Oh, yes! I know exactly what you mean, although for me it was GNU/Linux versus Windows. By now I largely switch based on gibberish; I don't consiously know what layout I'm using except by the feel.
What, so Norway's decision to stay out of the EU to preserve some of their sovereignty means that they lose their sovereignty, because now they're bound to implement laws their citizens have no say over by being unable to elect representatives who make these laws? Or have I completely misunderstood?
From Wikipedia: "The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout". So obviously both then, but it's speed isn't the only benefit and not the one most people who I've known to switch have looked at.
I'm afraid I've never really followed what studies have and have not existed concerning keyboard layouts as they didn't influence me. Annecdotal evidence suggests there are some benefits, but this could easily just be "a change is as good as a holiday" kind of things.
As for whether any claim was "subsequently discredited with force", I assume you refer to "The fable of the keys". This itself has been subsequently discredited with some force: IIRC, it was written by two economists who were more interested in proving that Dvorak/Qwerty and Betamax/VHS situations are always due to the quality of the products, not inertia.
No-one would want to use my computer anyway, after trying it. Me and my computer have grown around each other so that nowadays, no-one can understand my computer any better than they can understand me:)
Also, completely irrelevant, but what is a "Calc sheet"?
Oh indeed, I know exactly what you mean. It took me a lot longer to get used to certain punctuation, and when I go and touchtype qwerty nowadays, I usually try to type the dvorak form and have to look down.
Of course, this provides the benefit that you'll eventually learn to touchtype punctuation. Just leave the image of the keyboard layout attached to your monitor, and consult it, not the keyboard. Looking at your screen and touchtyping will help you learn to touchtype a lot better than looking at your keyboard ever will.
(I didn't practise what I preached here. I physically rearranged the punctuation after I was fluent in dvorakese for letters but still couldn't hit + or ] to save my life. So I never learnt them, till I got a laptop and I had no choice.)
Of course DVORAK is 'optimized' for English, which may at times be helpfull when entering code, but often is not, not to mention that a substantial part of the world doesn't speak English.
Please stop bringing this argument up, everyone reading this article! Dvorak is optimised for English, and no-one argues that anyone but people using English (or other languages similar enough) should use dvorak.
As for RSI etc. I've heard this a lot from people who've switched to dvorak, and many assert they touchtyped properly beforehand.[*] The fact that you get by without getting RSI on qwerty doesn't mean it's not a risk for some people: Some people just don't get RSI for no clear reason. And likewise, many people switched to dvorak because of its purported benefits, and their RSI wasn't cured. Point: Everyone's different.
[*]: I touchtyped properly beforehand. But I didn't have RSI, so dvorak can't've cured it.
I use vi key mapping in my editor, shell and from time-to-time my webbrowser, and I always do so with the dvorak layout. Like I say, I like to be able to control scrolling up and down (the two most common actions as your anonymous parent observes) with either the left hand (jk) or the right hand (mouse, cursor keys, scroll wheel). jk are both on the left index finger, so it's not like it's a weak spot, either.
(I'm not a lefty, but doing everything with one hand tires it. Hence using dvorak, which balances the load a lot... It also means I can mouse with my right hand and scroll with my left hand, which is something I do from time to time.)
(Oh, I was wrong by the way, and said h and j were on the left hand. They're not. jk are on the left hand. Evidently I don't pay attention to how I'm doing something.)
Sorry, I completely misunderstood you! You were referring to natural languages, of course.
As for that, the QWERTY layout is no better for Swedish or French or Russian than the Dvorak layout is. It lacks the letters these countries use. So they've created their own ones, which makes it easy to type ä and é and Cyrillic characters. The French have gone so far as to move AQZW around. The situation is exactly comparable to Dvorak: People who largely write foreign languages should use a keyboard layout optimised for those languages. I know one exists for Swedish; it shouldn't be hard to create one for others, given the substantial freely avaliable databases of commonly used words you can get from the Internet.
The hard part there is trying to get the layout included in operating systems!—I'll agree, this will be difficult!
Why would you need to change the shortcuts for every program you use? I use exactly the same keys as a qwerty user. Even with VIM. Especially with VIM; I like the dvorak positionings of hjkl a lot better than the qwerty ones. Less mnemonic, but more useful.
