I agree concerning word processing and especially video chatting, I much prefer using these applications on MacOS.
I disagree though about online shopping, in my experience running Firefox under Linux or Windows is pretty much exactly the same.
I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?
Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.
- Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them.
- Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver.
- Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry...
- No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc".
While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them.
I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd.
For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.