Why move your parents to Windows rather than to some other Linux distribution? (Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian...)
Same with watching video's of a certain TV-channel (Silverlight 4, not supported by Monolight yet) and a dozen other things. Like I said, I always had faith one day all (most) will be good. But now that I've lost this trust, I feel all I can do is give in and no longer ask patience from them (with yet another Linux distro).
I gave up around 2008. Gave up trying to migrate friends/family; gave up being an evangelist. The number of things that wouldn't work on someone's hardware was always greater than my ability to help/google/patch/whatever. And I got sick of:
1) works for me.
2) research your hardware first(!)
3) build your own machine
4) this latest release version X "just works"
5) other tired canards you've already heard.
Perhaps it was my hardware (the 6 different laptops and desktops I rotated through during 5 years apparently just never hit that magical elusive sweet spot of 'just working').
Perhaps my expectations were different - I'd like to have two different apps running at the same time and both play sound at the same time - pidgin/gaim would constantly lock the sound so that nothing else could play, causing no sounds and sometimes crashes.
I've got other stories - everyone does - but got tired. I went mac full time in 2008 and have a good balance of a system that lets me run osx with windows and linux in virtual machines when I need them. It's certainly not perfect - I have occasional crashes, that stupid beach ball, and I miss the FISH protocol in Konqueror something mad. But... I get far more actual work done on this system than I ever did on Linux systems.
Other people will have opposite experiences - good for them - I just wish people would quit blaming the "linux on the desktop" defectors as if they'd done something 'wrong'. The only thing most of them did 'wrong' was to believe the hype for too long.
I just got disappointed in the seemingly new direction of Canonical not sharing my values. The vision and hope was exactly the energy I needed to fight all the non-working stuff.
I got way too tired of having to deal with that, and even moreso of people replying "I've never had to deal with that - you were doing something wrong" or even better "Oh, it's not like that any more". Yeah, it might not be, but I was also hearing that it wasn't like that 10 years ago, when clearly it was like that.
So... after a while, you become numb to the claims of fanboys who've been using one linux distro for 9 months and think linux is the best thing ever and "M$ sux" and all that, and you just get on doing your work with a platform that fits your needs. When your needs change, and your platform can't meet those needs anymore, fighting the platform to change when it won't doesn't make sense.
The feature I miss most is how selecting text with the pointing device on Linux copied it into the "clipboard" without my needing to type Command-C or Control-C.
Like you, the beach ball (i.e., general lack of responsiveness) is at the top of my list of OS X's disadvantages relative to Linux.
Unlike you, I do not experience any crashes of OS X. It hung and needed to be rebooted by holding down the power button -- once in about 4000 hours of service.
This was also my experience using Windows and Linux across a variety of hardware from the mid 90s through mid 2000s. I don't know if it's just because I expect too much from my hardware - being able to run "too many" things at the same time, or what, but I always run in to situations where I need to hard reboot (not every day, but more than 1 time every 6000 hours).
If your mom got a book about photo editing for Mac-only software, would you be so sad to tell her "sorry mom, that only works on MacOS"?
For the purpose intended, I'd install a Debian distro and leave it be for the whole lifetime of the computer. Their support lasts a lot (but so does Ubuntu's for long-term support releases and other distros).
That's the reality today, but when you take a step back and look at it more broadly it sounds nothing short of ridiculous. I don't remember any scifi movies where the characters had to dual-boot their refrigerators because the main OS kept track of your food supply but another OS had the software for calorie counting.
When you tell any normal person "that software doesn't work on this computer" they'll only stare back at you confused. It really doesn't make any sense and it should be the #1 priority for software development going forward.
I don't know why someone would go from Ubuntu to Windows. I can easily see going to Mac, or a tablet.