For anyone with the intelligence it takes to write a computer program, touchtyping in two keyboard layouts should be no problem at all. In fact, I'm touchtyping this on qwerty. The minimal cost of knowing two layouts is clearly worth the ergonomic benefits of using dvorak when I can, if you ask me.
As for issues with speed, the point of dvorak is not and never has been speed. It's ergonomics. This perhaps gives you a bit more speed—an irrelevant amount more speed—but it's not the point! I said that in the post you replied to: Why bring it up again?
It's not just Vim, but everything else I do as well. It's hard to imagine going back to being careful where the keys are... I've had plenty of times that I just kept on typing while I was looking at my boss (he was talking) or I got something in my eye and just needed to finish a sentence that was in my head.
I was like that before I switched. I'm like that after I switched. I wasn't like that for about a month in between. And I'm better at vi for it, too.
On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard.
Fancy that, neither have I. You (i.e. I) touchtype dvorak. The only value you'll ever get out of looking at the keyboard is because it's fun to look at yourself typing on a keyboard with the keys marked wrong, and you can't do that with a dvorak keyboard.
There's still just too many reasons not to switch, and only 1 to switch: It's supposedly quicker.
Most reasons against switching are false; about the only one worth listening to is that lots of people use your computer and/or you use lots of computers. A very good reason, certainly, but still only one.
And the purported benefit of dvorak is that it's more ergonomic. This results in it being a little faster, but it's not the point. That's why if you do want to buy a dvorak keyboard, you'll find that almost none of them have the standard physical arrangement. But I do certainly notice the benefits of dvorak with my regular-format keyboards.
I learnt VIM with Qwerty, and now I use VIM with Dvorak, a lot better and more skilfully than before. There's no reason to remap VIM's layout (and plenty of reasons not to). It will probably take a while to get used to it, but once you are you might find you use hjkl a lot more: in particular, I've found the hj (up/down... or is it down/up? i just use them, i don't think about them) to be much better placed on dvorak than qwerty (they're on the left hand, so you have a choice: use hj with left hand, or cursor keys with right hand).
Once you're used to VIM+dvorak, it's absolutely no harder than VIM+qwerty. I would expect it'll take you longer to get used to VIM+dvorak than anything else+dvorak, but if you love vi as much as I do, it'll only motivate you to learn faster:)
On the other hand: Although I can touchtype fluently in qwerty and dvorak, my VIM+qwerty skills are almost entirely gone. I have to stop and think about just about everything; it's painful and the only time I ever regret switching. If you're going to be bouncing around on computers whose keyboard layouts you can't control, and you use VIM, consider this before switching. Maybe just remap some keys so up/down are where god (not Bill Joy) intended.
Simple solution: Don't physically rearrange the keys. You gain nothing in two-fingered hunt-and-peck if you're using dvorak; it's benefits are almost entirely limited to touch-typing. It'll force yourself to learn the layout faster and better if you can't look at what you're doing. Also, it helps for if you ever need to run your computer in recovery mode when it won't load keyboard drivers, or for stupid games that don't realise not everyone is an American using qwerty layout; and sometimes it helps interpret typos on the web.
Trust me on this: I learnt Dvorak by keeping a printout attached to my screen for a week or two...
(To reconfigure the layout, use your operating environment's keyboard control panel thing; it's usually very simple. Every recent operating system installs the layout files by default, too.)
Can you provide any examples? Most code consists of words. What's left over is punctuation. Words and punctuation are easier to access. (I code, and I use dvorak and qwerty, and I find that there's no difference in benefit of coding vs english in dvorak: And for both you notice the benefit of dvorak over qwerty.)
FWIW, the population of Australia includes the population of Tasmania, at least on the Wikipedia article. "Australia" usually refers to the country, not the continent.
Yay! Absolutely true, every single word of it! Cross-platform guis generally suck and they're a waste of time. I have never met one I like. Write awesome cross-platform libraries to do the work and write awesome platform-supecific guis to do the hci, because I don't didn't choose my operating system because it doesn't support my hardware as well as the other options.
Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.
