"Switch to Ubuntu Linux" say two high profile Mac advocates
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.)