APC administrator06 July 2006, 3:12 AM
Mac fans worldwide are feeling a disturbance in the force: author Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) and software developer Mark Pilgrim have announced they've had it with OS X, and are switching to Ubuntu.
Apple has long positioned OS X as the operating system for getting the most out of your computer, and there is something to that claim.
If you want to spend more time enjoying your PC (and less time configuring it and battling 'helpful' popups), you could do a lot worse than the synergy of a Mac running OS X.
So I got a big shock when I read that two of the Mac platform's greatest supporters have moved over to GNU/Linux - the Ubuntu distribution - because they feel that it better satisfies their needs.
The first was software developer Mark Pilgrim about a month ago, and recently Cory Doctorow piped up an admitted that he was switching too.
How could it be that things could have changed so dramatically, so quickly?
Well, for starters, looking at their justifications one gets the impression that these issues have been looming for some time now.
Mark Pilgrim points to DRM and proprietary file formats as being a huge problem for him, and these have been a part of the Mac platform since iPods became the music player of choice for the discerning consumer.
(As a sidenote, hopefully he won't freak out as much as the Windows and Mac users did when he notices Ubuntu doing evil update checking.)
A lack of choice is also troubling for Pilgrim, who sees recent software offerings from Apple as being generally inferior to third-party GPL software.
I can see his point - I recently yelled "LOLZ!" in the office when I realised that Quicktime player still won't play in full screen without a command line hack, or a full version license.
Sheesh, even GXine that comes with Ubuntu can do that straight out of the box. So much for superior offerings from commercial software vendors.
Cory Doctorow's reasoning is partially that he agrees with Pilgrim but also the considerably more pragmatic concern that, now that the installed hardware is point for point comparable, he couldn't see a Macbook as being a superior offering to a Lenovo Thinkpad with the same hardware configuration.
This is a big issue for Apple. A Macbook, regardless of what the more zealous members of the Mac fraternity will tell you, is still more expensive than offerings from other vendors, even though it's now possible to do a direct comparison based on specifications.
So what is a Mac these days? Intel chipset and CPU, ATi or Intel GPU, SATA drive, dual layer DVD burner, and so on.
Sounds suspiciously like the Dell that I'm writing this on (running Ubuntu funnily enough).
Interestingly, Ubuntu uses GNOME as the primary desktop environment. I've always used the "GNOME is like Mac OS Classic, and KDE is like OS X and Windows had a baby with ADHD" analogy to explain the difference to users.
One point that's always made about GNU/Linux is that people need to be familiar with the UI before they can be productive with it, so users will be reluctant to switch.
However, GNOME is apparently similar enough to an interface that these users have already had years of experience with before OS X, so the switch was nice and easy.
Certainly Doctorow and Pilgrim are advanced users, but they're also users who have made a choice to go for usability over flexibility when they first chose a Mac.
Now, they have both decided that a GNU/Linux flavour is sufficiently usable, and considerably more flexible, so will go down that road.
Cory and Mark, welcome to the friendly world of GNU/Linux. We hope your stay is long and comfortable.
Links: