That's funny, because I have the opposite anecdote; I have been regularly converting OS X user to Kubuntu Lucid/KXStudio (with backports) for the last year or so. Know all those guys that are avoiding Lion and Mountain Lion like the plague that they are? Yeah. that's my market.
Tons of people with 3yo MBP's with an install of Snow Leopard, looking longingly at how pretty and useable my little powerless Netbook with 2GB of RAM is with OpenOffice/Dolphin/Blender/Gwenview/Firefox running and 40+ tabs open. They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing, so they sit in quiet humility while I actually get stuff done.
Once installed on their computers, an install that just works, I grab AppMenu (QML) from kde-look and replace the default one. At this point the MBP owner has a better OS experience than Snow Leopard could/does offer, and we haven't even done any tweaking yet. like f.lux or redshift (which you can grab from a ppa). I don't see the crashes you guys do on these apps, oddly enough. just works for me and my customers.
I love you Mac guys, really. You pay top-dollar for your hardware, and then Apple forgets about you in less than 4 years. I almost feel like I'm a rescue worker for abused and battered Apple customers.
> They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing
I am skeptical of your anecdote. My 2010 MBP was perfectly happy running Xcode, IntelliJ, and pretty much any other applications I'd care to run, and that was before I put a SSD in it (which, naturally, helped a lot).
I think you're stretching the truth by a great deal.
Depends on what you're doing. It helps noticeably if you're swapping, which I can see an "underspecced" older MBP doing. For me, however, it was disk indexing, Maven being able to quickly read in jars when I hit the go-button, etc.
Top dollar for hardware that lasts 36 months (the length of applecare) means $100/month. For people who "get stuff done" this is nothing. I literally spend more on bottled water than I do my top-dollar computers.
Snarky as this is, I'm sorry to say that it's probably correct. I've never had to have any configuration or other problems with f.lux on OSX, it just works there. On Ubuntu, it just doesn't work. :)
(Ubuntu user since 2004, OSX since about last year)
Tons of people with 3yo MBP's with an install of Snow Leopard, looking longingly at how pretty and useable my little powerless Netbook with 2GB of RAM is with OpenOffice/Dolphin/Blender/Gwenview/Firefox running and 40+ tabs open. They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing, so they sit in quiet humility while I actually get stuff done.
Once installed on their computers, an install that just works, I grab AppMenu (QML) from kde-look and replace the default one. At this point the MBP owner has a better OS experience than Snow Leopard could/does offer, and we haven't even done any tweaking yet. like f.lux or redshift (which you can grab from a ppa). I don't see the crashes you guys do on these apps, oddly enough. just works for me and my customers.
I love you Mac guys, really. You pay top-dollar for your hardware, and then Apple forgets about you in less than 4 years. I almost feel like I'm a rescue worker for abused and battered Apple customers.