I've been evangelizing Macs to friends, family, and basically anyone who will listen for over a decade now. Some days, though, I just don't like Apple all that much. Those days have come a bit more frequently of late, brought on largely by Apple's mishandling of the iPhone and disappointing showings in hardware and operating system revisions.
The release of the iTunes Wi-fi Store on the iPhone coupled with the revocation of third-party software on the device underscored for me that Apple's values are changing. I understand not wanting to support potentially damaging unlocking procedures, but waging war on a thriving software development community that exists in spite of Apple's total lack assistance is mind-boggling. Without third-party applications, the iPhone is little more than an iterative step towards a less repugnant mobile experience. With the addition of the Wi-fi Store, the iPhone moves one step closer to to its tacky companions in the mobile space shilling overpriced, crippled content. In short, the iPhone is lucky it's pretty, because it seems to be getting dumber every day.
Apple's advances in hardware are barely worth commenting on from where I'm sitting. Two years ago, I was excited to be able to tell prospective Mac buyers that they had affordable, market-beating options like the Mac mini or iBook. Today, those options seem overpriced and underpowered, though there still aren't clear competitors I could recommend. Of course, most of Apple's hardware line is irrelevant to me, and the one product that isn't - the MacBook Pro - has evolved only incrementally since its 2001 inception as the titanium PowerBook G4.
Most of what's coming in Leopard is either unexciting or outright unappealing. The GUI, usually Apple's mainstay aesthetic defense against competition, has gone gaudy; screenshots remind me of latter-day OS 9. Grumbles from the Mac development community about the overall quality of Leopard builds this close to the release window are troubling. From a development perspective, there's still no assurance of sane package management or first-class support for dynamic languages anywhere on the horizon.
All told, I feel a bit like Mark Pilgrim and Tim Bray circa last summer. There's nothing so egregiously wrong with my day-to-day Mac experience, but there's nothing particularly right either.
Both Tim and Mark compiled run-downs of the open-source equivalents of their Mac tools, and as an exercise, I'm doing the same here. Needless to say, Ubuntu would be my OS of choice.
Web
Firefox. I already can't develop for the web without Firefox and Firebug, and I can't reliably view a fair portion of the web in Safari 2, 3, or WebKit nightly builds. Safari isn't functional for me without plugins like Inquisitor, and those plugins are likely going away in Leopard.
Giving up 1Passwd would break my heart. I adore 1Passwd, and I know of nothing of its quality on Linux.
Text
I enjoy TextMate, but honestly, I don't use a lot of the completion and code generation features, as they tend to lag behind Edge Rails and other tools I work with. My fingers still remember Vim, and it's got tabs now.
Thankfully, I almost never have to edit office documents, and Google's Docs suite more than meets my needs. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are lovely, to be sure, but I can usually load a document faster on Google's servers, where it's then a click away from getting where it needs to go (that is, out of my hair).
Chat
Much like Safari, I can't use iChat without Chax, a bunch of fixes and improvements to Apple's chat application that are forcibly shimmed in by SIMBL. Adium has never appealed to me; it always seems one more theme or icon set away from looking right, but it never does, and I always go back to iChat. Pidgin ain't sexy, but neither is chat.
I only ever IRC in dire emergency circumstances. XChat used to be fine for that and probably still is.
There is only Gmail. I tried to get back into Mail.app for the super happy iPhone Mac native app integration lovefest but it bit me in the ass with instability, terrible search, and no iPhone integration to speak of. There is only Gmail.
Media
Hrm. Erm. Erk. Songbird for music, I guess? I always kinda just liked mpg123, honestly. You can bg that mother or script a lil' wrapper around it. I kinda like Peel for slurping down podcasts, but if Songbird can't do that, Ruby + curl can.
There's VLC for video, which is already a go-to on the Mac. I don't edit movies. I put my scant few photos on Flickr. I actually like using The GIMP, and am pretty proficient at it for simple web-related image editing tasks. I would miss Skitch and Acorn, but I don't have occasion to use either app more than once a week.
I have no idea if there's anything like Yep for the Mac, but I'd sure miss my favorite PDF librarian.
Odds and Ends
Anything would be better than the terminal options on the Mac. I've given up Quicksilver for LaunchBar, and even then I only use a fraction of what it can do; any auto-completing launcher would work for me. VMware is still there on Linux, not that I need virtualization half as much as I think I do. Hmm, a good BitTorrent app? There's gotta be a dozen.
