OS X 10.9: A downward spiral or a new hope?

I highly recommend Xubuntu. No frills, no nonsense. Just gets out of the way and lets you get your work done.

I don't think Linux has gotten any better on the desktop since 2007 or so. Hardware support still isn't perfect, sleep/wakeup still isn't perfect, battery life is still lower than on OS X/Windows, 3D acceleration is still iffy. It's a total disaster.

My biggest peeve with Ubuntu was that I always had to download a billion software updates every few days.

Really? The impression I got from Ubuntu users is that in the last few years it has made a lot of steps sideways.

Here are the reasons I switched to OSX:

- Image installers (.dmg files) and complete installers (.pkg files, that bring dependencies with them). I have never seen either of those fail, ever. I have seen installations from .tar.gz -> ./configure && make && make install fail countless times. This is the number one reason for me, and it's so much more important than anything else that I have trouble thinking of other reasons. I absolutely dislike the model that linux package managers use to handle dependencies and I do believe in bringing all libraries/dependencies needed with the installer and compiling them with disable-shared on. To do otherwise is to suffer a whole day trying to install ImageMagick when it should be a one-click task.

- Any other reasons pale in comparison to the first reason. I guess it's nice to have decent trackpad gestures... but I'd forgo everything for easy installers that bring dependencies with them.

+ I think going to a cloud IDE is the future. I've been experimenting with www.action.io - it's pretty awesome to just open that up in a browser on any OS and get coding without local configurations.

I use ubuntu at work and osx at home. Ubuntu used to be amazing, and I still think it's good open source development platform, but the amount of time I've spent fixing drivers or fighting with unity has meant that it has cost me a lot more than osx.

Then there is the abomination that is unity. They really hit the mark there, making a window manager for netbooks. Cause everyone in their target market uses a netbook, right?

I think they should have stuck with gnome 2, polished it, and targeted programmers as their core users.

For me, the matter of deciding between OS X and Linux is one of responsibility. When I buy an Apple laptop, Apple accepts responsibility for things like making sure that the hardware and the operating system work well together. Apple also makes sure that updates are (generally) compatible with existing hardware, up to a point at which they no longer support the hardware, but that line in the sand is clear. It's easy for me to understand where support ends.

Apple is very good at this. Yes, you will hear gripes from people about issues with Apple hardware/software, but relative to the rest of the industry (which is the pragmatic measure), they're way ahead of the game.

Contrast this with Linux. Yes, I can get a laptop that has good Linux support, but ultimately, I'm responsible for compatibility between hardware and software. I can pay for Canonical for support, but I believe a large part of Apple's success in building great compters has to do with the fact that they own responsiblity for both the hardware and the software.

At the end of the day, OS X is unixy enough (it was "UNIX certified", at least at one point) to make it a suitable development environment for Unix-like software. Combine this with the opportunity to not have to think about hardware and software compatibility, and the combination keeps a significatn number of users from making the switch to Linux.

Oh I don't know about that. One of the great things about using a Mac is that you get a POSIX compliant operating system without having to mess with things too much. At the very least Ubuntu is not the way you want to go. The Linux environment has certainly improved, but the reasons people picked OS X haven't exactly evaporated.

I did the switch at home three years ago after close to twenty years of Apples. My transition from design to dev certainly helped.

Here's the problem. This morning I applied some updates (yum update) to my Fedora workstation (not a laptop) and now Gnome is failing to start due to a video driver issue. I can fix this, I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1996. But I don't want to fix this.

This is on a fairly modern desktop built with Linux in mind and a slightly older NVidia card. It should just work.

I also have a Mac laptop and am more and more leaning that way, as it removes many of the issues that get in my way in the Linux world. Sure it introduces a few more, like using MacPorts or something to get my tools installed. Perhaps jumping into a VM when I'm working on that 5-10% of the code that is Linux specific. But overall that is less time taken away from my day than a broken update (and I'm not even talking about a release update).

I'm pretty sure that in a few months my workstation will be Mac as well, with a powerful headless Linux box in the closet or something like that - where Linux works best. I never, ever have issues with my non-graphical linux installs.

Which is why it is better to explain the benefits, not the features.

It would probably be sold more as a massive improvement in backup technology over time machine (which is already pretty nice).