Of course, they suck for completely different reasons, which is part of the frustration. And each have places where they shine. Why can’t there be a nice combination of all three? That would be perfect.

Why Mac OS X sucks:

• Apple is becoming a controlling, closed system, and with the advent of the Apple App store, developers have to go through an approval process to get their apps on the store, there are specific things you can’t include in an app in the store, and there will come a time when most people get their software through the store, so there will be less and less incentive to maintain non-app store versions of software apps
• These days, you can find most kinds of software for the Mac, but there still is a relative paucity of apps in comparison to Windows.

Why Windows sucks:

• Viruses, Trojans and Worms, Oh My!
• Although I have only seen the Blue Screen of Death once in my year of Windows 7 use, there are still inexplicable slow-downs, crashes, and weird problems. And it takes FOREVER to boot, even with Soluto.
• Internet Explorer

Why Linux (in my case Ubuntu) sucks:

• I have to go through arcane (and luckily for me, fairly painless) procedures to get simple things to work (like plugging a headset with a mic into my jack!)
• Hardware manufacturers ignore Linux for the most part
• Most software developers don’t make Linux versions

The only good news I can see is that the operating system is getting less and less relevant. And, on balance, for me, Linux is winning. Now that dropbox and scrivener work on Linux, and I’m moving from Quicken to some online cloudish thing (suggestions?), I can pretty much leave Windows behind. (Oh, there is still Netflix. Sigh.)

The Desktop

About 10 years ago, the very big FOSS vs. Proprietary battle was between Linux and Microsoft. The “year of the Linux desktop”, where Linux becomes a dominant force in the desktop computing world, was predicted, but never came. It never will come. Er, well. No, actually it will, but it will be in the form that no one could have predicted: Android.

Android is based on a modified Linux kernel. If Linux had never existed, Android probably would never have existed. Smart phones and tablets are going to be the new desktops, and yes, the Apple iPad is there first, but like the Macintosh and the iPhone, there will be a wave of successor devices running Android that will overtake the iPad in a matter of a year or two, relegating Apple to a niche player once more. And this has moved so fast, that Microsoft will also be a small niche player.

Speaking of Apple and FOSS, Apple’s OS X and iOS are based on the BSD operating system – another open source *NIX that has been around for a while. If it hadn’t been for BSD, it’s likely OS X and iOS wouldn’t be what they are today.

The Server to the Cloud

Also ’round about 10 years ago, the battle was brewing between Linux and BSD, and proprietary UNIX like SCO and Sun, as well as between Linux and Windows. For a while, Linux (and to a lesser extend, BSD) was winning only against the proprietary UNIX flavors, and Windows servers were heavily favored still by enterprises that needed stuff like Exchange. That was true until … the cloud.

The cloud would not exist without FOSS. There is no way that the kind of inexpensive cloud architecture could have developed if everyone had to have depended on proprietary, licensed software. The cost required to either pay software makers, or recreate everything needed from scratch would have made something like the cloud, or a Google, so expensive as to be impossible.

But what’s also true is that “the cloud” is, at its core, supremely proprietary. Not only do you not have access to the code running something like, say, Salesforce.com, but in some cases (such as the case of Facebook) the cloud service providers own your data, too! Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t download your own copy of Google Apps to run on your desktop.

And, at the same time, the cloud provides you with an ever increasing set of features and functionalities, with ever increasing ease of use, at ever decreasing costs. This is both made possible by open source software, and is completely proprietary.

So there you have it. Open source software has won. It underlies the bulk of the current technologies we use everyday. And, at the same time, even everybody interacts with FOSS every day, they don’t (and won’t) know it. And proprietary software has won, because in the final analysis, it’s the proprietary layers on top of FOSS that people see and know, even though it depends completely on FOSS.