Not true! You can have the computer set up only to raise windows when you click on the titlebar, but not on the window body, and use click-to-focus. This is the default setup for OroboROX, and you can make Sawfish work like that. Probably most other window managers too.
(I find focus-stictly-follows-mouse and mouse-strictly-follows-focus to be the easiest way to use a computer tho; Sawfish seems to be the only window manager that can do this without exhibiting annoying and consistent bugs.)
A lot of applications autoraise for me when I'm doing it. Delphi's IDE, Adobe Reader, Word... but all only sometimes. IE7 also stops raising or lowering at all for some reason, sometimes. I haven't worked out why or when yet.
Before you consider this one of a million angry rebuttals, let me note that your conclusions are your own and you can keep with them regardless of RMS, but...
You misunderstand RMS and the FSF completely. RMS does not and has never stood for Open Source software. RMS does not advocate the technical superiority of an Open development model. In fact, he doesn't even necessarily believe it is technically superior—read his essay on why Open Source misses the point of Free Software.
RMS is however avidly against proprietry software—to the extent that he will not even talk to you about features in Mac OS X, for fear that you might buy it. I can't imagine he would ever say that at some point in time, it becomes okay to allow free software to fall into proprietry code by using a BSD licence.
Probably what you were thinking of is RMS justifying the existence of the LGPL, and you accurately describe one of these justifications. He does believe that at some point (and that that point has come!) we should all switch our libraries to the GPL: Sort of like a bait-and-switch manoeuvre designed to force us all over to only free software.
I almost get offended by that quote every time I see it. I run Debian because there's no BSD that supports all my hardware properly. From all the BSD fanboyism you get, one is almost tempted to retort "Linux is for people who hate Microsoft; BSD is for people who hate Linux".
(That said, I wish I had all the man pages of BSD systems on Debian. GNU man pages suck, and the info system sucks harder.)
Sadly my foot! I'm pleased he's mistaken! I've tried switching to Mac OS X, but we disagreed so I came back to GNU/Linux. The Mac OS X user interface—and I don't mean the gee wizz graphical effects, I mean the more fundamental things like its application-centric design—are grossly incompatible with the way some of us work.
They've released a free client for free operating systems now too? I didn't notice that part. Otherwise, it'll be more than a little difficult for me to buy them in the first place.
(1) the ROX Desktop uses drag-and-drop to install programs, and has done so almost as long as Mac OS X has (from another influence). ROX is a competitor to Gnome and KDE, not Debian or Red Hat, and so this works on all distributions. I don't understand any better than the next person why Mozilla won't distribute Firefox nightlies as AppDirs, nor why Nautilus and Konqueror won't execute them.
As for the rest, I'm surprised things aren't working just right for you anyway. They usually do. If they're not, you're right: But it's an excellent idea to try filing a bug with the relevant distribution; Free Software devs are almost entirely self-guided and working on their own desktop, so they're used to the faults and see through them. More practical than ranting on Slashdot, at least.
I type this on a rev-a iMac G5 healthily running Debian with almost all the hardware fully supported, including the Airport Extreme wireless. It was a bastard to start doing, but from June 2005 having used Mac OS X for about six months (I got it in December 2004) till when I had it finally acceptable some time later, it became very important to me: The Mac OS X UI simply doesn't work for me.
The Finder keeps opening up in that stupid space-wasting sidebar brushed metal mode; it remembers my settings for old folders, but for new ones it falls back on its default. It uses file extensions to determine type: On Debian, I use ROX-Filer, which uses a file's contents to determine type whenever it can. I don't recall the Finder as having a way to create files from a set of templates in a menu: This means that if you're in a folder, and want to make a new file there, you have to (a) stop what you're doing (!!!); (b) go to the applications folder, (b ii) remember the name of the program you want to use, (b iii) find it, (b iv) and run it; (c) choose to save the new document; (d) find the folder you already have open once again in the save dialog box; (e) resume whatever you're doing. (This list, and any others I include, are based on how the process feels to me. So I get to include steps like "stop what you're doing". And any usability guru will tell you this means there's a serious problem!) It has other nasty habits.
I'm used to X11's selection clipboard, where middle-clicking pastes whatever's been selected, so I keep forgetting to choose to copy. Major cut to my productivity!
