How many people seriously choose a desktop environment based upon its license? I have *so* given up caring about all this licensing crap. In fact, the level of my interest in that crap now is demonstrated by the fact that I switched to Mac six weeks' ago. I just want a computer that god-damn well works, and works well, without me having to constantly move distros because bored-sh*tless developers decide to throw the baby out with the bath water every year or so. I've never been happier with a computer than I am with my new Mac. Sure, the Dock and the Finder are dumb, but there's Spotlight (way better than Nepomuk!) and ForkLift, and I don't mind paying $22 for a file manager, either, that's how much I've given up caring about FOSS :-)

10 years too late, I reckon. We've all moved on from this kind of "gratuitous eye candy above all else philosophy" and it's all about consistency, usability, integration, and last but not least, features now.

I had no idea people cared about the UID of their /. accounts, but I've been here for a very, very, long time. I'm not going to invest the time and energy refuting all of your points, but suffice it to say, I've reached the limits of what tinkering with my OS can teach me. I'm all about "getting things done" now and if I have to read a lengthy HOWTO to achieve something that "just works" somewhere else, sorry, but the "just works" is going to win. I hope that Linux does get to the point where it can claim >= 10% desktop market share, but as long as its as fragmented as it is, that day will never come. Oh, and happy to have wasted your time :-)

You managed to summarise his points quite well... Not too sure about the last one, though... but it was a funny read :-)

I've sat through every last one of them. Some were better than others but the proportion of crap in these new Doctor Who episodes is much higher than in the classics.

Those stupid angel statues, for God's sake! How utterly lame is that? And this obsession with Amy Pond and Rory and their family. And a floating spaceship where some carnival clown in a glass box controls everybody? What were the writers smoking that day? Lame! This is no way lives up to the classics from the likes of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee.

The new Doctor Who is at risk of being what Enterprise became to the Star Trek franchise -i.e., so bad that no self-respecting Trekker/Trekkie will acknowledge it.

It happens every so often around here that someone will claim X as the final hurdle to "finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop", and if you think that packaging Steam is that last cab off the rank, you are sorely mistaken. What about the ruination of a good desktop environment (GNOME), and the torture that getting a video card properly working can be? Or the cacophony of sound libraries that mean I can't get Skype to pick up my microphone? Or the many mail programs that *should* be able to import/export each other's databases yet, to this day, still manage to be a PITA (Kontact!).

I've been using Linux full time for 5 years (since the Windows Vista calamity) and it wasn't until Ubuntu ruined their distro with Unity that I had to hop to another one (Debian Squeeze and now openSUSE due to a new mobo install, and to get support for the LAN on same I wasn't prepared to upgrade to Sid). openSUSE 12.2 hasn't turned out to be as stable as I had hoped, so my Mac Mini should be delivered on Monday (TNT tracking currently has it in transit from Hong Kong :-) And installing and configuring Oracle Java is a nightmare. Just when you think you've found the right HOWTO to get it installed, you find that there's another way, and the way you were using was perhaps ill-advised. Yes, this isn't Linux's fault but Java is a necessity for some people, and the free Java doesn't quite cut it for some apps (CrashPlan, for example). It used to be that there were non-free repos in Ubuntu that added all these things nicely, but these seem to be a thing of the past nowadays for most distros.

Until Linux learns to cope with the installation/addition of other software that doesn't live up to its high and mighty standards, and stops fragmenting its core GUIs and programs, the much prophesied "year of Linux on the desktop" is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN! And if you think that people are going to accept a totally stripped-bare 100% pure distro the likes of which Richard Stallman would use, then it's game over (though it's probably been game over for years, now).

Some of us come late to this realisation, but when it does come, it's like an Enlightenment. I could have kept distro-hopping between the various major flavours of Linux like I have been for the past five years, or I could get a Mac (delivery due Monday :-) and simplify my end-using and development life greatly. Windows Sh8te is going to be like a cat among the pigeons when Microsoft start deprecating 7 in a big way, and the only safe harbour in that storm is Apple. I've been seeing predictions of "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" come and go for 15 years, and it's still as unfathomable now as it has been all this time.

I bought an ASUS eee-pad Transformer TF101 when they came out and it was quite a let-down (Android experience wise), especially the Marketplace, and the Google Play store is about as disappointing as the Marketplace, probably because it just looks like they changed the name and thought we'd be fooled.

Developing for iOS and/or Mac and just ignoring the rest of the world and their petty problems sounds like a recipe for success to me :-)

My problems with Linux are not entirely the fault of the GNOME developers' downward spiral into insanity. See my earlier comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3243483&cid=41946241 (just posted). I agree with your last sentence about not having to use extensions to make it usable.

I haven't tinkered much at all. In fact, among Linux users, I'm probably among the more lazy because I prefer things to "just work" here, too. My latest problem was having to switch from Debian Squeeze to another distro because I upgraded my mobo and didn't want to use Sid to get my ethernet working. I found that openSUSE's KDE Live CD seemed quite smooth but it's not particularly stable. Now this could be the mobo's fault and/or the ATI 4670HD using the FGLRX-LEGACY driver from geeko.ioda.net (you talk to some Linux users and they shit all over ATI: "ATIs are shit, get a NVidia", yet others are quite the opposite). I have a Dell U2711 LCD screen, and thought perhaps it's too big, so I changed a couple of settings in Catalyst (enabled Tear Free and reduced DVI frequency) and it seems a little more stable, with less complete X lockups, but they still occur several times a week.

But I'm just sick of the problems and the tinkering required to get it stable. KDE sometimes takes 2 minutes to let me start an application after login, too. That's another thing I don't care to get to the bottom of, and Nepomuk is just irritating shite. Playing a video sometimes results in complete video corruption such that I have to log off and on again. And Dolphin hangs if I forget to unmount a samba share before switching off the computer on which it resides.

My brother/mother recently got onto Skype to do video calls with my nephew and so I found a HOWTO and installed it. Seemed to go well, except it won't listen to my microphone or pick up my webcam. I've never seen a distro yet that wouldn't detect a webcam, so this is a first. Yet another issue that could take hours of fiddling. Linux's many sound systems are a joke. More Balkanisation to keep the control freaks happy (see: http://xkcd.com/927/). Skanlite is complete crap, too. I eventually installed Simple Scan (remembering it as a nice, no fuss, scanning program from my good old Ubuntu 10.04 days). Why have a scanning program on offer if it's complete garbage? It doesn't make sense.

Many of my MP3s show up as being 27:03:11 in length in Audacious. That's quite bizarre, since I ripped them from my very own CDs in Linux.

I hope this conveys some of the reasons why I'm done with Linux. I know I'm done enumerating my problems with it.

True, most desktops require some fiddling, and I'm sure I'll customise OSX in some way. An example of the "polish, smoothness and complete lack of fuss" would be the Magic Mouse and web browsing. Swipe left or right and it's the back/forward buttons, but not only that but as you swipe your finger, the current tab/page slides in sync with the motion and eventually disappears left/right off the window as appropriate.

Another example would be downloading files: the Finder window's Size column for downloads becomes a tiny progress bar in the adjacent cell for that file. Very nice indeed.

The menu bar at the top I'm beginning to appreciate, too. So many programs on Linux/Windows have weird and wonderful variations on the menu bar theme (especially considering the different libraries used to create each one), and some (especially on Windows) require considerable research to figure out how to use (I'm looking at you, WLM/Office Communicator!). On the Mac, the menu bar is at the top of the screen, and after all these years I think I finally appreciate the simplicity and uniformity of this approach. Sometimes, the "there's more than one way to do it" approach is just stupid and simply creates confusion.

That's an interesting way of summarising the situation. GNOME have effectively ruined what most of us knew well and were more than happy with, and foisted some half-baked straight jacket worse than the alleged strait jacket that is OSX (claimed by a commenter above). GNOME 3 is a serious regression from its predecessor. No wonder people a looking at the greener grass elsewhere and giving up on desktop Linux.

To be fair, the Mac OS and its "other world" keyboard shortcuts have been around for a very, very, long time. They're not "different just to be different", they're what they have been since day one (mostly), so I'm going to have to cut OSX some slack as I try to adapt, because it's me that needs changing here, not the Mac (though I used to bitch and moan about Apple needing to add a preference pane to enable what I consider to be "normal" shortcuts, like Home/End key going to the beginning/end of a line). This is one trade-off I'm prepared to make, I suppose, though switching from Windows 7 at work and OSX at home may prove challenging.

I realise you're just being informative to those that might find such a thing interesting, so I won't bite your head off, but I have no idea why anyone would want to further complicate matters by running a Linux window manager on a Mac. That just defeats the whole purpose, IMHO. At the age of 38 I now want simplicity and a hassle-free computer. The last thing I should be doing is bringing all my control-freakery from Linux to my new computer :-)

You've hit the nail on the head right there.