A few more app tips, in case you don’t know them already:

- iTerm is a great terminal replacement

- Colloquy is a wonderful IRC program

- Regarding your resizing windows habits – it’s not the same but maybe it’s helpful: http://www.atomicbird.com/mondomouse/

@jacmoe: I think the ‘mainstream appeal’ and ‘completely open, standards-less system’ is unsquarable, so I think desktop Linux will remain mostly in the hands of developers, enthusiasts or people who can’t afford the alternatives. I don’t find Windows or OSX any less ‘open’ than Linux in practice, personally – I can develop apps for any of them, and get open source code and plenty of good apps on all of them. Sure, I can’t get the code to many parts of OSX but I don’t feel I need to. So the main key requirement of my OS is for it to just work well and stay out of my way while I do more useful things. All my experiences with desktop Linux have involved it getting in the way of real work by me having to spend a lot of time poring through docs and forums to resolve various problems, certainly far more than either of Windows and OS X have required. Given that I can get the apps I want on all 3, the ones that don’t need hand-holding are more attractive to me – but for other people who like to spend their time tinkering with OS’s, or can’t afford commercial OS’s, or feel that they gain something extra from a fully open source OS, I’m sure it’s different.

Linux is not one entity, not a company.

I remember how awkward it was to install only a few years ago.
Not so now: it installs elegantly on almost anything.
So, yes: Linux is getting better all the time.

Maybe Linux will still be for geeks only. If you take out the power and flexibility of it, you get much closer to fail-safe-ness.

Linux is a tinkerers OS more than anything else.

- inconsistent UIs
- poor SATA performance
- having to fiddle with xorg.conf (e.g. monitor setup), audio problems (I have to do what to use a DAW???)
- fragmentation (how many distros or editors do I need?)
- neither KDE nor GNOME work well for me but I need a desktop.

For me OSX is what Linux + GNOME/KDE should have become. I don’t use OSX though my next PC will be a Mac when I can afford it. I’ve used my brother’s Mac and I used it without thinking what I was doing.

So my (humble) opinion is that Linux desktops have lost the plot over the years and missed their chance.

I’ve been using Linux on and off since Ygdrassil, so I’ve tried Mandrake, Redhat, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Slackware, Fedora, Lycoris, Mitel SME (still running a server on it), Foresight and god knows how many other smaller distros.

@niko: Interesting, I hadn’t heard that about Adium, maybe I’m not talking to anyone using Trillian.

@Tau: depends what you’re doing but on an average session I get around 4 hours. Theoretically the battery life is up to 6 but I doubt anyone will ever actually see that. Under Vista it’s more like 2 even with transparency turned off – I might turn off Aero altogether.

@Andrew: “Speak for yourself”: I never claimed to do otherwise I have indeed been burned, and that’s the point. I’ve tried Ubuntu too (twice) and so far no desktop Linux distro has made me feel the need to switch; too much time wasted with fiddly driver support and inconsistent app UIs. Desktop OS’s are all about being productive quickly and getting the hell out of the way and I personally never felt that way about a Linux distro – they have always been a time sink for me, mostly because of a few small niggling issues, but that’s enough to spoil the experience. In contrast Linux on the server side has been perfect for me, does what it says on the tin and no faffing about. Very much personal experience, but having given it several goes each time I don’t feel any inclination to make a permanent switch – I don’t hate desktop Linux, I just don’t love it either, certainly not enough to make it my main environment. For me OS X is the first experience of *nix in something that is actually a joy to use.

Speak for yourself, there are many people that have used Ubuntu Linux just fine. You have been burned by your past experiences.