There are other differences, too. The playlist showed up by default on the OS X version of VLC, and I haven't found a way to make that happen on the Ubuntu version. Also, the OS X version has a very nice "jump 10 seconds" feature which the Ubuntu version seems to lack entirely (or I couldn't find it). It's weird that the OS X version of VLC actually seemed to have more features and a markedly better interace than the linux version, to the point that although I used VLC almost exclusively on OS X, now that I use linux I usually use Totem.
Not sure about the playlist thing, but on linux there are keyboard shortcuts for jumps of varying lengths (some combo of left or right arrow and ctrl|alt|shift variations).
