Well, my nominal work is as a system administrator, and I've been working with Linux since about 1998. In fact, until 2005, Linux was my primary computing platform. So, I would claim to have tried at least one or two Linux distributions over the past ten years. There has been a very marked improvement in the user interface over that time, and of them all, I would say that Ubuntu is probably the best of the lot.

My point still stands.

Firefox is built on GTK, whereas KDE is built on Qt. Audacity uses wxWindows, and xterm is just raw xlib, if I remember correctly. OpenOffice has its own widget toolkit, as does VLC, and since I was a WindowMaker user, that's GNUStep, which is yet another widget toolkit.

All of these toolkits behave differently, and even though the situation has improved, they still don't interact terribly well. For example, cut-and-paste was, and still is as of the last time I tried Ubuntu, still not terribly functional. Sure, it worked with the X clipboard, but the behavior was subtly different between applications. This is something that even Windows has had working well for nearly fifteen years.

This is a very real problem.

International support isn't terribly good across the board, either. The situation has improved a lot in the past year, with Ubuntu and Debian now doing a decent enough job out of the box in terms of Japanese input and translation, but still nowhere near as good as it works on my Mac desktop.

Speaking of which, I can not think of a single piece of open-source cross-platform GUI software that I use at all. Of course, I use a ton of stuff on the command line, but not a single application from my Linux/X Windows days has made it on to my Mac.

Mostly because they don't use native widgets, and so even if they look like a Mac application, they behave differently in subtle yet highly annoying ways. For example, in any OS X application, I can highlight a word, hit a key, and then have that word fired over to the Dictionary. I use this regularly, yet even the latest build of Firefox doesn't support it. It's a built-in feature of the OS, and works just fine in any application that uses Carbon or Cocoa, yet not in Firefox, because they've bundled their own widgets with the application.

And this is my point. Even when Linux apps look like they're all part of the same platform, through appropriate use of themes and skins, they still don't feel as if they are integrated together.

OS X has only one set of widgets, although there are two primary APIs for developing applications -- Cocoa and Carbon. Cocoa is for applications written in Objective C, whereas Carbon is for C, C++, and Java. Carbon mostly exists to make porting applications easier, and to provide Java applications with access to native GUI widgets.

But, no matter which API a programmer choses to use, the application will behave like all other Mac applications. Copy and paste will work the same as it does everywhere else. So will all of the neat tricks under the 'Services' menu.

So, there's my complaint. GUI Applications on my Mac all act the same. GUI Applications on a Linux box don't, and coming close usually requires quite a bit of fighting, even for something as simple as entering text my second language.

Linux (and FreeBSD) are great server environments. I would be hard-pressed to even consider using OS X for anything other than a file and print server. But I won't use it as a desktop platform anymore, because it's simply too much of a pain in the ass, too much of the time.

I would love to see this change.