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I've been using MacOSX as my primary desktop since the days of Rhapsody. But I always had Linux virtual machines running on occasions. A dwindling number of machines at home were running Linux, most notably a couple of Raspberry Pi and a Synology Diskstation. And when I installed Linux, I usually went for Ubuntu, which did a good job polishing the user experience. The build ring for Tao3D includes a number of virtual machines running several major distros for testing purpose, but it's been quite inactive for a while, and repairing it is on my short-term to-do list.
Working for Red Hat, I thought I had to use Fedora as my primary desktop. And the experience has been a bit underwhelming so far, unfortunately. In just three days, I managed to render a Mac Book Pro unbootable in OSX, had several different issues with skippy or laggy mouse cursors and even non-responsive keyboards, had a driver crash attempting to access my home Wi-Fi, found out the hard way that NFS performance is just horrible, and had to use Google for trivial things way too often.
I complained several times on this blog about what I perceived as a degradation of OSX software quality since 10.6, but this experience with Linux puts all this in some serious perspective.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:19AM
I love using linux, on servers and on desktops. I am quite happy with my primary workstation running debian unstable. But I am fully cognizant of the fact that it's an operating system for tinkerers by tinkerers. Some cars can be great fun but require a driver with some mechanical mojo to fix issues that pop up, Linux is like that for operating systems. If you don't spend time understanding how the system works so you can fix it when it inevitably breaks, you're not going to have a good time. And yes, you absolutely will have to google problems that spring up on any distro, no matter how polished. If you're not familiar with the command line, you're never going to have a great Linux experience.
But, off the top of my head: Using a Mac is going to give you trouble. It's mostly a PC but it's not quite a PC, it has a custom Apple EFI "BIOS" and it was never really designed to run other operating systems. And yeah, NFS is terrible. I actually use SMB for high throughput NAS activities, with Samba on the server side and mount -o smbfs on the client end. NFS was developed in the dark ages of Unix and never quite modernized itself enough to be seamlessly usable like ssh (works fine, is moderately slow, doesn't require a special server aside from the standard ssh server you are probably running anyway) or Samba.
Linux also has bloat issues with some desktop environments - I use XFCE locally and LXDE on most of my remote (x2go) sessions, both of which haven't been updated in the last couple of years, which at this point I kind of look at as a positive feature since the software treadmill seems to continually get worse on every operating system and nowadays everyone wants some bling ass composited wobbly windows, which is not my thing at all.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM
Enlightenment 17 on top of a decent GPU (Anything HD2600+ or 8400GT+ should work!) is smooth as butter for me. I don't 100 percent like the built in file manager, but as a 'windows-ish' interface to get people on Linux, and gaining the benefits of compositing, a build in frame rate viewer and stable with good crash recovery, I have found it excellent.
Where E17 is too heavy, WindowMaker+a file manager is quite good as well, but its UI designs and default hotkeys are not conducive to making linux seem 'polished' to a Windows/OSX convert.