Time to Switch?

We hear all the time about people switching from Windows to Linux. But how often do you see people move from the Mac over to Linux? Ah ha, I thought not…

Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote at length about switching to Ubuntu. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now John Gruber’s written And Oranges, a fine excursus on Mark’s piece. I’m pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick, physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email—the record of my life—away in a proprietary undocumented format. I’ve had this happen once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear a funny sound? That’s a camel’s back, breaking.]

Note: The links to pieces of software in this fragment are not to their pages, but to my experience with them on the Mac.

The Conversation Thus Far · First of all, I should say that I share every one of Mark’s concerns. In particular, it’s bothered me for years that the Apple apps aren’t Open Source; there are all these irritating little misfeatures and shortcomings that I’d be willing and maybe able to fix, and there are lots more like me. Since the apps are joined at the hip to OS X, there’d be no real downside to Apple. ¶

The real problem, it seems to me (and I think this bothers Mark more than he says), is Apple’s paranoid communication culture: it is forbidden to say anything except what it’s compulsory to say. Apple’s exterior is polished, shiny; and entirely opaque. Personally, I think their success has been about shipping good products, but I think they believe it’s a consequence of the tightness of the lip. I’d rather do business with a company I can talk to.

John Gruber’s essay is very hard to disagree with, but I’d place more weight than either he or Mark did on the increasing excellence of Ubuntu. If you haven’t tried a recent Ubuntu, you really should; the level of polish, and amount of stuff that “Just Works”, is really remarkable. Ubuntu won’t always be the polish-and-quality leader among Linux distros, of course; but for now, it’s set a very high standard.

Non-Problems · I already use lots of OSS: Adium for chat, Camino (based on Firefox) for browsing, Emacs for editing, and NetBeans for Java. So there’d be zero cost in those spaces to switch to Ubuntu. ¶

Quite a bit of the Apple software I use, I could move off with little trouble. Mail.app is bothering me more and more every day with its lousy performance and pitiful search capabilities, so I think I’d be OK with Thunderbird. How hard can ripping CDs and playing MP3s be? I don’t think I’d miss iTunes, and I love music too much to get locked into the iTMS handcuffs.

I use iCal but I hate it; it’s lost my calendar data, which is intolerable. I’m only still there because I haven’t had the time to invest in finding an alternative…. Source: tbray.org

[tags]windows,apple,linux,open source,proprietary[/tags]