Oh. And. I hate window managers/desktop environments. I hate GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Window Maker, et al. I've tolerated the Mac OS window manager, Fluxbox, and Enlightenment. I do, however, like the Vim-for-windows that is wmii and Ion and that ilk. I've run them before and they're just dandy. You'd be amazed what your machine can do when it's not spending cycles painting windows with pixel-perfect shadows.
Hardware
Software-wise, a switch from the Mac wouldn't be that painful for me. The hardware is where it all breaks down.
As I said above, Apple's line is basically irrelevant to me save their top-end portables, so that's what I'd be trying to match in power and style. Aesthetically, one of those slim silver Panasonic ToughBooks would do, but Ubuntu on one still looks a bit sketch; no reliable external display support is a killer.
I know that Thinkpads and System76 machines are supposed to work great with Ubuntu, but I just wouldn't want to look at one every day. I'm vain about my technology. They wouldn't match my glasses. Nuh-uh.
The real issue, though: anything less than total support for your hardware is hugely frustrating. Little incompatibilities are what sent me back to the Mac after my last stint with Linux, an impossibly lithe and sexy but largely unusable Fujitsu. Little things like non-functional volume controls or wi-fi that requires command line incantations are deal-breakers.
If there's an attractive, powerful machine that isn't crippled under Ubuntu, do tell. I'm all ears. It's just that over years of doing literally hundreds of Linux installs for Installfests and the like, I haven't seen one come out as seamlessly integrated as a Mac yet. Not even close.
So What Now, Mister Doesn't-Need-the-Mac?
Well, if you need me, I'll be on my MacBook Pro. Apple may be pulling dick moves left and right, but they've still got the best thing going. I'll give Leopard a spin (whenever it ships) and maybe it'll wow me - or at least placate me.
I can't shake the hunch, though, that Leopard is going to be the tipping point back into Linux for me, and maybe more than a few other ex-pat Mac geeks who crossed back over from Linux to Apple's territory in the Jaguar days. That was 2002, and nothing stays rosy that long in computers.
9 comments:
You should record that so i can listen on the way to school! :)
I think that one of the reasons that mac progress has seemed to stop over the past few years is that their super-secret-skunkworks-uber-badass-black-helicopter-technologies are too big of a change from the status quo to release right now. It's taken 20 years of GUIs to get a resolution independent window manager, which is one of the features of Leopard. In order to use something like that, every app has to be touched. Ever graphic updated, every widget manipulated. It's a hard problem to solve, and in the era of annual doubling of speed/size/half-price computing, their progress seems slow. We are at the *beginning* of an incredible UI change, and it is going to be a difficult and annoying process. Multi-touch is the beginning, and what will emerge over the next few years will be astounding.
I'm not, however, defending their recent behaviour. I don't (and won't) have an iPhone until they figure out that people want more than ten thousand songs and a phone in their pocket, and that DRM is fundementally broken.
I am eagerly awaiting the google phone. Linux will surely catch up to the advances that Apple has forced upon the world, but it will have to catch up. Developers more interested in Cory Doctorow's cape and glasses than on making technology transparent are not going to lead the way.
Good points, all of them, and I look forward to hearing what great tools you find when you do make the Pilgrim-switch.
I was feeling the same way and started dual booting ubuntu feisty on my mbp. It really wasn't too much trouble. The buginess of aspects (mostly special effects/UI related) starting getting to me though, and I just lost patience and went back to osx. However I'll probably at least try ubuntu gutsy before I add the partition back to osx. (http://latherrinserepeat.org/)
i highly recommend mpd over wrangling mpg123 with scripting and job control. my friend is running it on his mac, actually, but i think that involves setting up several libraries via fink or whatever and then compiling it yourself. (you know you want to switch... apt-get install... :))
there isn't a client which nears itunes in... being what most people want, but then, i mostly control it from the command line. i am working on a ruby client library, which should hopefully make it even easier to hack new tools up. (i prefer programmability to one slick do-it-all ui, myself. i've never wanted to try songbird. yes, yes, i'm sure you can plug JS into it if it's based on xulrunner, and itunes in Automator-able like everything else, but that's not really what i mean.)
thanks for the link to the gruber piece. personally, there is nothing i would like more than to drop the horrible loss that is X11 and use something as well-designed as quartz. there are lots of parts of OS X that are technically superior. but to me, freedom trumps everything. i don't think other people should be forced to hold my view on that; i just want to work for what i feel is important. i agree that for most people, the *benefits* of freedom -- i.e., "open"-ness -- are a win, but just another one to be weighed against things like aesthetics and usability. (these are subjective -- i like my incomprehensible unixy desktop and my command line (and, ahem, a terminal emulator that doesn't suck to run said command line in) -- but the technical/procedural things are not. X11 sucks. the proliferation of end-user "environments" and distros sucks. the community is full of assholes who prefer arguing to accomplishing anything.)
