You are not getting down-voted for speaking ill of Gnome/KDE but rather for making a completely subjective statement as though it were established, objective fact.

I have used OS X as my primary OS for long periods of time (totaling about 15 months) on two separate occasions and I currently use XFCE. For me, OS X is unusable garbage.

Am I somehow fundamentally defective as a human being? Or do I just have different preferences than you? The latter seems far more likely to me.

I've used OSX for the last nine years, and I'm also starting to think the OSX GUI is kind of crappy. I prefer tiling window managers nowadays, their as-fast-as-possible user interface and their no bullshit look and feel.

Actually, in the end, I came out even and my original post is worth +1.

Obviously, everyone has an opinion. You are entitled to yours.

Mine is mine and that of most UX people I have spoken to. I have used XFCE, I have used CDE, NextSTEP, the Irix UI, Gnome, KDE, Comice OS, Mint Linux, all versions of Windows, all version of Mac OS...and I happen to believe Mac OS X is the culmination of decades of gradual, tedious, laborious, unoriginal improvement. I just happen to believe it's better than any alternative. I may be wrong. I am not a man of great certainties.

My original point stands: People should spend less time repackaging existing distributions with a different logo and background image, and more time coming up with a UI that can compete with something a proprietary, profit-oriented entity came up with.

Or he used OS X long enough to witness its flaws.

Um, nine years? Did you read his post? If nine years isn't enough to recognize any flaws, than the software is flawed anyways.

Or you grow up yourself. People change.

> A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux....

Already been done by Google with Android. It's state-of-the-art in the sense that it's a touch-based mobile UI, and it does compete with Apple directly...

Although, if you mean Linux in the sense of a full-fledged traditional GNU/Linux Unix userspace..the closest we've got is probably something like Ubuntu.

    > There are literally millions of smart hackers out there
    > and only 1 entity has ever managed to put a state-of-the-art
    > UI on top of a Unix core: Apple.

I wouldn't say ever. At some point in time, IRIX and Solaris (at least!) both had state-of-the-art GUIs on top of Unix. Apple's state-of-the-art GUI-on-Unix was inherited from NeXTSTEP.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "state-of-the-art", but I think you're over-representing Apple's relative quality. I've used various versions of OS X for significant amounts of time, but I've never seen what makes them so much better than everybody else. Gnome and KDE aren't perfect, but Apple isn't any better. (Seriously, I can't have a full-screen program on one monitor and normal programs on another, and that's the state of the art? I hope not.)

On top of that, I've found that most of the problems with KDE (I haven't actually used Gnome much) have been consistently eliminated in newer versions. When I started using KDE around 4.4, I was annoyed by several little details. Somehow, even without any input from me (I'm really lazy), almost all of these little issues were fixed in subsequent versions.

For example, the GTk build of Emacs can only be resized to the nearest character--you cannot have a window that overlaps has half a character off screen in either direction. This actually makes sense for Emacs; certain normal commands and interface elements would not work properly if you could resize that way. Normally, this is not a problem; however, if you used KDE's fullscreen shortcut, it would properly hide the borders and maximize Emacs, but it would leave a strip of desktop visible because Emacs can only be sized to the nearest character. This was a little annoying, but certainly not a horrible problem, and yet it was actually fixed shortly after I found it. Now fullscreen mode fills in any stripes like that with the correct background color, even taking things like transparency into account.

Over all, KDE is still the best desktop environment I've used anywhere. Given the relatively smaller amount of resources behind the project, I'm very impressed.

BeOS (and Haiku) do not have a Unix core.

No, they do not.

Citing Wikipedia BeOS page: "It has partial POSIX compatibility and access to a command-line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system."

To compete with Apple directly on the desktop you need more than a good UI. You need Microsoft Office, Adobe Create Suite, and other staples of the computing world.

This is why many argue that Microsoft agreeing to produce Office for Apple back when Apple was nearly bankrupt was far more important to them surviving than the money investment.

The final polish tha you are looking for gets the implementation into patent hell from what I understand.

I have been using OSX for as long as it was available, and I am starting to get tired of its look, but I am increasingly switching to just running as much as possible in iTerm 2 to be me as operating system agnostic as possible. Adobe software is holding that process back.

> A prophecy: The first entity to put a state-of-the-art UI on top of Linux will have an opportunity to compete with Apple directly.

I think this is Canonical's current strategy: they're not relying on KDE/Gnome to get their act together, rather they're trying to roll their own with Unity.

They had a shocking start (very unfinished when launched) but they're moving really quickly. I personally find it nice to use now. Still not at Apple levels of state-of-the-art or polish, but if they keep the pace up they'll overtake Win7 before long and within a few years might offer serious competition to Apple.

Everyone wants to (re)build their own pyramids (often from scratch) instead of just uniting to finish the top of the most promising one. But I don't judge too harsh the developers: my contribution to free & open source is quite small until now and free & open source it's a lot about free will and passion and not necessarily for the benefit of the world.

That's the thing -- what does Linux need at this point? Not much, and the things that are needed are not at the kernel level. The things on the kernel level that are needed are mostly from device manufacturers -- there is no shortage of people to do the work of writing a video driver, for example, if the specs were there.

Nearly every incompatibility we see right now is a result of a hardware company not releasing complete specs. It isn't for lack of coders that suspend/hibernate isn't working universally.

There are enough people working on the big pyramid.

That's the thing though, everyone has a different perspective of where they are working on the pyramid. One person's peak is so far below another's abstraction level as to be considered part of the foundation, and vice versa.

In oss, I think you can make contributions in two ways: refine or invent. To do either of these you have to learn the past.

Even if all the only result is an exact clone of BeOS an entire group of developers will have learned a whole lot about something state-of-the-art at the time it was created. That's knowledge that was previously available only to a tiny group of people.