This is going to be unpopular, I know. I'm a linux buff too, diehard fan since 1997.
BUT. One has got to admit the Windows 7 interface is great. I bought a new notebook that came with it and I gotta say, I wish Linux had ONE great interface and standard GUI programming API.
> I wish Linux had ONE great interface and standard GUI programming API.
Gnome2 was the de facto standard Linux desktop for probably a decade. Then it was abandoned overnight because the developers got simply bored with endlessly maintaining it for free. But exactly that, maintaining, polishing and evolitionary improving Gnome2 and letting an app and extension ecosystem slowly grow for the next 10-15 years, is what Linux desktop needs.
After decades of boasting "stability" over Windows, I think Linux desktop users are slowly starting to reckognize the real value behind a commercially long-term maintained "stable" API. Having a "free" desktop is in practice useless when there is no one willing to maintain it.
One has got to admit the Windows 7 interface is great.
Opinions. I hate the Windows Interface with a passion, the same goes for OS X, and I'm not too fond of G3 either. It's just needless clutter, completely pointless blingbling, bloat and is generally unusable.
I say that as someone who hasn't been on Linux for too long (about a year now), and slowly worked his way from Ubuntu 10.04 to a custom Arch Linux install running Xmonad, and I'm never going back to stacking WMs on my main machines. Ever. All they do is hinder productivity.
By "ONE" do you mean at least one, as in implying there are none right now. Or by "ONE" do you mean that you wish there would be one and only one GUI/DE for linux?
If it's the first, I would agree because I would willingly pay money to use the Windows 7 or even OS X interfaces in Linux. Essentially, I feel that while Linux has software I can't live without, there is not a single WM/DE out there that I can use without being annoyed every 20 minutes or without having to spend weeks configuring it. Gnome came closest before the gnome-shell move, now KDE is the closest but it's seriously still too buggy and "WTF" inducing. I'm not sure if it would be less work to remove all the "default/assumed" features from KDE (like the wallet that irritates me even when browsing websites) or to set up XFCE to some bearable degree from scratch.
Regardless, I'd still take this selection of environments that are all either ugly, time consuming to configure, buggy, or flat out annoying over having no choice at all. Even if the "no choice" option was really excellent, I would not like the thought of being stuck with it knowing that under some rare condition it might be useless and my only way out is a complete OS switch. Example: as much as I praise the windows 7 UI, I would hate to try and deal with it if I lost my ability to use a mouse. Meanwhile, I know there are nice options in the Linux world that I could use if this was the case.
Pretty much it boils down to my opinion that no interface is going to be good at every use case. And for that reason I'd rather have a slew of mediocre ones that span a broader range over a single one that covers a small spectrum but does it well.
I was in the same situation as you. I had been using mac and then bought a desktop PC and ran Linux. I tried awesome, xmonad, gnome, kde, etc but none of them were to my liking.
So now I run Windows 7, which is more option-full than you might think and develop on a virtual arch box via ssh/vim... It's the perfect setup in my opinion!
I was a Linux diehard too, but I got a Mac laptop and now most of the time I just use Linux through SSH or occasionally through a VM...
I still love it as a development environment (I even get to do kernel hacking at work sometimes) but I'm not as sold on it as a desktop OS as I used to be...
The Windows taskbar is one of the biggest reasons why I couldn't live with Windows. I tried (for the sake of my games), I really did. But the grouping behavior just puts me off. I can't live without text so I switched back to the old rectangular bar with text and an icon style instead of the square with icon style. But say I have two Explorer windows open. Both would be placed right next to each other and moving one moves the other. What if I want one that's less active on the left while I place the other one on the right with all the other related tasks that I'm actively working on? Can't do it. That "we chose how you will do things and that's that" attitude made me run back to Linux where I can do whatever I want. tint2 + conky + openbox is all I need. :)
What? When I bought a new laptop (few months ago) which came with W7 too, it took it about an hour (on the first run) to install some vendor (HP) crapware, randomly popping up old-fashioned term windows running a lot of text, before I could use it, anyhow; it ended up with some… something. I didn't even know how to connect to my wifi, there were two very different (both in appearance and behavior) widgets for that, fighting each other. The interface was, on the first sight, very polished and rather nice, but after first few minutes, I started to spot things that looked like leftovers from Windows 98, most likely, they were. To actually do something, I had to download some 3rd parties software packages, none of them really fitted into the W7 environment. Three completely different fileselectors on the screen at one time? W7 problem too, obviously.
Well, I'm not making definite conclusions from what I saw, it was just something like 4 hours and I bought the laptop to use with Linux anyway, so I didn't really want to use Windows even if I liked them more than I actually did. But I really tried to approach it without prejudices and bias. And I really think that it's stuck in 1990's. 20 years before OS X and now even Gnome 3. Hey, it was even worse than Android!
BUT. One has got to admit the Windows 7 interface is great. I bought a new notebook that came with it and I gotta say, I wish Linux had ONE great interface and standard GUI programming API.