Ok, let's see.

> NDISwrapper. Unfortunately, I had to end up Googling around for hours to find a solution consisting of modifying the driver itself before the USB adapter would work. Once it was actually working, it would just randomly stop every once in a while.

No, you didn't "have to do that". You could have invested $10 and get an usb wifi adapter from a company that doesn't produce highly proprietary windows-only hardware. With buying the original usb adapter you were giving a company money that contributed to the vendor lockin for windows. You personally contributed to the problem.

> Next, came the display. Ubuntu, for some reason, labeled my two monitors as “Laptop” and treated it as a single screen.

No, ubuntu didn't do that. The nvidia driver did that.

> I was forced to use the NVIDIA display configuration utility.

Yes, because nvidia did not implement the randr freedesktop.org standard. Recently they implemented it I think but for a long time the proprietary nvidia driver was stuck with buggy and nonstandard configuration.

>Onto the windows manager.

window manager

I have used ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 for a few days so I don't have any long term data.

> Beyond the frequent crashing for no particular reason, #

I don't think I have seen a crash. How frequent exactly?

> there were constant glitches. Leave the computer for a while and come back? Title bars for windows would become glitchy and unreadable. Restoring a window from being minimized? Sometimes it’ll just be white. Go ahead and minimize and restore it again to fix.

Sounds like bugs in the nvidia driver.

> Icons randomly disappearing from the dock, requiring a restart of Unity? Yup, pretty consistent there too.

I haven't seen this but at least it sounds like the first actual problem in ubuntu's unity.

> Not only this, but the experience felt laggy. On the beefy machine it was running on, I expected the performance to be smooth and responsive but it was quite the opposite.

Do you have a video from the laggyness? I have used 12.04's and 12.10's unity on a nvs 300 which is a really slow card and it felt fine.

>At the login screen, it’s possible to select GNOME instead of Unity so I gave that a shot, assuming going back to GNOME would work. As soon as it booted in I was greeted by a monitor that didn’t work and a window full of error messages.

"booted in"?

Any screenshot?

> After Googling around for a while, I found some configuration changes to make in my xorg.conf file and was able to actually get it working.

Which were? No seriously, what could you possibly change in xorg.conf that would make gnome go from only displaying error messages to work?

> I was met with even more errors and problems

Like what?

> so I decided it wasn’t going to work for me. I decided to switch back into Unity.

Fair enough. But if before you change to completely new hardware with a completely different operating system and gui, there are still other alternatives to consider like KDE.

>When I came back? All of my settings were gone. All of my changes to use a sane Alt-Tab in the CompizConfig Settings Manager, my keyboard shortcuts, everything.

That's interesting. I just deleted my compiz config and started ccsm and by default it used the flat file backend for the configuration and it stored its setting in ~/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini

Perhaps ubuntu had set the gconf backend by default... But unless you deleted either ~/.config/compiz/ or ~/.gconf I don't see how that could have happened.

> Extremely frustrated, I decided to give the Mint side of things a try and give Cinnamon a shot. Again, a few weird problems

Like what?

> Cinnamon didn’t quite fit the bill either. I ran into a display issue or two and found myself actually missing a few things from Unity

Basically half of what you write is absolutely worthless and can be loslessly summarized with "I had some problems".

> When I purchased a printer for my computer? Of course Ubuntu had no idea what to do with it.

But you still gave a company (again, you don't say which one) money for highly proprietary windows-only hardware and then complained about it?

Here is the thing: Companies develop new hardware. Then they sell that hardware and they give you some windows specific software with it to make it work. How do you imagine it starts working in linux? The driver doesn't simply spawn out of thin air, someone has to write it. And if the company producing that hardware doesn't do it, then someone else has to do it. The problem is that there is too much different hardware and not enough people to support every single existing piece of hardware. What you are expecting is magic. Keep that paragraph in mind, I will come back to it later.

> Of course there was a run around necessary to get it working.

Sigh which was?

Also, workaround.

> Even the mouse had problems. My old Logitech MX500, for one reason or another, would spam the logs in dmesg whenever I was using the scroll buttons on it

With what messages? I'm getting a bit tired of asking the same question over and over again... (I'm using a similar logitech mouse right now and it has worked fine for 5+ years now I think)

> Sound would skip while listening to music using anything Flash or HTML 5 related like Grooveshark or Pandora.

Almost surely a bug in the alsa driver. Unfortunate for you, but at least it's a real problem.

> The whole system would lock up occasionally pegging a quad core CPU for no reason at all.

Interesting. Which process would use all the cpu time?

> Sometimes, it would just crash entirely.

Yes, but that happens on all operating systems with buggy drivers. I still sometimes get bluescreens on a windows boot from the amd graphics driver.

> When I’m at a computer, its because I want to get things done. Gone are the days where I have time to tinker around and spend countless hours Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking. This is not a good direction for an operating system to go.

Sadly you have not given a single real example of you doing this, only a very unclear anecdote about the xorg.conf that doesn't sound right from the beginning.

The bad thing is that I would agree with the sentiment that recently the linux experience became quite buggy. But not really for any reason you described.

> iPad. It was incredibly powerful,

"powerful"?

> had a beautiful screen,

Yes, probably.

> and was light years beyond any tablet experience in terms of responsiveness,

Well, android tablets are often a little bit laggy, but not to the point were it actually annoys me. Light years, really?

> design

Maybe it's because I don't really give much on design, but I have a hard time taking this seriously. "The iPad is so good, it is light years beyond any tablet experience in terms of design!". Doesn't really work for me.

> and construction.

This may be an actual advantage. A Nexus 7 for example bends and breaks the display quite easily so I would appreciate a better constructed tablet.

> “I’m not building anything in iOS, yet. Maybe I’ll hate the OS and be stuck with a $2,500 bad decision. Walled garden. Non-customizable.” Those were the thoughts that were keeping me from taking the plunge.

Why? You could have still always installed linux on it and would have kept your status quo with just an expensive computer.

> The unboxing was, of course, elegant and easy as my previous Apple products had been. The physicality of the product was awesome.

What the fuck did I just read

> What I found was absolutely shocking: it was far more customizable than I had ever dreamed. Want to move the dock around? Sure, go ahead. In Ubuntu? Nope.

Wrong.

A little bit more correct: In Ubuntu's Unity without changing to one of the numerous alternatives? Nope.

Correct: In Ubuntu's Unity without altering the source code they provide you? Nope.

> Ubuntu had introduced the ability to launch a program or find something from the dash and I had started to like it, even though it was buggy and extremely slow in a lot of cases. Spotlight? Completely blows it away. It’s fast, responsive, and gets me to the program or thing I’m looking for every time.

I don't have a direct comparison but so far I am satisfied with quicksand from kde. Remember: The article supposedly describes how ubuntu pushed you away "from the pc", not just from Ubuntu, or even just Unity.

When comparing the performance, have you also considered that you are comparing a not so new computer with a brand new machine?

> Every device I hooked up to the machine worked flawlessly. Printer? Plug it in, it finds what you need, and you’re good to go.

So you can buy literally any printer and mac os will make it work? I mean, that's what you expected Ubuntu to do, do you still have that expectation?

> Monitor? Plug it in and it recognizes it correctly and makes it available to start working right away.

Just a quick reminder that your problem was never with ubuntu but with software developed and supplied by nvidia.

> OSX was everything I wanted Linux to be and more.

I think it is quite important to say that you don't care about the free software stuff. I think it is one of the biggest reasons to use linux.