And this is On tolerance, written Jul 28, 2009, and concerning Rants, Musings, and Linux

I've spent the evening fuming. Earlier this evening, Norm said:

I use a Mac because I value my time at more than £0/hour.*

I hate that sort of comment. It's a typical snide, sneering aside from a Mac user to someone who uses Linux. The subtext, which is hardly sub at all, is "clearly you don't value your time because you spend it playing around compiling your kernel and fighting your operating system". Suggesting that obviously I've never considered using a Mac because I'm too stupid to realise that my life would be so much easier. Like I spend all my day compiling a kernel, which I haven't done for about a decade. Like they've seen the great wide ocean of possibility in front of them and I'm still scrabbling around on the beach looking at stones.* I was all ready to fire back something equally snide. "Yeah, I value trust at something more than £0." Or "what do you use the time for, clicking 'no I don't want Quicktime Pro' dialogs???" Or something equally mature. Or maybe an email to Norm, saying: do you realise how offensive a comment that is? Do you realise how sneering and holier-than-thou it sounds? And then I thought, now, hang on, this is Norm. He's a sensible guy. The second half of his comment, after all, was "Free OSs are good, OS X is great." He uses Linux all the time. And then came the second, darker, thought: that his comment was in reaction to one of mine. The conversational thread went:

sil: although does anyone not run ff3.5? what is this, the middle ages? :)
anonymous: why on earth would any OS X users run FF 3.5? Firefox is slow, crashes frequently, and is generally quite buggy on Macs.
sil: feel free to adapt the question to "why is anyone using a Mac" as well if you like. :)
Norm: I use a Mac because I value my time at more than £0/hour. Free OSs are good, OS X is great.

And do you know, I was just as snide and nasty. That was a humbling thought. There's a lot of intolerant comment out there. There are plenty of people who really think that a modern Linux is still all about compiling your kernel and compiling all your programs and configuring your machine in emacs and not actually doing anything constructive. We, the Linux community, tend to either shake our heads and wait for them to catch up (in the best case) or flame the shit out of them like whiny teenagers banned from the cinema for throwing popcorn (in the worse cases). But there are an awful lot of people out there who think that Macs only have one mouse button and are just "shiny" with no underlying decency behind them. I try to not think that but, well, it's easy to make that generalisation just to score cheap points, just like it's easy to suggest that Linux users waste their time compiling kernels for the same cheap points. I should do that less. John Gruber said recently, "With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better." Sometimes I forget that just because my stuff's infinitely better, it doesn't mean that I can divide by that infinity to conclude that their stuff's worth zero, and it certainly doesn't mean that they think it's worth zero.* So, sorry, Norm. I'll try and do better next time.

Comments

AlastairC

Very true. I try and avoid the OS wars, but occasionally you get a useful nugget of info. (NB: I use OSX at home, Windows at work, and Linux on servers.)

The 'value my time' argument is probably the quickest one to make for OSX. I know that I can sit at a basic install and get on with stuff straight away. Sure, I add to it, but the defaults are good (for me).

A friend puts Ubuntu on his Macbook Pro. That confused me, hardware integration is one of the benefits that OSX brings. If you want to use Ubuntu, why not get a cheaper laptop?

On the other hand, the time argument completely fails if you're trying to put Apache and mod_python on your (intel) Mac, in comparison to apt-get.

For me, each eco-system has a useful set of applications, so it depends which of those you prefer.

I'm not convinced that Linux has a reasonable equivalent to Adobe Fireworks, or whether I could use amy iPod. (Must admit I haven't looked for a while.)

On the other hand, I wouldn't trust Windows software to look after my data.

Did you ever resolve that argument on LUGradio about having a good set of default programs installed? For me (with a usability background), that's one of the big impediments to Linux uptake.

David

anonymous might have a point on the Firefox thing - for me, at least, it (3.5) is slow on the mac - I open a new tab, start typing and firefox lags behind :(. Takes a while to start up, too. Could be an add-on thing, mind.

It's good to hear that the linux community isn't full of tunnel-vision, too. However....

Joshua Ellis

The problem, for me, with Linux, is that if you're not working on bog-standard hardware, it can still be a nightmare to install and configure. I shoved Kubuntu on my little HP Mini 2100 and it literally took two days to get it into some reasonable semblance of working order. And, horrifyingly, it still performed worse on things like audio and video than Windows XP, even after I spent hours looking for workarounds and such.

