IMHO, here on the verge of 9.10, things aren’t much improved: Gnome Do still isn’t close to Quicksilver, there’s nothing like Growl (for ubiquity and customization), neither Empathy nor Pidgin can compare with Adium, Multi-Touch remains Apple’s killer function, Compiz offers great eyecandy but no real utility, and the gnome desklets crash too only slightly less often than Scribus. I think VLC will play anything under the sun, in Kate (or Geany or Bluefish or…) Linux offers editors that rival Textmate, and FF’s uniformity across OSes provides a measure of stability that makes me smile no matter what machine I’m on.

So, can OSX expats work in Linux? Yeah, happily. But has Ubuntu (or any KDE-based system) caught up with Snow Leopard (or even Leopard?). No, not yet.

I just migrated my wife from a Panther (10.3.9)-based machine to a new Snowy iMac; truly, Panther feels like where Ubuntu is, today. Which pretty much is in line with what Adey said, above. Give Canonical 5 years and what might they produce? But give Apple those same 5 years?

And, of course, in that time Windows might finally come up to the knees of either of them..

I miss absolutely nothing about using a Linux distro compared to the beauty, simplicity, compatibility and shear grace of Leopard.

Getting your hands dirty with bash/tcsh to get the most out of OS X and discover that its not the ‘child lock’ environment that Windows and Linux users constantly promote it as.

I use X11 for the odd darwin-port and compile some specific apps I use at work that need little tweaking.

The thing I love most is full Adobe suites and the ability to open up my macbook and start work instantly. Onyx does all my housekeeping and I have total flexibility.

Ubuntu has at least 5 major releases to get anywhere near Snow Leopard… by which time…

Gjten is free version based on Jim Breen’s JEDICT and pretty usable, but of course no comparison to the Daijisen in OS X.

Always remember, if the package manager under the applications doesn’t find what you are looking for, goto the system – > administration – > synaptic package manager

You can search the entire repositories for stuff, or if you prefere terminal type

aptitude search “searchstring”

if you find what you are looking for type

sudo apt-get install “packagename”

It will download all libs needed to run the app and install them all for you without any hunting.

ubuntu + os x = no worries

And I’m a relatively recent Mac convert: my background is in Sun Solaris (since the release of 2.5.1) and Linux (since RedHat 6) as a Sys Admin. Apple’s switch to BSD Unix completely passed me by until a colleague mentioned to me 2 years ago, while I was asking why no one had managed to create a usable desktop for Linux that didn’t require endless frigging.

Here are the things I miss most when I’m forced to use Ubuntu instead of OS X (which I use when I’m working from home):

1. Cisco VPN Client – you have to build the Linux version yourself (ffs!), and I’ve never got this to work. I’m therefore forced to use the abandonware that is “Network Manager”, which removes all my DNS settings from /etc/resolv.conf every time I connect and frequently disconnects from the remote VPN server while I’m using it.

2. Proper wireless network support – another problem with Network Manager… which always prefers to connect to the unsecured BTOpenzone wireless network that belongs to another company (isn’t this actually a criminal offence in the UK?) instead of the one for our office, which is WPA2 protected, but has a visible SSID. So every morning, I waste 10 minutes waiting for it to finish connecting to BTOpenzone, disconnect and then reconnect to the wireless network I want. It also never remembers my passphrase, so I have to type it in each time.

3. Bluetooth/Mobile Phone support – how easy is it to set up a connection to a bluetooth enabled mobile phone on a Mac? Ridiculously easy. The set-up wizard then asks you if you would like to sync your phone’s data and/or use the phone to connect to the Internet… and, in my experience, it just works. I wasted a whole day wading through countless forums trying to get Ubuntu to connect to my Nokia N73 to do the same. The best I can do is retrieve files off my phone, that’s it… no syncing my calendar, todo lists or contacts and no connecting to the internet. Pathetic.

I now try and work from home at least 3 days a week if not more… as working on my Mac is far less stressful than Ubuntu. OS X has Maven and SUbversion already installed and all the other tools I need (Netbeans, JBoss, MySQL) work fine. I’m even using JDK 1.6 preview 9, which hasn’t let me down yet.