Here are the good things:

• Even macs get weird sometimes, especially if they’ve been on for a long time. The only time I shut down this laptop is when I’m taking it somewhere, which is relatively rarely. So I regularly have it on for many days at a time, with no noticeable degradation in performance.
• I love apt-get/aptitude. 90% of the software I want to install I just install by saying “apt-get install name_of_package”. Anything that is a requirement gets installed along with it. It’s so incredibly easy. In general, installation and configuration of software has become much easier.
• Open Office works better on Linux than on the mac, as does thunderbird and firefox
• For a few things (mostly system/network tools) there are some incredibly awesome options, amazingly good for free (as in beer) software, and better than software you’d pay for. For some things, there are lots of relatively decent choices.
• I have no problem getting just about all of my work done using Ubuntu.
• My printer setup (Brother laser printer) was easier on Linux than on the mac

Here are the bad things:

• The games available on Linux leave much to be desired
• Getting proprietary codecs to play (MP3, WMA, etc.) can be a pain
• XWindows (x.org) can be annoying to configure if you go beyond the most simple
• KDE is a memory hog (I switched to xfce, and am thinking about other light window managers)
• There are some serious holes in available software
• Some things take a while to get set up – longer than on a mac.
• Getting some hardware configured can be painful.

Now the ugly:

• If you are used to integration between your email, calendar and addressbook, there is only one option (Novell Evolution) and it is not very good.
• If that integration, with the added integration of a PDA is very important to you, don’t even bother trying Linux on the desktop.
• Regressions are on the rise (regressions are things that used to work, but break in new versions.)

So, overall, I like it, and I’m sticking with it, with the exception of my addressbook and calendar. It was quite a shame to have to give that up, but it was either that, or make due with either not using a Palm, or modifying dramatically how I dealt with my PIM data. So I’m stuck where I don’t want to be (where lots of nonprofits are) with a data integration problem that I can’t solve right now, and likely won’t get solved for years. Evolution, apparently, is not under active development because Novell is focusing on Groupwise. The Mozilla Foundation supposedly has been working on an integrated email/calendar/contacts system, but they are spinning off Thunderbird, and Sunbird (the calendaring app) is coming along slowly. So an integrated app from Mozilla is years away, if it will happen at all (nevermind the palm part.)

I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in October. I’m sure I’ll be upgrading.

And, to answer the question posed above, the answer is, for me, obviously, a definite yes. But it appears, from my experience and others, that question actually has to be framed not as “Is Linux ready for the desktop?”, but “Is Linux ready for your desktop?” And the answer to that question depends upon the unique combination of the type of work, your software and hardware needs, and your willingness to put up with certain things. (Although, one needs to be willing to put up with some things no matter what OS one picks – it just depends on what you want to put up with.)

Linux is supposed to be easy to install and use. And, in most situations, it is. And, if I had a USB CD-ROM drive, it would be, since it seems from the BIOS of the Vaio’s that they can boot from USB external devices. But, the computers are networked, so it would seem – there must be some easy way, right?

Debian comes to the rescue. They have a site, with the URL: http://goodbye-microsoft.com, which is a link to a windows .exe file, which is a simple, sweet Debian installer. It works pretty well (at this moment, I’m now downloading and installing the base system.) The one snag I hit (not unusual) is that originally, I was using the wireless cards for networking, but the basic Debian system didn’t recognize them. So I switched to the very standard ethernet PC cards that Gavin so thoughtfully included, and bingo – everything works.

My next step, after installing the basic Debian system, is to switch the install to Ubuntu. That’s easier than it sounds. Changing one file (/etc/apt/sources.list) and running a few commands, should do the trick. We’ll see…

Anyway, if you’ll be at NTC, come by and see where I got to. The geekout will be on Thursday at 3:30.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, nptech, linux

I’ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured it was time to try it out. Here’s my basic experience and review of it.

The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get it from their download page. They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files, and jigdo files. They’ve got some good mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn’t too slow.

I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I’m going to write this as if I wasn’t – I think that would make it the most useful.

The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning and base system install)  is very straightforward – there were few choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary. Easier install than Windows, I think.

A few things were a bit odd – for example there wasn’t a request for a root password – the default root password seems to be the same as the password for the single user account that was set up during install.

Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one installed by default – I’m a KDE fan. I switched my desktop environment in a way that I’m familiar with (install the kde packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)  Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice – and if I’d read the Kubuntu page first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.

The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive, but for those who don’t like the command line, it’s an improvement over basic CLI configuration.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far – the ease of install and configuration, matched with Debian’s ease of software update, etc. We’ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments (both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can’t imagine, given the Debian base, that I’ll run into trouble.

Via digg.