I'd still rather run Linux than Windows any day, but I run OS X as my primary OS for a number of reasons:

1) Software. I cannot stress this enough -- Linux does not have anything equivalent to the tools I use for media creation. There is nothing approximating Propellerheads Reason or Ableton Live. There are open-source apps that try to do what these apps do, but they're either simply not powerful enough or friendly enough. (PD can do anything either app does, but I'm not willing to write code to write music.) And Photoshop and Illustrator are also irreplaceable.

2) Macs are simple. It's not that I'm not capable of handling the tricky stuff in Linux; I simply don't want to. I want to turn on the machine and focus my energy on what I'm doing, not the environment I'm doing it in. And honestly, I've never, ever, ever, ever had Linux simply work out of the box for me, in almost thirteen years of using the OS. Ubuntu is the closest, but it's still not 100% for me.

3) Pragmatism. I have never, ever downloaded an app and modified its code to suit my needs. Not once. It's a freedom I appreciate, but not one I've ever taken advantage of. So much of that flexibility is wasted on me.

4) I hate ideology of any stripe. The most frustrating thing about downloading Ubuntu was that the driver for my network card was readily available as a download, but not included in the OS because it wasn't open source. Which meant I couldn't just use the package manager to get it, of course, because it was my NETWORK driver. I had to find it on my MacBook, download it, copy it over to an SD card, and make Ubuntu install it manually.

This is a waste of my time due to someone else's ideological constraints. In fact, I find that most of what I stumble over in the OSS world is due to ideology, not practicality. (It's also why I cannot stand to be in the same room with Richard Stallman. He's perhaps the most irritating human I've ever encountered, and I grew up in Texas.)

I like Macs because they're a compromise between the dumb simplicity of Windows and the hidden complexity of Unix. If I need a bash shell, I've got one. If I want to play around with compiling things, I've got a gcc compiler. I have far more access to the underlying system than I do in Windows and far less need to access it regularly than I do in Linux. And, again, I've got Photoshop, Reason, Logic, Live, Illustrator, Flash...all the stuff I need to do the things I want with computers.

Plus they're shiny and pretty and I look really cool in the coffeeshop with mine, banging away at the Great American Novel with Pitchfork Media's most-loved music on my iPhone and a nonfat soy mocha latte next to my copy of VICE. :-p

ethana2

Most of the time I have to modify my Free Software OS is because it has been pre-emptively crippled to avoid angering the patent gods.

Compiz' genie effect and mp3 support in Ubuntu come to mind.

I am not a business user. I will not allow patents to tell me what I can and cannot do. If Mint was a little less different than Ubuntu, like, hardly at all, I'd use that.

Richard

I generally think Linux desktops are too inconsistent and buggy for me to recommend to people, but I cannot myself use something controlled by Apple or MicroSoft. It's not a Mac OS X thing directly, but I see Apple rejecting apps for their iPhone for ridiculous reasons and go "I can't trust environments provided by them."

I dream of one day having a robust and free desktop. Le sigh.

James

@Joshua Ellis: Ubuntu hardware compatibility isn't perfect, but they're generally pretty good about being practical with things like closed source network drivers; nonfunctional network hardware is considered bad and missing drivers are mostly attributed to an oversight rather than malice.

The Ubuntu ideology is that while free software is ideal, users want things to work. And yes, they've had a clash or two with Stallman over it. :-P

FWIW, both my ethernet and wifi cards required non-included closed source drivers in 8.10. It was a massive pain setting them up, and I was dreading it upgrading to 9.04 because of it. But, presto! People had complained and magic had happened; both devices worked perfectly as soon as I booted up the 9.04 live-disk. :-)

Joe Clark

Nonetheless, you can’t possibly imagine that most people, or even most educated people, would view your computer choice as better in any sense than Norm’s.

But I’m sure you’re as happy as you expected to be.

Jason

Mm. You've suggested one way of solving the problem (everybody stops doing it), but you've missed another (everybody stops taking it seriously).

My way, you still get the casual entertainment of scoring cheap points, and nobody gets upset or angry.

sil

@jzellis: on the hardware point, I buy hardware with Linux on it, just like I'd buy Macs with OS X on them. While "just download a CD" sounds compelling, it's not there yet, I don't think. I want a computer which works with Ubuntu, so I bought an M1330 from Dell with Ubuntu on it. So everything works. On your software point, I agree with you. Macs or Windows are much better for audio software, just like Windows is much better if you need vertical apps. I don't need 'em, so it doesn't worry me.