in this way it is absolutely an advantage for apple that their OS is *not* free. the linux community can't decree that one day, everyone must stop using this entrenched framework and start using that one, unless it's a simple matter of porting some simple library calls, recompiling, and waiting a year or two for upstream to merge your patch. kde was never replaced; it was only supplanted. unix-style init will be around for at least another decade. (this works the other way, though -- if the kernel maintainers want to fix something that affects drivers, they can make the proper changes across the tree and be done with it, rather than having to co-ordinate with vendors. these are of course both gross simplifications.)
i think it's good that we can compete. apple can innovate in their area -- "disruptive" architectural improvements and the funding to direct work at them, rather than trying to herd globally distributed cats (or tolerate personal politics to the extent we do) -- and we can in ours -- breaking free of the demands of things like DRM or compatibility with a market of binary-only software/drivers, and ignoring whether or not our own innovations directly benefit some business plan (particularly not AT&T's...).
in the long run, freedom will win, but that doesn't mean linux will triumph and apple will die. as long as people can switch to a mac, we can't suck too hard (more to the point, we must constantly improve), and as long as people can switch to ubuntu, they can't be too evil. with the iphone, things are not so simple, and apple definitely is being evil. i'm hoping openmoko can capture some of the market it has created, and take advantage of the backlash against carrier lock-in. i have no idea what's actually going to happen.
The last time I did this reverse switch, it was 2005-2006 and I used a company thinkpad t41. most everything worked, even the volume and brightness buttons. sleep was wonky, though, you had to press the sleep button before closing the lid.
For music, even though I'm not a big Gnome fan, I liked Banshee well enough and it integrated with last.fm.
Like I mentioned yesterday the real reason I've been using Linux for so long is that, although the shareware culture that has developed around osx is intriguing, I just cannot imagine a world in which I can't just apt-get (emerge, yum ... pick your poison) something. Also, being able to dive into the source of particularly interesting apps. It seems like most of your quarrels with Mac right now are not application based, but due to the fact that everything is so proprietary, which leads me to believe this is the most important note.
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That being said, just to reply to a few of your application/technical points:
XChat ... XChat-Gnome is very nice. Not quite a sexy as Colloquy, but not bad.
As far as external screen support goes, Xrandr is progressing more every day ... the work in that area is incredible. It's not far off.
Deskbar is the Quicksilver equiv (Gnome-Launch-Box is another one, but nogood).
Tomboy. You'll never be able to live without it.
Music. This is tricky. There are so many good ones that it's hard to pick, although none are perfect. I flip between Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Quod Libet
On the iPhone front - what's scary is that I can imagine a future where all Macs start to move that way. First they make an unhackable multitouch tablet. Then they get some sort of pay-to-play package manager for 3rd party software. Then they propagate the closed-source approach up the product line, and everyone oohs and aahs over multitouch. They must know the developer market is meaningful, so hopefully that will stop them. But still, it would be nice to think of Apple as a force for good, rather than as a force for evil only constrained by market realities.
I don't think you need to worry about losing your Safari extensions in Leopard.
We spent a few weeks finding a non-Input Manager based solution for making 1Passwd work in Leopard. Here are the Input Manager alternatives that we found.
In the short term most extensions will probably be broken, but within a few weeks of Leopard's GA I expect developers will get their extension working.
Firefox on the Mac is a slow, fat and ugly cow. If it wasn't for firebug (and some other extensions)... not to mention the ugly font rendering.
I browse with Safari and develop with FF.
Textmate... well, I once was an Eclipse fanboi, but now you'll have to pry Textmate from my cold, dead hands.
Google docs (and in general all Google apps) sucks big time in the interface department. iWork is a perfectly fine (and reasonably priced) office suite, and Numbers is the best spreadsheet around, period. Let's not talk about OpenOffice, please :-)
Adium is perfectly fine looking out-of-the-box, and it works with every IM provider you can name (does iChat?).
Gaim is a nice alternative, though.
Gmail... what I was saying about google apps? :-)
I fetch my gmail with POP on Mail.app and I'm happy and I have all my mail in a single place.
I'v been a Linux user for more than 10 years, but since I switched to the Mac I've never looked back.
And I just love my brand new 20" iMac.
Just my 3c :-)
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