Honest question: as someone who dropped Linux in favour of OSX largely to get a nicer user experience, what is in the new generation of Linux desktops to tempt me back?
The videos linked from the article show a Spaces'esk virtual desktop and a more interactive Growl'esk notification box. Both very slickly done but not really anything mind blowing. The features in the other videos on the Gnome 3 site seem equally derivative; clones of the Window snapping from Win7, the icon view from Lion etc.
Am I missing something? Should I be looking somewhere else? KDE?
What I find exciting is the increasing integration of Telepathy into Gnome apps. The idea is to enable easy networking for all applications so the user can just pick contacts out of their address book and never have to worry about ip addresses or nat traversal. Things like collaborative editing or music streaming can be built on top of Telepathy rather than every application doing its own networking.
before you got low UX, high customizability with Linux.
now you get very comparable effects (customizable and evolving with 11.10 too) with all of the customizability and flexibility of Linux.
I don't mind the UI/UX of my MBP, but I prefer both Unity and GNOME3 and my heavily customized GNOME2 installs. The app-indicators and control center in Ubuntu are actually easier to use than in OS X. ICS to my Xbox took 10 seconds in Ubuntu. It took 10 minutes of Googling and editting a configuration file to get it in OS X. My phone works out of the box as a router in Ubuntu, it's not detected as an Internet device at ALL in OS X, who knows why. (And those tasks took less than a minute or two to access directly from the app-indicators or control center. (And very excitingly, there is a whole new connection center planned for 11.10 which out to be even cooler/faster).
I wish more people would come back and really spend the time to give modern DEs a chance. I personally can't stand KDE even after a lot of customization, but even Qt apps are indiscernable from GTK+ apps in Ubuntu (yes, even file selection dialogs, etc).
It's also funny that no one seems to know the history of these UX elements. Spaces have been a *nix feature since the late 80's, early 90's. The Grid plugin existed in Compiz as an unstable plugin for a long time before Windows 7 came out. They simply refined it for Natty.
Also, anyone on a MBP should try Unity just to see the power of the uTouch API they've built. Compiz is actually multitouch enabled. You can move and resize windows with gestures as well as expose the dock.
I too prefer a Linux desktop, but too many of the apps I rely on still aren't available. The day Photoshop and Ableton Live get ported is the day I switch back.
I still haven't found a Linux distro that really behaves 100% reliably on a laptop either. Suspend/wake issues and flaky wireless behavior eventually became dealbreakers for me, even if the blame lies with the hardware vendors.
For what it's worth, I haven't had any issues with Ubuntu in the last two years or so (HP Envy 15, Alienware M11x). Even things like docks with multiple monitors work smoothly.
i like imagemagick, gimp, et al for 99% of my needs, but having ableton-like anything would be great, although the state of multimedia timing and the myriad combinations of audio subsystems, i hope someone can persevere.
> flaky wireless behavior eventually became dealbreakers for me
Speaking of which, I'm fairly sure that NetworkManager fails to select the strongest Access Point when many routers are broadcasting the same ESSID. It's a nightmare to try to use Ubuntu on my MBP at my University. It seemed better in 10.10, I didn't get a chance to try it in 11.04 but that was my biggest frustration.
The videos linked from the article show a Spaces'esk virtual desktop and a more interactive Growl'esk notification box. Both very slickly done but not really anything mind blowing. The features in the other videos on the Gnome 3 site seem equally derivative; clones of the Window snapping from Win7, the icon view from Lion etc.
Am I missing something? Should I be looking somewhere else? KDE?