Or why Apple should slash the prices of Machintosh and kill Linux. The reason for this ins't that I want Apple to gain a monopoly of personal computer use, it is that Linux Distros have lost sight of why Apple is the success they are not; what they need to learn about software from Apple and what other vendors are doing by being "Simple" in the wrong way.
A good example of what is wrong with Linux is provided by Recordmydesktop, a tool that is supposed to capture sound and video from the desktop or a window on the desktop and save it into an open format. I have tried it on Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04, a desktop and a laptop system and the sound capture has not worked. The man page is a horror of details and the user interface is very low level. It takes signals from the environment to control and the claim that control-C sends a SIGINT and stops the recording is not true on either of my systems. I had to find the process ID and do a 'kill -15' to stop recording. In addition the decoding is slow, taking about three times as long as the video and after all that, no sound.
On top of all that Ubuntu Software Manager wouldn't let me submit a review even though I installed it from there and to try to submit one on the Source Forge site where the software lives requires a login on Source Forge, which I am lothe to create because of the desire to not spray my identy all over the Internet. So, I am venting my spleen here and this will last for years, maybe longer than Ubuntu or Recordmydesktop.
The design of Recordmydesktop is typical of many Linux thrid party tools where not enough time is put into designing a useful interface and documenting it for human use. It was a hack rushed into distribution. The developer did not think about novices who do not know UNIX internals. OS X uses some of the same open source programs but to be installable from Apple they have to meet more stringant configuration and documentation standards. It isn't that applications on Apple are not open source or based on UNIX or BSD predicessors, but that the integration with the OS is better and tested more. Many Linux apps fail in complexity; they are too difficult to configure and maintain because the underlying hardware is so complex. There is really no excuse for this any more. Apple is well positioned to reduce this complexity if it can get over its own mystique and lower its prices or offer an inexpensive platform, The man page of Recordmydesktop is full of choices that reflect chaos of the underlying driver structure and sound on a Linux box has always been a huge and an inscrutable problem. There really isn't any excuse for it. I am thinking seriously about getting out of Linux.