I'm using OS X right now but I really hate all OSs at this point.
OS X is a usability nightmare for me, slowing me down even after many years of using it and trying to adapt to its ways. Lion is buggy on top of that (never ending wifi troubles).
Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.
And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.
But ranting about this is probably pointless. There will not be a new OS any time soon. It's just too difficult even for the largest corporations to start from scratch.
Got to agree ... every OS these days seems to annoy me in huge ways. I was surprised after I moved to a Mac that it had huge usability issues and even a lot of basic bugs. For some reason I always just accepted that Apple nailed usability but OSX (Snow Leopard) was annoying as hell. I miss so much the standard ability to navigate menus with hotkeys in Windows. I'm forced to use the mouse for a huge number of things that I never had to in Windows.
But then in Windows there are an almost equally number of annoying things, the primary being the lack of a Unix-like environment by default. I end up going with Cygwin but that has all its own issues.
Then Linux is just a neverending pita with driver issues, crappy versions of things like Skype, no possibility of MS Office, etc.
In the end I don't particularly care what OS I use because I know each and every one is just going to require me to customise the crap out of it before I'm happy (I will say for Windows and Linux that I nearly always end up getting there, so far with OSX I'm not and I'm not optimistic about the future with the direction Apple is moving).
Two things have made the Mac a little more comfortable for me recently. One is an OS extension/plugin called Witch. It allows you to switch between all open windows in MRU order the same way Alt+Tab does on Linux and Windows.
The other one is to enable "All Controls" on the keyboard shortcut preferences panel. That allows you to use the tab key to move between active buttons in confirmation dialogs like "do you want to save changes?".
> Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.
Ubuntu was actually like the first desktop OS with an "app store," and Linux in general has taken all the hardware I've thrown at it with gusto. For instance, I have a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Windows 7 x64 couldn't use it, but all recent version of Linux have done just fine.
> And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.
Windows is fine for development. It may not have all the Unix-y tools, but it does have most of them. Just this week it even got a great Node.js port, in fact. Not to mention it probably has more IDEs and development environments than any other OS... I don't understand your complaints of it.
I'm always running Linux on some systems and it works very well on servers. But on all the laptops I owned in recent years (MacBook, Acer, Dell, Toshiba) Linux was a hot, noisy battery hog. I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about powertop, CPU states, generations of power management daemons and kernel modules, USB drivers and whatnot. I got a lot of things to work but it has never worked nearly as well as Windows on the same machine. Sleep/resume is also extremely spotty.
Recently I made a half hearted attempt to install Ubuntu on my iMac. I got nothing but a blank screen after booting up the installation CD.
If you don't have any issues with Windows as a dev platform I can only assume that you don't work in C/C++ much or your code targets only Windows. And if Windows really got a great node.js port only this week you're making my point for me.
OS X is a usability nightmare for me, slowing me down even after many years of using it and trying to adapt to its ways. Lion is buggy on top of that (never ending wifi troubles).
Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.
And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.
But ranting about this is probably pointless. There will not be a new OS any time soon. It's just too difficult even for the largest corporations to start from scratch.