Erm… did you ever try out KDE? There are people out there, having made everything in KDE look like gnome, people who made kde look like osx. With compiz you can even design your own window borders, you just draw them. Also, I’m sure KDE has the most design-options from all OS’s and all other window managers.
One thing I detest is UI customisation 
I want everything to always work the same way and behave the same way.
One of Linux-on-the-desktop’s biggest problems is the existence of X, followed by the existence of multiple GUI shells. X must die, and all the shells must be replaced by One Shell To Rule Them All, that is made by someone who understands the importance of spacing, colour, and so on. The Ubuntu people were getting quite close with the style on Gnome until they had some sort of brain spasm and released Unity, presumably as some sort of sick joke. Close-ish, anyway. File manager still abhorrent; task bar thing was still a joke; basic window management still felt clunky and difficult. I did really like their new font though.
Cas
I agree completely. Haven’t used Ubuntu since Unity, only Linux Mint… Still like gnome better.
I also agree with most gene9 points out as good for linux. That being said, these point are peanuts in comparison with software you need to work that doesn’t. In short, and not to repeat myself needlessly, things like the whole Adobe Suite just have to work, natively or with wine…
Efforts to kill X are underway with the Wayland project, several large projects (Android, Ubuntu, Fedora, KDE, Compiz, etc) have already expressed their intentions to eventually switch to it. Its much lighter weight than X (as it doesn’t have all the legacy API’s and design dating back to the 80’s) and since they are building it from the ground up for modern hardware hopefully they’ll get just the right and minimal API. Its also directly uses cool stuff like OpenGL ES and has other nice features like every frame being perfect (i.e. never any flicker). Sadly X is pretty entrenched and the logistics behind replacing are pretty huge, so it’ll take a few years before we start seeing Wayland in mainstream distro’s.
I’m impressed this hasn’t turned into a flamewar. As someone who knows how to use all 3 dominant OS’s at least to some degree (Windows, Mac, Linux), I like Mac OS the best. Then I have it set to dual-boot into Windows for the off chance I need it, and I have a VPS running Fedora for when I need that.
I’m surprised so many people complain about “lickable” interfaces. The thing is, Apple especially is attempting to mimic how we interact with things outside of computers. Nothing instantaneously appears anywhere, instead it moves. Similarly, all their pushing of different gesture systems and incredibly annoyingly swapping scroll direction in Lion (so you’re directing the content rather than the window around it, which intuitively makes sense but is the opposite of the common paradigm) is all about getting it closer to a “physical” interface. Like in Minority Report.
That being said, a lot of this behavior wastes milliseconds and is certainly slower than having hundreds of custom keyboard shortcuts. I once knew an engineer who was an absolute expert with emacs, and when trying to do something on my machine had to install it because otherwise he was completely stunted. Using it, however, he flew through and was astoundingly fast. And that’s really the thing. Super users who can memorize a few hundred hotkeys, set up thousands of unix aliases, and the like will always be more efficient than somebody using a “lickable” GUI. But my grandfather can jump in and use this GUI and understand what’s going on. That’s pretty incredible.
I’m a person, as some of you may know, who hates wasting time learning what’s going on under the hood. If it works and it’s fast enough, I never bother. I like to be pretty much as top level as possible, because I want my vision to come to fruition. I don’t want to spend time memorizing hotkeys and details. And I feel like the more the world moves out of the need for people to memorize esoteric nonsense, the better. Even if we’re all a little slower.
I think you are right. Many popular graphics/art/video/music tools are not Linux native and if those are important for what you are doing, Linux is a poor choice.
For programmers and math/science types, all the best tools are on Linux, and many of the best tools work best on Linux.
Are you talking about cross-application UI consistency? Who cares if my web browser, IM client, and text editor have different widget sets or UI flourishes? So what?!?
I know programmers who hate the premise of manual window management, so they just replace Unity with xmonad. Linux makes it easy to drop in the window manager of your choice, so I don’t see why people complain so much.
X may be replaced by Wayland, which sounds great, but in the meantime, I don’t see any major problems with Linux GUI. All the apps I use look nice, even if they are inconsistent. IntelliJ looks foreign since it’s Swing, but so what, the functionality is amazing.
I may be in a majority of one here, but I feel I must come out of the closet and admit that I love Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity! ;D
I think it’s a great interface, lots of useful keyboard / text driven features, and the whole interface just stays out of the way unless you need it. Still, it’s actually not that far away from how I used to have Mint set up. Maybe it stems from the fact that I still think the best OS ever was RiscOS (showing my age a little there!)
@princec should love Unity too really, since it’s hardly customizable at all! 
I’m curious about what tools you’re thinking of? I serious hardly ever notice what OS I’m in (OK, unless I’m doing something OS specific). If you’re running windows and don’t have cygwin (or something equivalent)…well that would be a problem. Shell windows aren’t quite as nice in windows, but bash is bash…so I don’t really care. Besides bash looks the same in emacs under either…so again, I don’t really notice.
@gene9
Of course now that I use NVidia, this is no longer an issue for me.
But ATI Linux drivers are hopelessly broken, and I tried them all.
But I am indeed a NVidia user now, just because of Linux…
I don’t see why windows and linux users bash each other. they should both bash Mac OS. when i used it it slowed down at a greater rate than windows does, and i couldn’t find ANYTHING. It’s like they took the best parts of windows and the best parts of linux… and shoved them.
I bash all three equally.
I am aware of Wayland. Its incredibly slow uptake is probably a sign of something wrong with the whole Linux ecosystem and philosophy but I’m not going to dig any deeper looking for answers.
