Actually, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard out Ubuntu feels even further away from becoming mainstream. I want to like Linux on the desktop but looking at it objectively Win 7 and Snow Leopard are better.
I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs, which are the same on every platform. It really doesn't make much of a difference to me what desktop OS I use as long as it's cheap and it works with my hardware. I use Ubuntu on an HTPC because it's free and it (usually) works. I can't imagine what MS or Apple could do to improve on free + works.
To me Linux is a lot closer now than it was in the past because you can pop a Ubuntu CD into a computer and 9 times out of time it you have a working computer with sound and everything half an hour later. 7 years ago, when I first installed linux, that would have been more like 1 time out of 10.
> I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs
Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine.
But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.
Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly.
The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?
I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.)
Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configure X and fonts/local.conf.
In Arch the AUR directory has packages called fontconfig-ubuntu, cairo-ubuntu, and libxft-ubuntu , i found when i compiled those my font rendering was the same as ubuntus. Maybe Gentoo has the same packages, or you could grab the sources from AUR and compile them manually?
Firefox, like OpenOffice.org, bundles its own renderer instead of using the OS's renderer. That's why Ubuntu fonts look good, and Firefox fonts look blurry.
True - but when we start comparing it to Windows - (disable crapware, install firefox, install anti-virus, install iTunes) vs Ubuntu (install restricted-extras) then a Ubuntu setup starts looking pretty good.
For me the fonts are better in Linux. The clear-type technology they introduced in Vista doesn't play well with existing monitors.
I have a 19 inch LCD display that's very decent, but I purchased it before Vista's release. The fonts on Vista have a red hallow that are unbearable, and I'm not the only one with this problem (and trust me, I played with the clear-type settings, although they don't make that easy).
On a big monitor with a typical DPI, clear-type just adds visual noise.
In Gnome the standard font anti-aliasing that doesn't use clear-type is great.
I genuinely believe (ignoring vendor support) that ubuntu is by far the easiest to use operating system, ahead of windows and osx for the basic operations of installing and using new applications, I would rather use gnome over leapords window manager any day.
Since I installed Ubuntu on my mom's computer, she hasn't called me for really any support. The computer boots up faster and isn't slowed down by virus software.
i don't think Win7 is better. to me, it is a slight improvement over vista but still annoying and ugly.
osx is the clear winner among UIs and ubuntu is nice enough for most people.
I couldn't agree more. The last time I ran Ubuntu as my primary OS its desktop experience was a long ways from Windows or OSX. Compviz was full of bugs that in my opinion significantly detracted from the the overall desktop experience. I'd constantly run into problems where windows wouldn't be placed correctly on the screen or would have artifacts drawn in them. Some of the compviz effects would fail to run altogether - with almost no indication of why. On top of that I found the general desktop performance to be much slower than Windows and OSX. Specific examples of this would include: hiding/restoring/maximizing windows, scrolling through text and graphics, and moving windows. Add to that performance issues in firefox (which have been well documented), incomplete drivers (sleeping, graphics drivers, etc), and the obvious compatibility problems with running linux. Ubuntu is still more frustration than it's worth for a desktop OS imho.
you must have a fast machine... Try installing windows 7 or snow leopard on a computer with 2gb of ram and a 2 year old processor... then the eye candy won't really add to the experience.
Windows 7 is running on my 1.6ghz Sempron w/ 1GB of ram. I turned off the major eye candy (aero) and it still looks great and runs fine.
That PC is the 'family' computer - so basically all it's used for is Surfing, streaming music through iTunes and instant messaging.
It used to run ubuntu but everyone complained about how ugly it is - and I wasn't going back to XP. At least with Win7 I'm in the clear anti-virus wise, no need for that.. yet.
hmm... I guess some people don't like brown. I would be happy if ubuntu came with a non-brown theme that had the same overall quality as the default theme.
I have always preferred Kubuntu to Ubuntu for desktop installs, and that's one big reason. (Also, I've always preferred Konqueror as a file browser to whatever Ubuntu uses by default with Gnome.)
However, it's been a while since I've used it (I have 10.4 and XP machines for the most part), and I get the feeling that Gnome has benefited from Ubuntu far more than KDE has from Kubuntu, being sort of a bastard stepchild at best.
KDE's Konqueror has features that I still find myself wishing for on my Mac on a daily basis. (E.g., the visual view-by-size thing and built-in sshfs are my top two.)
I've not seen any compelling reason to upgrade my Macs from 10.4, so when they finally hit EOL I may seriously reevaluate Kubuntu as my main desktop, see if it's kept up reasonably well versus the mainline Gnome version.
is it really a big jump from 9.04? the last few releases havent changed a whole lot in terms of ui polish, which I always thought was really nice until I used osx.
and to be fair to the original poster, the link is available now, the site was in the middle of updating
I think it is. Pulseaudio, for example, has become sane and actually better than any other sound system I've used. It even streams to apple airports and other computers.
I've been using the beta for a while now, it is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. It's competing with OSX now (having surpassed Windows long long ago)