I laughed quite a lot at the coffeeshop comment though :)

Joe: difficult to say. Among the people I know who aren't at conferences and on Twitter and aren't technical, Linux has a higher showing than the Mac by some considerable distance because people don't want to pay Apple prices. If you use your machine all the time, maybe it's worth it. If you don't, it ain't.

Jason: I fear the Bobby McFerrin approach flies in the face of thirty thousand years of human evolution :-)

Simon

"Pragmatism. I have never, ever downloaded an app and modified its code to suit my needs. Not once. It’s a freedom I appreciate, but not one I’ve ever taken advantage of. So much of that flexibility is wasted on me."

I have, and do this occasionally. Most often to figure out where a bug is, or how exactly some piece of code is working.

But surely the reason you didn't need to is that someone already did this for you, because your needs are not so different from those who came before you. So probably it is a freedom you've taken advantage of many time not realising you have.

ctwise

I'm a developer and an architect. I love to tinker. I ran Linux on my laptop for years - back when suspend and resume was a complete joke. I fiddled with X, ran Evolution and the Exchange connector back when it was first released. I've submitted code to open source projects and modified code in others to suit my own purposes.

I repeatedly mocked Mac people. They were using a dead-end operating system on overpriced hardware that performed poorly. Then they switched to OS/X. That made them far more interesting to me but the price/performance of PowerPC wasn't there. Then they switched to Intel. I stopped mocking them, but they still seemed irrelevant. Then I noticed people around me starting to switch. And I had absolutely zero knowledge about the platform.

I got a Mac over a year ago - my intent was to learn about OS/X. I decided I was gong to give it a fair shake. I would use it as much as practical and ignore the fact that the menu bar was in the wrong place and that the control/paste keyboard shortcuts were wrong. It was a struggle to get past the basics which worked _differently_ on a Mac. But once I did, it was obvious what the appeal was.

Now I wished everyone in the Linux space would spend three months working on a Mac - really using it on a day-to-day basis - and then bring that experience back to Linux. Instead I see the same comments I used to make being repeated ad-nauseam.

The problem is ignorance and intolerance. I just wish that Linux developers would give OS/X a fair shake, understand why so many people are appreciative of it and bring that back to what they feel passionate about - Linux.

meh

Firefox 3.5 *is* absolutely horrible on Macs. It's a plain disaster. Tabs refuse from closing sometimes, it's slower than any other browser, the GUI went a few years backwards in development from 3.0/3.1, it crashes easily, ... Ugh.

I work 8 hours a day working with extremely complex technical tasks. It's wonderful to come home, turn on the computer and being able to focus on what *I* want to do instead of what the computer wants to do. Everything just works, and the interfaces are full of tiny tweaks and features that really make your day. I would not change back to Linux for anything.

Jason

Your approach is similarly anti-evolution, and mine's more fun :-)

Oliver Lorton

My linux experience goes back as far as Red Hat 8, and back in LugRadio S2-4 days I used Fedora/Ubuntu at work and home. I loved the freedom, and the love, but in the end it was no use. There just isn't a single suitable graphics suite to replace Photoshop/Fireworks for the designer an environment I spend at least 5 hours a day in. Pro designers have constantly been saying that the GIMP just isn't good enough for us. So I eventually switched to the Mac, for work.

Sil: Do you know of any commercial designers that use the GIMP as opposed to Photoshop/Fireworks ???

But what really stands out for me was the comment "I use a Mac because I value my time at more than £0/hour." and that is the sentiment that caused me to switch to a Mac at home. I am a designer/programmer not an OS enthusiast and I could not be arsed to piss around trying to get everything to work all the time. Freedom is one thing, but it was really starting to get in the way of productivity for me.

But I have good faith that eventually Linux will one day become a viable platform for me again, and I'll be back!

Er, No

"With regard to the freedoms that stem from the software being open source, something like Ubuntu isn’t just, say, ten times better than Windows or Mac OS X, it is infinitely better".

Unfortunately, this is both (a) bollocks (large parts of OS X are open source too, therefore Ubuntu is not "infinitely" better on any conceivable scale of open-sourceness), and (b) pointless (the ultimate measure of any software, its whole raison d'etre, is its usefulness to the person who uses it-- which may be indirectly affected by whether or not it's free or open source, but in the vast majority of cases, it's irrelevant).

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