Linux had a shot. Unity in 12.04 is quite awesome and makes me super productive. It gets out of your way and that is how I like it. Sure, I make some modifications (smaller icons, autohide the launcher, change icon set to Faenza), but that is about it.

And, since being back in Linux land, I have never, ever had to maintain a system config file or touch it at all. I do have my own zshrc and .vim stuff, but I would have that on a Mac as well. Overall I find Ubuntu to be more productive than OSX. And since I virtualize my dev instances, I want something lighter and Ubuntu is WAAAAAAY lighter on the same hardware than OSX.

It makes me happy to know that someone here likes Unity, because I think it is horrible. But then again, my preferred GUI for Linux is Ratpoison and some Xterms.

My preferred UI is the Awesome WM so I know how you feel but I think Unity is going down the right road for several reasons:

+ Composited desktop means a X11 artifact free experience. + Keyboard shortcuts for most tasks + Unified experience for different apps/programs + The windows key is no longer a dead key - Custom key bindings are hard

Back in 11.04 I absolutely hated unity, but now Stockholm syndrome is setting in. When I go back to 'regular' desktops I find that I have to make a conscious effort to manage my windows. I now get annoyed if I have to move windows around.

Unity appears to have altered my behaviour and I think the change is pretty nice.

Well, I will give Ubuntu another go when 12.04 LTS is released. Maybe I will take a shining to it.

"Ubuntu took a nosedive into crazy UI fantasy land" Is that really your reason why you ditched linux???? It is so easy to install a different UI. Nothing is so clean and consistent as window maker or any other of the extremely lightweight UIs linux allows to use.

Compared to that: whenever I start up Winodws (XP) in vmware to get my tax stuff done, I am horrified by all the messages that pop up (repeatedly), antivirus practically paralysing my computer for minutes (and longer), genuine advantage stuff etc. For my taste, windows still needs so much work invested in configuring these annoying things until the stuff is usable.

Is that 1500% improved with win 7?

First off, occasional forays into Windows VM is always fraught with windows and AV updates - you can delay them if you're only in for a few minutes, but...

That evenutally got me to dust off an old netbook, use it as my windows "server" that faithfully wakes on LAN, and just keep that in the cupboard access through remote desktop (Microsoft makes a great OSX app for this).

Every week the machine wakes up, backs up (to image), fires off a bunch of updates, potentially reboots, then goes back to it's aquiescent sleep state.

The RDC is generally faster and has the upside that crazy activity on Windows stays on it's own hardware, and I don't have a crazy 60GB file that's clogging my backups - the netbook has it's own backup.

Our experience must have been quite different, since I have finally ran away from Windows after four years of using Ubuntu in parallel. Windows 7 is nice, but I still find Ubuntu easier to use and much less resource intensive. True, I was also at first thrown away by Unity, but have adopted Gnome Shell and had no need to look back since. Each time I reboot in Windows I feel like in one of those nightmares when you're running the best you can, but are barely moving.

I'm getting older, and after about 15 years playing around with config files, I just want something that's stable and consistent[.] .. Windows is leaps and bounds better than when I heavily used it last.

This is why we use Windows. When we buy a new computer, it's a former corporate business class laptop sold on eBay, it comes with some version of Windows preinstalled, and we don't mess with it. As with the recent Gmail discussion, the reason we use it is that it simply works and we need it to do work.

I use Windows too. But I found it interesting that someone on Hacker News considers installing an OS as "messing with the computer".

I'm using "messing" in the same sense the gp used "mucking":

Ubuntu was soooo close to surpassing Windows from a "I just want to get stuff done without mucking with the machine" standpoint.

Here follows nostalgic reminiscence and some ranting.

I used to run OpenSUSE exclusively. That was fine when the world was young and my job didn't demand too much of my time. I didn't need any graphics support, WiFi or even ACPI.

10 years later, I don't have the patience and the time to sculpt a unique snowflake that will work with all the hardware in my laptop, and have it work in any reasonable network I might have to plug in to. Windows 7 works well enough. This is also a pity, since I've come to strongly dislike the post-Vista Windows UI - the new start menu, the new task bar, the new Windows Explorer windows. Everything was Just Fine with the Windows 2000 UI.

At work it's all Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a tiny bit of AIX (ewww). And I run NetBSD on Prgmr just for the heck of it.

I hate where we've gotten to. Opera is the only browser that still has a g*ddamned proper status bar.

You didn't ever try running a different window manager?