Ubuntu With Linux 3.16 Smashes OS X 10.9.4 On The MacBook Air

[liam]

I hate docks. But that's just me and I appear to be a loner in this regard. I find them obtrusive and offensive in their approach to real-estate. People seem to get wet between the legs over it, though and Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. Thankfully I only see it when people want Apple support. Then I can get back to my pretentious life amongst GNUland and the 'rich ecosystem' that's all the UI's, DE's, apps, applets et al. And Windows. Damn gaming habit.
<SNIP>

So say I! I find the dock especially bad on large screens as you have this vast swathe of jellybeans you've got to search that spans the width of the screen. For large monitors, and lots of apps, this attains considerable levels of suck, IMO.
A way to make the GS overview better is to grab the icon-over-window extension.
Actual usability isn't a strength of the gnome designers, unfortunately. They've yet to learn to differentiate simple from "too simple ".

[chrisb]

Many of the benchmarks publicated here are graphics benchmarks using 3D games, benchmarkers and some applications, would be nice to see more server benchmarks like databases, web servers and etc, for example PostgreSQL runs a lot faster on OS X than Linux .

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...8_ubuntu&num=8

But do you believe it? There are two possibilities: 1) PostgreSQL can process 360% times more transactions when running on OS X versus Linux, or 2) there was some problem with the benchmark on that specific hardware.

Thousands of companies around the world run mission critical systems with PostgreSQL on Linux. It is very likely that if there were an easy 360% performance improvement to be made, someone would have figured it by out.

[jimbohale]

So say I! I find the dock especially bad on large screens as you have this vast swathe of jellybeans you've got to search that spans the width of the screen. For large monitors, and lots of apps, this attains considerable levels of suck, IMO.
A way to make the GS overview better is to grab the icon-over-window extension.
Actual usability isn't a strength of the gnome designers, unfortunately. They've yet to learn to differentiate simple from "too simple ".

Overviews are in my opinion stupid when made the primary task management system. They're incredibly inefficient for me and perhaps for others. Also, I have about 15 of those jellybeans that travel about a fourth of my screen horizontally and are very easy to use. By using the logic you've just used, Linux desktop is inefficient because you have to right click the desktop in order to open any app. Is that true for fluxbox? Yes. Is that true for anything else? Generally no, certainly not GNOME nor KDE nor Xfce nor Unity etc. It is what you make it, and it is VERY hard to fill it up all the way. I have roughly 15 or so things that I use the most regularly there and it has been great.

[liam]

Overviews are in my opinion stupid when made the primary task management system. They're incredibly inefficient for me and perhaps for others. Also, I have about 15 of those jellybeans that travel about a fourth of my screen horizontally and are very easy to use. By using the logic you've just used, Linux desktop is inefficient because you have to right click the desktop in order to open any app. Is that true for fluxbox? Yes. Is that true for anything else? Generally no, certainly not GNOME nor KDE nor Xfce nor Unity etc. It is what you make it, and it is VERY hard to fill it up all the way. I have roughly 15 or so things that I use the most regularly there and it has been great.

The overview as executed by GS isn't great (the way it handles apps is far too basic) but it is a good step to take, nonetheless, imo.
OK, you've got an incredibly small number of apps installed. My sister's imac has icons that nearly span the screen.
I honestly can't follow your reasoning, but it's great that you've found an interface that matches your workflow so well, rather than having to adjust YOUR workflow.

[jimbohale]

The overview as executed by GS isn't great (the way it handles apps is far too basic) but it is a good step to take, nonetheless, imo.
OK, you've got an incredibly small number of apps installed. My sister's imac has icons that nearly span the screen.
I honestly can't follow your reasoning, but it's great that you've found an interface that matches your workflow so well, rather than having to adjust YOUR workflow.

Likewise your sister's workflow doesn't match OS X. Of course there isn't any way that you use that many apps regularly, it's just a matter of removing icons you don't use regularly but some people don't like that. I do. GNOME shell's workflow of either clicking at the top left of the screen or pressing the meta (windows? w/e they call it now) button is plain wrong. You shouldn't have to take two steps (or 3 if you're also switching workspaces if that's your thing) to switch between windows. You should have to do one action to switch between windows, and that's one. Unity as awful as it is in many ways understands that. Xfce gets it. KDE gets it. Fluxbox even gets it. GNOME shell should somehow (ideally cleverly in ways that I'm not smart enough to come up with) provide one-action task management. Additionally, as an end-user, I DO NOT want to use my keyboard for everything. This sounds picky but I can tell you that quite a lot of users feel the same way, and if GNOME shell is trying to appeal to the majority of users they need to address it. It's just too tedious to use. You can install random things like frippery and such to make it *better* but frippery is too ugly and misaligned and stuff. It's not their fault, it's just a side effect of how GNOME shell extensions are done.

tl;dr It's not that I'm a fan of the dock in itself it's that I'm a fan of one-action (ideally button) task management that doesn't look like ass. So far no Linux DE has figured it out, and so no Linux DE will get a lot of people using it because it's just too tedious. ElementaryOS has it, but that's a shameless OS X almost-clone that is done really, really well.

[ssokolow]

or pressing the meta (windows? w/e they call it now) button

These days, the config I usually see is Alt<->Meta and Win<->Super.