Windows are grouped by program, not by task. I might have one browser window open for work, and another for play; if I'm using Terminal and Preview also for work, I don't want to have to keep pushing the play browser window out of the way. (Actually, I found different programs behaved differently with regards to this. I can't remember which or why.) Relatedly, there's no decent virtual desktop programs out there. Or perhaps, because most programs don't expect to use virtual desktops, they don't behave properly when they're asked to.
There's only one menu for every program. This makes it really hard to keep track of where I am. Exposé makes it worse; if I'm busy with Camino, and use Expose to show my desktop, Camino's menu still shows up. So I go to the "View" menu and get really confused by why "Clean up selection" doesn't show up. Apparently this makes going to the menu faster for some particular use cases, but the way I operate, it doesn't help much; aside from the fact I prefer context menus (which help me associate actions with objects), I'm usually using more than one program to do a task, so using a menu becomes a multi-step process: (a) Work out which app is focussed; (b) If necessary, (b i) go find a window for the app whose menu I want to work on, (b ii) and click on it; (c) Use the menu.
Actually, it probably makes me sound stupid, but I find this whole business of "the focussed window" really hard to keep track of. On the Mac, it's the topmost window, it's the only one you can operate (most) widgets on (most of the time), it's the only one whose application menu is visible, the window itself looks different (brighter, more contrastive), and it's got a shadow round it. Only... on a 20" screen, it's really hard to compare the brightness, shadow, and height of non-overlapping windows when one's in your peripheral vision and the other's in your direct line of site. When I'm running Debian, I don't think my computer has the concept of "focus", only "keyboard focus": keyboard entry goes into the window that the mouse pointer is over, regardless of it's stacking order or whatever (it also has a purple titlebar, instead of a grey one, but the mouse location is more important on a 20" screen). The focussed window = topmost window thing also means that if you mis-click when using the scrollbar or whatever, you have a major problem with your windows rearranging! I neve
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yes! I know exactly what you mean, although for me it was GNU/Linux versus Windows. By now I largely switch based on gibberish; I don't consiously know what layout I'm using except by the feel.
What, so Norway's decision to stay out of the EU to preserve some of their sovereignty means that they lose their sovereignty, because now they're bound to implement laws their citizens have no say over by being unable to elect representatives who make these laws? Or have I completely misunderstood?
From Wikipedia: "The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout". So obviously both then, but it's speed isn't the only benefit and not the one most people who I've known to switch have looked at.
I'm afraid I've never really followed what studies have and have not existed concerning keyboard layouts as they didn't influence me. Annecdotal evidence suggests there are some benefits, but this could easily just be "a change is as good as a holiday" kind of things.
As for whether any claim was "subsequently discredited with force", I assume you refer to "The fable of the keys". This itself has been subsequently discredited with some force: IIRC, it was written by two economists who were more interested in proving that Dvorak/Qwerty and Betamax/VHS situations are always due to the quality of the products, not inertia.
No-one would want to use my computer anyway, after trying it. Me and my computer have grown around each other so that nowadays, no-one can understand my computer any better than they can understand me :)
Also, completely irrelevant, but what is a "Calc sheet"?
Oh indeed, I know exactly what you mean. It took me a lot longer to get used to certain punctuation, and when I go and touchtype qwerty nowadays, I usually try to type the dvorak form and have to look down.
Of course, this provides the benefit that you'll eventually learn to touchtype punctuation. Just leave the image of the keyboard layout attached to your monitor, and consult it, not the keyboard. Looking at your screen and touchtyping will help you learn to touchtype a lot better than looking at your keyboard ever will.
(I didn't practise what I preached here. I physically rearranged the punctuation after I was fluent in dvorakese for letters but still couldn't hit + or ] to save my life. So I never learnt them, till I got a laptop and I had no choice.)
Of course DVORAK is 'optimized' for English, which may at times be helpfull when entering code, but often is not, not to mention that a substantial part of the world doesn't speak English.
Please stop bringing this argument up, everyone reading this article! Dvorak is optimised for English, and no-one argues that anyone but people using English (or other languages similar enough) should use dvorak.
