[account_taken]

These look like good moves. While Microsoft and Ubuntu are shunning their desktop users, Apple is making me look the smarter for choosing a company who still stands believes in a desktop OS :)

FYI, I was a decade long Windows user who switched to Mac then to Ubuntu then back to Mac after Unity.

[Shorel]

As a happy Ubuntu Raring user, I can't honestly agree with the complains against Ubuntu.

It's the best desktop experience I've ever had.

[account_taken]

I tried Ubuntu 12.10 again briefly and was disappointed that intel HD4000 wasn't fully supported in 3D. Graphics is dog slow in Ubuntu on the same hardware.

It looks like shopping spies still on by default in 13.04. I doubt I'll ever use Ubuntu again on that principle alone. Even Apple doesn't force that on you in Spotlight. Still cannot move taskbar. Still cannot resize taskbar without 3D support.

[evilduck]

Hear hear! I just installed 13.04 on a relatively modern computer yesterday (C2Q, 8GB RAM, an "old" 9800GT) and had what I consider the typical linux experience. Any one of these might halt or scare off a newbie:

* It wouldn't let me choose the encrypted/LVM option when formatting the drive before installing. Unencrypted worked though. I didn't bother to really investigate why, maybe the HD is at fault?

* Defaults to the nouveau drivers for obvious reasons and I swapped it to the NVidia binary (for specific reasons). Screen dumped to console on its own while it reset X. Functionally fine, but scary looking compared to anything you'd see in Windows or OSX.

* Changing the GPU driver now makes the system boot up in a not-native resolution until LightDM loads. Visually unappealing.

* The computer has a Broadcom Wifi card installed that I'd like to use. Oh boy! (read that as... fuck broadcom). Obviously not handled by Ubuntu out of the box so I drag out an ethernet cable. Trying to install their binary driver requires command line magic which temporarily breaks dpkg/apt when a installing kernal module stalls out. I fixed that and then installed an open source version which grabbed the binary for me, which worked, but I wouldn't ever expect a layman to figure it out. Requires a reboot to finally function.

* Numerous "application encountered an error" popups in the 10 or so hours I was working with it. Nothing that halted the OS, but several apps had to restart. It dings my confidence in the quality a bit. And the computer's RAM checked out fine a couple months ago and all temps were normal, I'm going to lean towards either my suspected aforementioned drive issue or actual errors with the apps. Didn't investigate, but they could happen to anyone.

* Annoying Amazon and Ubuntu One monetization techniques defaulted into the Unity. It's not a functional issue, but raises concerns about the future of the free software ethos at Canonical and treads awfully close to the adware and spyware that plagues Windows users that the OSS community has been railing against for years.

Compare that to OSX where I could just turn it on and have none of these problems, it's not quite rainbows and unicorn farts. I like linux for many reasons and Ubuntu has made great strides towards making Linux available to the masses, but it's still relatively easy to want to do normal things and encounter rough edges that require technical prowess.