Switchfits

The week-long phenomenon of literally several tech luminaries switching from Mac OS X to Linux has come to the attention of the O’Reilly Radar, amongst other parties. The sentiment is that Apple should be worried about losing influential geeks to its wholly Open Source and commodity hardware competitors. It’s all a bit much, I think.

Mark Pilgrim and co. have some valid reasons for abandoning OS X for Ubuntu Linux. Nobody likes losing their data, and no programmer likes being unable to do anything about it. It’s also true that Apple is getting a little too cozy with closed source and DRM. But Apple, flaws and all, is still the best option out there. If I were a gambling man, my money would be on these prominent techies switching back before too long.

The urge to switch to Linux seems to be cyclical. Most every hardcore Mac user I know has had an itch of it. They always come crawling back, though. More often than not it’s over schizophrenic hardware support. Occasionally it’s over a piece of Mac-only software they missed. Universally, geeks come back to Mac OS X for its aesthetic refinement.

I abandoned the Mac for Linux in the OS 9 days. No regrets there; OS 9 was impossibly primitive next to its competitors at the time. I came back briefly to try early versions of OS X, but as the now-common wisdom goes, it simply wasn’t usable until 10.2.

Since then, though, I’ve only faltered once. Before DefCon 2004 I had it in my head that I needed something more “hackable” than the loaded PowerBook I had at the time. With some creative Craigslisting I swapped it for an impossibly lithe Sharp notebook that I promptly installed Gentoo on. I had open source apps. I had hackability. I could barely use the fucking thing. It drove me crazy.

It bears mentioning that I am not a Linux novice. Through personal tinkering and involvement with Linux User Groups I have conservatively done several hundred Linux installs of all different distros onto all variety of hardware over the years. I know how to make Linux work.

My favorite axiom apropos to this subject is that Linux is only free if your time is worthless. Yes, Apple is faltering in its commitment to openness. Yes, lots of people seem to get lemon Mac hardware. But this all pales in comparison to the everlasting asspain that is dealing with Linux.

Ubuntu is no magic bullet. It has a touch more desktop-friendly polish than other Linux distributions, but that’s not saying much. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about it. There’s barely anything evolutionary about it. People had all but forgotten about Debian before Ubuntu came along to revitalize the brand. That the Linux community is congregating around such a bland distribution should be cause for head-scratching, not chin-stroking.

Apple, meanwhile, is continuing to innovate. Their strategy of selling fit-and-finish on top of improved Open Source components has been successful thus far, and I’d be surprised if their current perceived swing towards a more shackled business model is anything but temporary. It’s also unfair to lump criticism of the DRM built into the iTunes Music Store with the rest of OS X; yes, it sucks, but it’s easily ignored.

It’s good that alpha geeks periodically test other waters. If not for such behavior, how would the rest of us have ever known that the Mac world had once again become a great place to be? Apple does have a tentative grip on the nerd cognoscente and it should work to keep it. That said, Linux – and more specifically Ubuntu – doesn’t seem like a serious threat to the Mac’s geek supremacy.