As for RSI etc. I've heard this a lot from people who've switched to dvorak, and many assert they touchtyped properly beforehand.[*] The fact that you get by without getting RSI on qwerty doesn't mean it's not a risk for some people: Some people just don't get RSI for no clear reason. And likewise, many people switched to dvorak because of its purported benefits, and their RSI wasn't cured. Point: Everyone's different.
[*]: I touchtyped properly beforehand. But I didn't have RSI, so dvorak can't've cured it.
I use vi key mapping in my editor, shell and from time-to-time my webbrowser, and I always do so with the dvorak layout. Like I say, I like to be able to control scrolling up and down (the two most common actions as your anonymous parent observes) with either the left hand (jk) or the right hand (mouse, cursor keys, scroll wheel). jk are both on the left index finger, so it's not like it's a weak spot, either.
(I'm not a lefty, but doing everything with one hand tires it. Hence using dvorak, which balances the load a lot... It also means I can mouse with my right hand and scroll with my left hand, which is something I do from time to time.)
(Oh, I was wrong by the way, and said h and j were on the left hand. They're not. jk are on the left hand. Evidently I don't pay attention to how I'm doing something.)
Sorry, I completely misunderstood you! You were referring to natural languages, of course.
As for that, the QWERTY layout is no better for Swedish or French or Russian than the Dvorak layout is. It lacks the letters these countries use. So they've created their own ones, which makes it easy to type ä and é and Cyrillic characters. The French have gone so far as to move AQZW around. The situation is exactly comparable to Dvorak: People who largely write foreign languages should use a keyboard layout optimised for those languages. I know one exists for Swedish; it shouldn't be hard to create one for others, given the substantial freely avaliable databases of commonly used words you can get from the Internet.
The hard part there is trying to get the layout included in operating systems!—I'll agree, this will be difficult!
Why would you need to change the shortcuts for every program you use? I use exactly the same keys as a qwerty user. Even with VIM. Especially with VIM; I like the dvorak positionings of hjkl a lot better than the qwerty ones. Less mnemonic, but more useful.
For anyone with the intelligence it takes to write a computer program, touchtyping in two keyboard layouts should be no problem at all. In fact, I'm touchtyping this on qwerty. The minimal cost of knowing two layouts is clearly worth the ergonomic benefits of using dvorak when I can, if you ask me.
As for issues with speed, the point of dvorak is not and never has been speed. It's ergonomics. This perhaps gives you a bit more speed—an irrelevant amount more speed—but it's not the point! I said that in the post you replied to: Why bring it up again?
It's not just Vim, but everything else I do as well. It's hard to imagine going back to being careful where the keys are... I've had plenty of times that I just kept on typing while I was looking at my boss (he was talking) or I got something in my eye and just needed to finish a sentence that was in my head.
I was like that before I switched. I'm like that after I switched. I wasn't like that for about a month in between. And I'm better at vi for it, too.
On top of that, I've -never- seen a Dvorak keyboard.
Fancy that, neither have I. You (i.e. I) touchtype dvorak. The only value you'll ever get out of looking at the keyboard is because it's fun to look at yourself typing on a keyboard with the keys marked wrong, and you can't do that with a dvorak keyboard.
There's still just too many reasons not to switch, and only 1 to switch: It's supposedly quicker.
Most reasons against switching are false; about the only one worth listening to is that lots of people use your computer and/or you use lots of computers. A very good reason, certainly, but still only one.
And the purported benefit of dvorak is that it's more ergonomic. This results in it being a little faster, but it's not the point. That's why if you do want to buy a dvorak keyboard, you'll find that almost none of them have the standard physical arrangement. But I do certainly notice the benefits of dvorak with my regular-format keyboards.
I learnt VIM with Qwerty, and now I use VIM with Dvorak, a lot better and more skilfully than before. There's no reason to remap VIM's layout (and plenty of reasons not to). It will probably take a while to get used to it, but once you are you might find you use hjkl a lot more: in particular, I've found the hj (up/down ... or is it down/up? i just use them, i don't think about them) to be much better placed on dvorak than qwerty (they're on the left hand, so you have a choice: use hj with left hand, or cursor keys with right hand).