What Linux needs to be is just like Mac OS, that is, buried utterly under a lovely UI, but with a Windowsy attitude to window management, mice, menus, and desktop. It’ll never be like that because that’s what it’s like. Somebody’s going to have to make a new OS, and nobody’s going to bother. Grr.
Cas
My favorite programming/math/science software is fully cross platform: the JVM ecosystem, LaTeX, IntelliJ, Python, and web stuff.
You can experience most of that and pay little attention to the underlying OS.
I never put much effort into using *nix shells on Windows, so you probably know more than I do on that. Pretty much all third party software/extensions assume the Windows shell (they include .bat files) for Windows software, so I’d expect less polished integration there. I also briefly tried Microsoft PowerShell (1.x and 2.x) which was supposedly trying to build a power user shell for the .NET crowd and I didn’t like it at all.
Can you do aliases/symlinks on Windows with a *nix shell? When I download non-repository tools, like Scala or Gradle or IntelliJ, symlinks help me install and organize things better than I could do on Windows. For example, I like having an opt/scala/current symlink to whatever the current version is.
Plus, all the other points I mentioned earlier. Installing/uninstalling software is way easier with apt-get for repo software or simple untar/unzip software rather than dealing with .msi. And I’m constantly trying a new version of this or that tool (new Scala, new Gradle, new Python add-in) so software setup and system maintenance is a big factor. Also Linux has much less crapware relative to Windows, it’s way more configurable, I love the premise of xmonad (not quite ready to dive in though).
Cas, have you taken a look at that Haiku OS link someone posted earlier? It’s quite a recent OS that was inspired by BeOS. You should take a look at it…it’s quite promising
X is a Ship of Theseus – just about everything in actual use has been replaced by extensions, leaving X as more or less a setup and transport protocol. It certainly has problems, and god knows its API doesn’t win any beauty prizes, but just about everything else does too. How many buttons is LWJGL supporting on X now, as opposed to how many on Windows? (Just don’t ask about multitouch – X is really doing bad there)
God knows the last thing X needs is a Windows approach to window management. I like being allowed to minimize and resize windows even when the application is unresponsive.
And X doesn’t know a thing about menus any more than GDI does on windows or Quartz on a Mac. The most industrious tinkerers with the desktop metaphor have been the GNOME people and frankly I don’t want what they’re pushing.
On the subject of OS wars, what are everyone’s minor pet peeves between systems? Mine:
[]The Windows 7 taskbar grouping is a useless and interrupting feature – compared to XP, it requires an extra mouse click whenever I want to switch to a different window in the same app.
[]Aero Peek is useless and distracting when you have many windows open – since it just looks like a bunch of empty squares. I don’t really understand what it serves. Aero Flip is just as useless.
[]Windows requires you focus a window before scrolling in it, rather than scrolling whatever is under the mouse.
[]Not an OS thing, but Excel on Windows doesn’t support multiple windows (instead, it uses internal frames). It’s a real bitch to try and compare numerous excel documents at once. (Oddly enough, on Mac multiple windows are supported just fine.)
I’d say MacOS is definitely geared towards power users. It’s got a hell of a lot of keyboard shortcuts and built-in features (Expose, Spotlight, touchpad/mouse gestures, etc) that can vastly increase productivity, especially for “visual users” (like artists, musicians, designers etc, who are not just dealing within a terminal/command-line).
Worth noting, many “lickable” features are not a waste of milliseconds. Human reaction time is not immediate; and so you may as well use the extra 250+ ms to visually prep the user. The zoom out in Exposé is a good example of this; it’s very clear how the tiles are organized because you can see them zooming/moving into their tiled locations. And since you can click the windows as they zoom out, the “lickable” feature can be overridden.
[quote]I don’t see why windows and linux users bash each other. they should both bash Mac OS. when i used it it slowed down at a greater rate than windows does, and i couldn’t find ANYTHING. It’s like they took the best parts of windows and the best parts of linux… and shoved them.
[/quote]
I used Windows once and it slowed down, and I couldn’t find ANYTHING. : Then I got a BSOD and a virus…
You can turn off the grouping. Personally I find it useful, since I don’t exactly find clicking taskbar buttons to be the fastest way to flip apps anyway. Ditto for Aero Peek. Aero flip I can’t say I find myself using much, and it does seem more of a tech demo than anything useful.
What’s really silly and pointless is Aero Shake. I keep accidentally triggering it whenever I get fidgety about where to put a window. But you can disable that too, it’s just really buried somewhere in the policy editor (or a registry setting if you prefer).
As for Excel … still using MDI? Damn that’s shameful. But what really needs a makeover is Outlook. God what a clunky app.
I like the taskbar grouping, I guess it’s just a matter of opinion then
Aero Peek is definitely not useless…but I agree about Aero Flip.
I use Windows 7 and the search function works really well. Plus I never got a BSOD nor a virus…
'Twas a jab at the other poster’s comment… But you are lucky for not having windows crash on you.
EDIT: Regarding Aero Peek, I was talking more about the full-screen “peek” than the taskbar peek. How is the fullscreen peek particularly useful if you have many windows open at once? The gray boxes tell me nothing about what the application is or even what z-order it’s in.
100 years again and our grandchild will say “my grandpa waited more than 0.5 second for booting a pc!”
'Twas a jab at the other poster’s comment… But you are lucky for not having windows crash on you.
[/quote]
BSOD’s are actually a good thing, without them, Bad Things Happen [tm]. Also, they are 99.9% of the time caused by 3rd party drivers.