Originally Posted by
acregal
This all depends on where one is living - someone living in south Osaka will hate commuting to Kyoto, for example. However, Nagaokakyo is one station from Osaka prefecture and easily reachable from Umeda (or from stops along the JR or Hankyu line). It would very likely be much easier for someone to go there from Osaka than to take the Kyoto subway and transfer to Hankyu or JR.
For a while, I was commuting between Nishinomiya (Hyogo) and Kyoto. Now
that was no fun, but it was still only an hour and a half or so and not half as bad as my commute in LA used to be. Plus, you can read/sleep/watch videos on the train to keep entertained. Plenty of Japanese people have commutes this long.
But as
acregal points out, depending on where in Kyoto you need to go and where in Osaka you live, it might not be so bad. Nagaokakyo is ~45 minutes from Umeda, which is (IMO) a reasonable commute time.