:)
Once you're used to VIM+dvorak, it's absolutely no harder than VIM+qwerty. I would expect it'll take you longer to get used to VIM+dvorak than anything else+dvorak, but if you love vi as much as I do, it'll only motivate you to learn faster
On the other hand: Although I can touchtype fluently in qwerty and dvorak, my VIM+qwerty skills are almost entirely gone. I have to stop and think about just about everything; it's painful and the only time I ever regret switching. If you're going to be bouncing around on computers whose keyboard layouts you can't control, and you use VIM, consider this before switching. Maybe just remap some keys so up/down are where god (not Bill Joy) intended.
Simple solution: Don't physically rearrange the keys. You gain nothing in two-fingered hunt-and-peck if you're using dvorak; it's benefits are almost entirely limited to touch-typing. It'll force yourself to learn the layout faster and better if you can't look at what you're doing. Also, it helps for if you ever need to run your computer in recovery mode when it won't load keyboard drivers, or for stupid games that don't realise not everyone is an American using qwerty layout; and sometimes it helps interpret typos on the web.
Trust me on this: I learnt Dvorak by keeping a printout attached to my screen for a week or two...
(To reconfigure the layout, use your operating environment's keyboard control panel thing; it's usually very simple. Every recent operating system installs the layout files by default, too.)
Can you provide any examples? Most code consists of words. What's left over is punctuation. Words and punctuation are easier to access. (I code, and I use dvorak and qwerty, and I find that there's no difference in benefit of coding vs english in dvorak: And for both you notice the benefit of dvorak over qwerty.)
FWIW, the population of Australia includes the population of Tasmania, at least on the Wikipedia article. "Australia" usually refers to the country, not the continent.
Yay! Absolutely true, every single word of it! Cross-platform guis generally suck and they're a waste of time. I have never met one I like. Write awesome cross-platform libraries to do the work and write awesome platform-supecific guis to do the hci, because I don't didn't choose my operating system because it doesn't support my hardware as well as the other options.
Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.
Not true! You can have the computer set up only to raise windows when you click on the titlebar, but not on the window body, and use click-to-focus. This is the default setup for OroboROX, and you can make Sawfish work like that. Probably most other window managers too.
(I find focus-stictly-follows-mouse and mouse-strictly-follows-focus to be the easiest way to use a computer tho; Sawfish seems to be the only window manager that can do this without exhibiting annoying and consistent bugs.)
A lot of applications autoraise for me when I'm doing it. Delphi's IDE, Adobe Reader, Word... but all only sometimes. IE7 also stops raising or lowering at all for some reason, sometimes. I haven't worked out why or when yet.
Before you consider this one of a million angry rebuttals, let me note that your conclusions are your own and you can keep with them regardless of RMS, but...
You misunderstand RMS and the FSF completely. RMS does not and has never stood for Open Source software. RMS does not advocate the technical superiority of an Open development model. In fact, he doesn't even necessarily believe it is technically superior—read his essay on why Open Source misses the point of Free Software.
RMS is however avidly against proprietry software—to the extent that he will not even talk to you about features in Mac OS X, for fear that you might buy it. I can't imagine he would ever say that at some point in time, it becomes okay to allow free software to fall into proprietry code by using a BSD licence.
Probably what you were thinking of is RMS justifying the existence of the LGPL, and you accurately describe one of these justifications. He does believe that at some point (and that that point has come!) we should all switch our libraries to the GPL: Sort of like a bait-and-switch manoeuvre designed to force us all over to only free software.
I almost get offended by that quote every time I see it. I run Debian because there's no BSD that supports all my hardware properly. From all the BSD fanboyism you get, one is almost tempted to retort "Linux is for people who hate Microsoft; BSD is for people who hate Linux".
(That said, I wish I had all the man pages of BSD systems on Debian. GNU man pages suck, and the info system sucks harder.)
Sadly my foot! I'm pleased he's mistaken! I've tried switching to Mac OS X, but we disagreed so I came back to GNU/Linux. The Mac OS X user interface—and I don't mean the gee wizz graphical effects, I mean the more fundamental things like its application-centric design—are grossly incompatible with the way some of us work.
They've released a free client for free operating systems now too? I didn't notice that part. Otherwise, it'll be more than a little difficult for me to buy them in the first place.
Actually...
