[nolite]

Not sure if this is appropriate for your question.. but I've been using Ubuntu for 5 years now as my sole OS, as a programmer. I'm thinking of switching to Mac OS soon because I'm sick of hacking my computer to have it "just work":

- Every time there's a new release, and I update, it leaves me with a crashed unusable system. Its happened so much that I've scripted out my entire install and configuration process

- I have to kill Firefox in order to make sound work in VLC... wtf?

- My bluetooth mouse works 50% of the time

- Wifi doesn't usually work with the built in managers.. I often have to install wicd

That's the gripe side.. will report back later for more UI related improvement ideas

[heresy]

I used Linux for six years as my primary OS, on OS X for a while now.

On OS X, the biggest annoyance for me, coming from Linux, is the lack of a consistent packaging system.

I don't like the MacPorts style of compiling everything on my own system, but being a Ruby programmer, I'm kind of stuck with it as well due to that being the way any Gem native extensions like to work too.

But really, that's about it.

It's a UNIX. It works. I never have to muck around with my config files, and pray that the next drop of the OS doesn't break my wireless / sleep / wake / sound card.

[grk]

You could try homebrew, which could be described as macports done right - http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

[rbanffy]

Better hardware support sure is important, but it looks like you have harware that was carefully selected as to bring the greatest frustration possible.

[nolite]

Ii dunno.. Nvida GTx 280, Asus Gene II, i7 920, Corsair Ram Desktop. Before that, a standard IBM x41 tablet. I'm not going that extreme here in the hardware side

[Udo]

> - I have to kill Firefox in order to make sound work in VLC... wtf?

Sadly, that's not a Ubuntu-specific problem. Recently, I had to borrow an openSuSE box for a few days and this was basically the first time I used client-side Linux in ten years and I was appalled. One of the many many annoyances was that only one program could use audio at a time. Like you described, I had to close Firefox after playing a Youtube vid, just to open VLC in a functional state (and this was on KDE I believe).

After all these years of not looking at the state of GUI on Linux I was extremely surprised by how little advancement happened in this time. I don't say this to flame, but I'd be really interested how things ended up in this sad state. The overall "experience" is just a nightmare.

[middus]

I haven't had these kind of upgrade problems since updgrading from 7 to 8. Did you really have trouble upgrading to, e.g. 10.04?

It seems to me that there's some problem with your HW configuration (WiFi etc. - never had problems). Did you consider staying on some LTS. I've found 10.04 to be extremely smooth. If you don't want to have the trouble, just stay on LTS :).

[train_robber]

I did. (9.10 to 10.04) I lost my graphics driver during the update and when I fixed it my sound card went for a toss. But a clean install of 10.04 solved the problems, so I don't understand why the upgrade can't work without problems.