I've used Ubuntu for work development for some time now, and I would never consider it for home use. It just kind of sucks from a usability perspective. Lots of little things are just randomly broken or difficult compared to what I'm used to.

That's the exact same complaint I have about Windows.

Sadly, that problem is as old as Windows and hasn't really gotten better. For a company that's specialized on software, that's a pretty abysmal bottom line.

I would strongly disagree. Windows works pretty flawlessly nearly all the time these days. My only real complaint with it at this point is that so little of my dev stuff runs natively. If that weren't the case, I'd probably switch over.

And I'll have to disagree with you on that. I have to use "vanilla" Windows 10 at work and the various missing tools and kinks in the OS drive me borderline insane at times. How can it be that in 2016, the default "quick, dispensable" file editor (notepad) lacks pretty much every feature under the sun? The command line is still abysmal - even with the improvements of Win10. Powershell is not much better. Simple tasks have to be done using clicks all over the place, instead of just editing the according file from a cmd. The registry is still in heavy use (eww). The new virtual desktop feature (which *NIX systems had for decades) is clunky at best. IE is borderline unusable. Edge is worse. I could go on for ages.

In fact, if you subtract the gazillion of little 3rd party tools you have to install to make Windows usable, the actual OS is a disappointment, and if you can use those tools you still have to install them through a wizard - by hand. Microsofts dev tools (i.e. Visual Studio) also seem to suffer from the same symptoms, although that seems to be changing slowly.

One could argue that you have to install many tools via a package manager on other OSes, but at least, you get most of them (neatly organised) just by trusting one source (Canonical, Debian, whatever).

I concur. For development Ubuntu is definitely superior, but for everything else Windows works pretty great.

Eh, that functionality has a tendency to break after being used a few times in OSX.

Specifically, dragging images from your browser to the finder works the first few times, providing an overlay image which becomes a file icon as you hover over the finder window. A few transfers later, the file icon stops appearing. Then the semi-transparent image stops appearing; though the files are still being copied. Then, silently, the copying starts to fail completely. Not fun.

Macs have become a lot worse at this sort of thing - weird, intermittent user interface failures - over the last few years.

Sometimes I can't drag attachments out of emails (which is about the only damn reason I don't use Mutt for everything) on the first few attempts; I thought for a while it was because the attachment hadn't completely downloaded, but no, it doesn't seem to be as predictable as that.

Moving files around in the Finder in general seems problematic, especially dragging between directories in the list view. This often causes much cursing.

The worst thing about Macs for me now is how much guff pops up entirely unbidden - messages about not having done any backups in 90 days, messages about an update which hasn't been able to be completed (but has caused iTerm to try and quit, which, in itself, causes a dialog to appear that I need to get rid of), iCloud approval nonsense (which also happens on both of my iPhones periodically), iTunes Store requests that I may or may not have made days ago that have failed with an unknown error, etc. The list goes on. I'm sure all of these things in isolation are very clever and should help improve my life, but in toto it's immensely frustrating.

I have similar thoughts. I feel the Mac has gone from an environment that was great for developers and creative people to a kitchen appliance that tries to micromanage its users. If there were any viable alternative, I might have switched yesterday (and Windoze doesn't cut it). As it stands, I have to split up: Linux for development, and Mac for the movies, games and email. Slowly migrating away might work better than all in one swoop.

Not being a Mac user, a similar thing that always struck me as strange is that those Mac users I know all seem to have a huge amount of windows open in the background (multiple Finders etc.). I found that being interesting because it is the first habit I got rid of when starting out in the new Gnome Shell: I have a workspace for every task going on, and each workspace contains no more than two windows, that are neatly aligned - or maximized if there's only one.

I switched to AwesomeWM a while ago, and the first thing I changed in the RC is that it replicated Gnome's automatic/endless workspaces behavior.

Of course that is highly subjective, but i always thought that going for a window hunt everytime you have to switch context is pretty backward, and I can't figure out why even the more sophisticated Apple users I know won't use workspaces for their benefit. On Windows, I get it - if only because that sort of workflow was impossible without special tools before Win10.

Does anyone have thoughts on this? Is this a "culture thing", or is it because users that switched over from Windows never even thought of the workspaces feature?

I've gotten in the habit of screenshotting. With one hot key (cmd shift 4) I pick a region and a file is placed on my desktop. This turns out to be far more useful in more circumstances for me. (The only image dragging I do is within chrome to send someone an image through hangouts.)

Just FYI, screenshotting is taking a limited-resolution, imperfectly cropped PNG from what is usually a compressed JPG. You just need to get into the habit of right clicking and "save as" and the resulting image with have perfect fidelity with the original.

That doesn't really help me when I'm, for example, sharing a flash ad or a video or any number of other things, like my Hearthstone state.

Oh okay you meant screenshots in general. I thought you were screencapping jpegs.

I do that too. I actually like the consistent interface, so to speak.

My biggest gripe with OS X right now is that Safari doesn't play nice with some website when it comes to dragging pictures and pasting them in from the clipboard.

Part of this is sites like Facebook intentionally subverting proper click and drag behavior with photos, links, etc. It's incredibly annoying, and we should be shaming sites that do it.

Safari is following in the iTunes and Preview in the "what's wrong with this once pretty decent piece of software??" thing

Among web devs Safari is considered "the new IE" (which among web devs is probably the lowest insult)

TL;DR avoid Safari. It's rubbish.

I can't personally justify using chrome over safari on my macbook though, I don't last the entire day with chrome but do with safari. Any other alternatives?

I also can't stand the lack of plugin support on Safari. Is uBlock origin or similar available on that platform yet?

There are adblocking plugins available now, yes. Though last time I checked uBlock Origin wasn't one of them, unfortunately.

uBlock is available for Safari, but uBlock Origin is not.

This works in Gnome. And if it doesn't you can just copy/paste stuff instead of dragging. In any case that's no reason to switch OS, whatever the direction.