(1) the ROX Desktop uses drag-and-drop to install programs, and has done so almost as long as Mac OS X has (from another influence). ROX is a competitor to Gnome and KDE, not Debian or Red Hat, and so this works on all distributions. I don't understand any better than the next person why Mozilla won't distribute Firefox nightlies as AppDirs, nor why Nautilus and Konqueror won't execute them.
As for the rest, I'm surprised things aren't working just right for you anyway. They usually do. If they're not, you're right: But it's an excellent idea to try filing a bug with the relevant distribution; Free Software devs are almost entirely self-guided and working on their own desktop, so they're used to the faults and see through them. More practical than ranting on Slashdot, at least.
I type this on a rev-a iMac G5 healthily running Debian with almost all the hardware fully supported, including the Airport Extreme wireless. It was a bastard to start doing, but from June 2005 having used Mac OS X for about six months (I got it in December 2004) till when I had it finally acceptable some time later, it became very important to me: The Mac OS X UI simply doesn't work for me.
... on a 20" screen, it's really hard to compare the brightness, shadow, and height of non-overlapping windows when one's in your peripheral vision and the other's in your direct line of site. When I'm running Debian, I don't think my computer has the concept of "focus", only "keyboard focus": keyboard entry goes into the window that the mouse pointer is over, regardless of it's stacking order or whatever (it also has a purple titlebar, instead of a grey one, but the mouse location is more important on a 20" screen). The focussed window = topmost window thing also means that if you mis-click when using the scrollbar or whatever, you have a major problem with your windows rearranging! I neve
The Finder keeps opening up in that stupid space-wasting sidebar brushed metal mode; it remembers my settings for old folders, but for new ones it falls back on its default. It uses file extensions to determine type: On Debian, I use ROX-Filer, which uses a file's contents to determine type whenever it can. I don't recall the Finder as having a way to create files from a set of templates in a menu: This means that if you're in a folder, and want to make a new file there, you have to (a) stop what you're doing (!!!); (b) go to the applications folder, (b ii) remember the name of the program you want to use, (b iii) find it, (b iv) and run it; (c) choose to save the new document; (d) find the folder you already have open once again in the save dialog box; (e) resume whatever you're doing. (This list, and any others I include, are based on how the process feels to me. So I get to include steps like "stop what you're doing". And any usability guru will tell you this means there's a serious problem!) It has other nasty habits.
I'm used to X11's selection clipboard, where middle-clicking pastes whatever's been selected, so I keep forgetting to choose to copy. Major cut to my productivity!
Windows are grouped by program, not by task. I might have one browser window open for work, and another for play; if I'm using Terminal and Preview also for work, I don't want to have to keep pushing the play browser window out of the way. (Actually, I found different programs behaved differently with regards to this. I can't remember which or why.) Relatedly, there's no decent virtual desktop programs out there. Or perhaps, because most programs don't expect to use virtual desktops, they don't behave properly when they're asked to.
There's only one menu for every program. This makes it really hard to keep track of where I am. Exposé makes it worse; if I'm busy with Camino, and use Expose to show my desktop, Camino's menu still shows up. So I go to the "View" menu and get really confused by why "Clean up selection" doesn't show up. Apparently this makes going to the menu faster for some particular use cases, but the way I operate, it doesn't help much; aside from the fact I prefer context menus (which help me associate actions with objects), I'm usually using more than one program to do a task, so using a menu becomes a multi-step process: (a) Work out which app is focussed; (b) If necessary, (b i) go find a window for the app whose menu I want to work on, (b ii) and click on it; (c) Use the menu.
Actually, it probably makes me sound stupid, but I find this whole business of "the focussed window" really hard to keep track of. On the Mac, it's the topmost window, it's the only one you can operate (most) widgets on (most of the time), it's the only one whose application menu is visible, the window itself looks different (brighter, more contrastive), and it's got a shadow round it. Only
Funny. Back in the day,[*] the story was version 4.0 of a Microsoft product was to be avoided. Think, in particular, MS-DOS.
[*]: I was too young back in the day to know this first hand.
And any exchange or refund of the license would be in breach of licensing agreement.
Doesn't the Windows EULA say that if you don't agree, you get a refund? Or has that been removed?