Linux has better hardware support than OS X

Any good links to read up on this?

What about over heating?

I tried ubuntu 12.04, and 12.10 on a 2011 macbook air 4,2. I followed the information here, some of the tweaks weren't needed on 12.10:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir4-2

But the fans were spinning almost constantly. This was with just firefox and vim usage.

OS X seems to do a better job of running Apple hardware at a sensible temperature.

I think if you work for a printing outfit, your exposure is likely to be skewed towards the realm of working solutions. My negative experience was always in getting some random computer to work with a random printer. Lets say a friend comes over, or I am at a friends house. If a friend came over, we'll have the joy of trying to find the drivers for the printer for their windows box. If I was at a friend's, it was always "just give me the usb cable."

That said, I don't have massive experience with crashes in Office. I do prefer plain text source files, though. To the point that I have begun using R for basic data analysis instead of excel. (Though, I make no claims that I can more quickly get a chart created than someone just clicking the chart button any any office application. I can more reliably reproduce my results, though.)

This is silly. Although I'm sure it's gotten much better since I regularly used Linux on the desktop, you always had to do some amount of due diligence about what hardware worked well with it and what hardware didn't.

For example, because I use OS X, I can go to any store, purchase my choice of Lexmark printer, and be on my merry way with a minimal amount of checking. The fact that I have to know that there's a "reference platform" is the problem. I don't want to have to think about that crap. I don't have to with my Mac. I want to save my mental cycles for important things, not struggling with which printer to purchase.

Or I can put it in simpler terms. There's a concrete social cost to using Linux on the Desktop. Let's say I want a printer for Christmas. If I'm running the amount of information I need to give my family in order for them to buy me one that works is orders of magnitude smaller than if I'm running Linux.

In fact, I'd sound like some sort of bizarro printer snob when I make my request. "If you're looking at Lexmark printers, these models work, these ones don't. HP is good, but not models like X, Y, and Z."

Now, like I said, it's been several years since I regularly used Linux on the desktop. I'm sure it's better. But the problem is not that there aren't known-good Linux configurations. It's that (1) those configurations are essentially arbitrary and therefore not obvious and (2) they require time and energy to learn (memorize, really).

If it's changed, that's great, but that's also part of the problem. Now I not only have to keep a set of known-good configurations in my head but a rolling changelog, too, to make sure my knowledge is up-to-date.

I switched from Linux to OS X precisely because I decided my mental energy was better spent on other things than remembering, "Oh yeah, the Dell Lenovo X876123 mark 10 is a known-good Linux laptop."

I'll add that I'm sure in aggregate Linux supports a much wider range of hardware than OS X. That's great! That's why Linux is kicking ass in all sorts of non-desktop markets like mobile devices, embedded systems, servers, etc. But there is an inherent tension in an OS that's optimizing for that vs. constraining itself to the desktop and the desktop only.

If you mean "better" as in quantitatively more, then yes.

The quality of those drivers are far, far worse than the OSX drivers.

Also, how is it surprising that OSX has few drivers, when OSX is meant for very specific Apple-designed hardware?

Anyway. I'm running Ubuntu on a new Macbook Air (5,1), and both the touchpad and the Wifi drivers are an absolute atrocity on Linux.

A few things just doesn't work, like the keyboard backlight.

The LCD backlight is also broken, half the time you have to unplug and replug the power to get the backlight to light up after automatic dimming, for some reason.

As for wifi, I quote, live, from my syslog: Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.034285] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.035618] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 Jun 16 22:27:45 laptop kernel: [28768.036427] brcmsmac bcma0:0: brcms_c_ampdu_dotxstatus_complete: Pkt tx suppressed, illegal channel possibly 48 ... etc ...

Constant disconnects, poor speed. Switch to the proprietary driver and bandwidth is 2-3x better and the disconnects disappear, though.

The trackpad issues seem unfixable, even though there are lots of options to fiddle with. The quality is just poor or the driver is not designed to work with the type of touchpad that the Mac has. Tapping causes the cursor to move to a new position before doing a click, left-clicking causes the cursor to zoom to the bottom left of the screen, etc. etc. etc. If the precision of the Mac touchpad driver is index 100, I would give the Linux driver a score of 5.