Hasn't OS X become "linux on the desktop". Homebrew is there for a lot of the main packages and its easy to bring up virtual machines with whatever flavor of Linux distribution one wants for more particular needs. If you already have Apple hardware, I feel OS X is a great compromise. A great mainstream OS with a lot of support for good GUI apps plus great support for a lot of linux software. What's your reason's for wanting to move away from OS X?

MacPorts has been there for something like 12 years now, so "linux on the desktop" software availability is not really the problem.

However, it's growing clear through Apple's actions that they aren't interested in supporting the traditional desktop computing market, and that they see iOS-style black box computing as the road forward.

For someone whose contributions to the platform have run the gamut from kernel drivers to VM runtimes to desktop apps, living in an iOS-like desktop is simply not tenable; I can't wait years for a platform vendor to decide that my particular use-case is worthy of their support.

It's like owning a wood shop and only being able to produce Ikea-style furniture. Endless streams of vendor-approved Ikea furniture, and nary a 30' hand-built sloop in sight.

However, most of the industry-changing software has been exactly the kind of thing you or I could never build on iOS -- even HyperCard would technically run afoul of Apple's iOS rules regarding downloaded code.

Apple lost their way, so I need to find a new platform.

Who does use vanilla OSX though? I mean people here are complaining about having to install extensions on Gnome, but isn't it what we do when we install a launcher (Alfred), web/documentation searching tool (Dash), clipboard manager (Alfred again), a new terminal (iTerm2), better touch tool, etc. etc. We are just extending the system to make it suit our workflow.

We just have to accept that developers expect a lot of their environment, more than traditional users want, and more than what should be available by default in an OS. I am okay with installing plugins/tools/etc. to make me more productive.

If you want a stable distro, then obviously Arch Linux isn't for you. I use Debian for production machines (ie. work laptops).

This is pretty much what everyone recommends re Arch.

I've had a lot of people use Manjaro and not run into issue. Packages are staggered enough that any bugs are usually found and sorted in the ~3 months between releases, but you never get into the Ubuntu 12.04 problem of "oh shit my system is so outdated everything will break if I dist-upgrade".

Debian testing is also similar.

The problem with Manjaro package staggering is that it's based on fortune. The Manjaro team as far as I know does not maintain any packages not specific to Manjaro. After using Manjaro on my laptop for the better part of a year and running into lots of stability issues over the last few months, I think that the criticism about "aging packages like wine" is valid. I could deal with significant breakage in Xfce for a while, but when my wireless card (supported in the kernel) was unable to reliably connect to a wireless network, I had to toss Manjaro for good. If there's breakage in Arch, it will make it to Manjaro, and Arch packages seem to break more often these days.

I think that the state of Linux desktop right now is bad. GNOME3 is a pretty toy and KDE4 is ugly and (in my experience) unstable. Xfce is getting heavy, so it seems like people are all going to *box DEs. There used to be much greater diversity of well-supported desktop distros, like MEPIS, that weren't just another layer over Ubuntu.

Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now: Fast mirrors, systemd for reasonable boot times, up-to-date packages, no distractions or consumer focus (Ubuntu), well-supported and relatively stable. I strongly recommend the MATE+Compiz spin: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/

As a user and contributor to KDE, it is as ugly or as beautiful as you want to make it. I find the default skins in Suse / Manjaro KDE to be pretty good, of course there is still huge room for improvement and hopefully the design group makes kde5 look less 1990s beige office box.

It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".

> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now

The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).

Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.

Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.

ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.

"rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case"

Oh my goodness, no. Rolling release requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything from the repos (because, as Arch says, "partial upgrades are not supported", as a practical matter I have to update everything before installing anything.) Breakage is also a routine possibility any time I install security updates.

I also have machines that connect to the Internet solely through a cellular data plan. I have no desire to such bandwidth for all these updates.

Rolling release gets me nothing I'm interested in. I use Debian stable on all my machines.

> requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything

This is a failing of an improperly tested update, not of the model. You do need to beat all the possible glitches out of updates as they come in some testing repo, but if you do and you can deliver rock solid iterative updates it is the natural way to keep a system up to date.

I disagree strictly about the state of the Linux desktop. Of course, whether KDE is ugly depends on the user's view, but it is highly customizable, too: for instance, I prefer having borderless windows, and I like using KWin's tabs, which means I probably get something different from the stock experience: <http://i.imgur.com/TfWFmZl.png>.

GNOME, too, is going a long way forward. Windows still doesn't really have pixel scrolling for trackpads, which MacOS X has had for a very long time, but GNOME does.

I'd argue that the biggest Linux desktop issue is that package management systems are a bit of a mess, especially the dpkg / rpm kind. A system like this one should not have locks, nor require root access systematically. Thankfully, Nix fixes both, and ensures atomic upgrades and rollbacks. That project makes me hopeful for the future. Anyone can install and use it, no matter what distribution or package manager is used on their system. Their default repositories are rather large, although obviously not as large as others, but that's improving rather fast.

Beyond that, the fact that both KDE (Apper) and GNOME (Software) agree on using PackageKit by default, which grants them an app store that isn't tied to a specific package management system, is rather good news for the future.

You can definitely make KDE4 look good, but KDE3 looked a lot better out of the box, and distros like openSUSE, Sabayon, PCLinuxOS, and MEPIS all provided very unique KDE setups, but it seems like the well-supported KDE4 distros all look very close to stock KDE4.

The main problem with fedora is that yum sucks so badly. It's absurdly slow and the interface is goofy. What's up with needing a separate tool like repoquery?

Also, why is it necessary to update the kernel twice a week? And why isn't VirtualBox a core package?

Yum seems a little faster than apt-get/aptitude to me. Do you have the yum cache enabled? Yum normally downloads its package lists for every command, but you can make it cache the package list like apt-get does.

Even using the cache it's annoyingly slow compared to Arch's pacman. Various repoquery commands take near a minute to run whereas pacman is instantaneous. I'd guess the Python and SQLite approach are to blame.