Remember a few months ago there was an apparent stampede of people, headed by Mark Pilgrim, who were abandoning Macs for Ubuntu? (Although some later came back.)

Java podcaster Tim Shadel is going the other way , dumping Ubuntu after using Linux for years and stretching his legs into Mac OS X.

Since Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark Pilgrim, it’s extra interesting to read Tim’s experience with Mail, compared to Evolution, his Linux mail client:

Mail.app is great. Evolution almost works. I have to use exchange at work (I have Ubuntu installed there, too). Evolution has a module to integrate with Exchange, and it sorta thinks about working. It’s slow, and frequently it hangs. So much so that I got sick of typing

ps -ef | grep evolu | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs kill

that I put it in a batch file shell script. I ran it no less than twice a day, sometimes more. Calendaring almost worked, except when it didn’t. Frequently I’d send out an appointment only to figure out that my colleagues version of the appointment didn’t repeat over the right interval. I don’t blame anyone for having trouble integrating with a Microsoft product. But at the end of the day, it was still annoyingly brittle. On Mac, there’s Entourage — an M$ product to work with the M$ server. As it is, Mail.app rocks for processing my personal email really efficiently. Oh, and it can export your mail to mbox. Duh. On Ubuntu, mail almost works.

He goes on to list many more ways in which Mac OS X simply provides a superior user experience—searching, wireless, GUI, audio effects, bluetooth and more.

In the end, it’s all about an OS that (wait for it…) “just works”:

My reasons for choosing to dump Ubuntu for a Mac are almost entirely about the experience. After years of Linux work, I’m tired of fiddling. I’m tired of things that almost work. I’m ready for a change. I’m sick of the war to get things to work. I’m ready to simply Get Things Done.