Time was, I was an enthusiastic Linux geek, proselytizing, apologizing, saying “well, it doesn’t now, but somebody will write something to do that”, overlooking the visual horror of the clashes of look and feel and user experience of all the disparate programs written on all the disparate X11 widget sets (yes, I could tell the difference between Xt and Xm at a glance), actually not laughing in people’s faces when they said that Gimp was better than Photoshop, ignoring the fact that Richard Stallman is a smelly looney who eats his toe jam in publc, etc. But over the years, two things have happened:
- I care more about user experience than I do about raw computing power
- I don’t apologize for my computers any more
Or to quote Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie “yeah, well I’ve got a girlfriend and things to get done.”
So I use Linux on my servers, and I think it’s a great OS for servers. I even contribute to open source products here and there. I hardly ever use it as a desktop any more, although it was my daily work desktop a year ago, and it was fine for work where video and audio didn’t matter. I’m just not anything like the “freetard” I used to be. Which is why I recognize the type so readily. And when somebody sends me something like this, and thinks it says something about how iPad is nothing new, I can instantly recognize the scent of crazy. Especially since it was sent to me in response to my saying that I hope HP hurries up with the Palm WebOS-based tablet because I like the user experience (UX) of WebOS better than I like iOS.
I’m sorry, but if you think somebody who is debating the subtle differences in UX between WebOS and iOS is going to like a hefty laptop with the keyboard broken off, running Windows XP or Linux, with no multi-touch, a stylus and a battery life that’s probably measured in minutes, you have greatly misunderstood the question. Or the purpose of a tablet. Or the meaning of life.