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.
Agreed. I can’t stand all these idiots who think all you need to out-Apple Apple is to make devices with larger screens, faster processors, more memory, and “openness”. Those things have nothing to do with why iDevices are flying off the shelves.
FWIW, I think Windows 7 is a better desktop than OS X. But Windows 7 on a slate or a phone will be laughable. It’s like saying “I really like this Corvette, but it would be so much better if it could carry four passengers, and had a pickup bed.”
One of the smartest things Apple did was to make their iPhone UI nothing at all like a Mac. Palm has the same kind of smart people working for them; I just hope the PC culture within HP will let them do the right things.
What I’ve seen of Windows 7 (which I admit is mostly looking over other people’s shoulders when they use it) looks pretty good. Is it like Vista in that if you don’t have the latest hot hardware, you miss all the good UX features? Personally, I just wish they’d upgrade my work machine to 7 so I could use dual screen RDC.
I’m running Windows 7 on a two-year-old MacBook, and it’s fine. I don’t know how beefy a machine needs to be to run it well. Even without all the chrome, it’s a very usable system.
For me, the difference between Vista and Win7 is that Win7 is less annoying because they tweaked some settings, for example they white-listed some user actions so that the user is not prompted to the UAC/LUA-confirmation multiple times for one user action. And, by the way, Win7 is not less ressource-hungry, meaning you won’t get the aero-look on an intel915-graphics chip (just like vista), these are just less common today than 2007. And yes, my employer still runs them, and two generations beforce that (intel 865 and intel 845 chips equipped with pentium4). Okay, and the business editions of Win7 includes virtual xp mode – Vista users who had their applications updated (for money, I suppose) sure feel cheated, because: no virtual xp mode for them, not than, not now.
Linux is just more than an operating system (or a kernel). The general idea goes back to the days of BSD, where the SD stands for source distribution. It’s just more flexible, for example someone requested a source code versioning server, more of a favor than for money. The requester wanted to show some options to people who can easily buy our whole company (three digit people) out of pocket money. I just copied a fedora installation image (using vmware) i had sitting around on a dvd, started it, created 5 users and done. The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 simply does not run on linux and that is what that company has chosen to use (they provide rail signaling solutions as a part of a two-digit-billion-revenue company doing defense/aerospace/security). So, they surely can afford to feed microsoft some money?
Well, the “I have things to get done” thing is why I don’t use Windows or MacOS on my workstations.
On my Linux boxen, I settled on a window manager that I could tweak to my personal liking 10 years ago, it’s not going to change much and which, and this is the most important part, is not getting in my way constantly. I can live without Gnome/KDE, and with issuing the occasional “mount” myself or reading through the transcode-manpage when I want to convert a video, it actually takes me less time than wading through the noise on Google searches when I want to, say, turn off the “unused items on your desktop” nagscreen with Windows.
Every time I use Windows, I’m feeling drowned in little nag-popups (there are unused items on your desktop, I don’t recognize your A/V, upgrade meeeeeee, …), which tell me nothing of any interest whatsoever, but are breaking my concentration, and make me want to kick the designer in the private parts. And then there’s the lack of a central update mechanism, which means I have to deal with every vendors slightly different idea on how to keep software up to date – when I turn on my Windows laptop every 3 months, I get to spend 1-2 hours updating, when on Debian it’d take an “aptitude update/upgrade” and grabbing a coffee.
With MacOS, the couple times I tried, I got the feeling that I could do everything The Mac Way, or I could fuck off and go sulk in a corner – I mean, integrated-everything’s fine, but only as long as you don’t want to, f’rex, actually working PGP-integration in the mail client, a way to extract an https-client-cert for use elsewhere or, *gasp*, need to share calendar and contact data with non-Macs or a non-Mac mobile phone. Plus, the constant assault with senseless visual effects makes me want to vomit (this goes for Windowses from Vista, and MacOS both).
On mobile phones, I have to confess that I don’t fucking care – from a phone I expect to be able to make&receive calls, and to send&receive text messages. Be it SonyEricsson, Nokia, Apple or whatever, I hate all their UIs (though I’ve just settled on a Nokia 3720 for a new company phone, because it has a standby time of nearly 2 weeks).
For PDAs, the UI on my Palm Vx was excellent, and everything else I’ve seen since has only made me give back the PDA to the company with a sincere “no thanks, I got WORK to do”.
(I still fondly remember the ads for Toshiba Roughbooks – “it has a design that makes Apple fanboys cry” – so I guess I’m that kind of person.)
> I can live without Gnome/KDE
Yes, and that way you can keep some useful servers on an usb stick in your pocket – servers meaning standby servers of for training purposes. Just try to fit 8 servers from Microsoft and Apple on one usb stick.
> upgrade meeeeeee
… and than telling you “i can only be upgraded by an administrator”, so you have to do fast-user-switching (which XP can not do in a domain). I really need to lookup how long “su” has been around on unix.
Another peeve about the Apple haters: When you point out how much nicer the Mac or iPhone experience is than the competitors, many will claim that the comparison isn’t “fair”, because Apple makes both the software and the hardware.
Other hardware manufacturers are stuck with the limiations of Android or Windows Mobile, so you have to cut them some slack. OS vendors can’t dictate how well the hardware manufacturers will take advantage of OS features, so you have to cut them some slack too. So I’m supposed to buy an Evo or a Galaxy and be thrilled with the big conglomeration of openness and choices-by-many-committees, even if the software is slow and glitchy, and the buttons are in stupid places.
I’ll be happy when someone makes something better than the iPhone and iPad. However, I think it is most likely that the someone will be Apple.
Anyone who spreads around the image you linked to needs to be sent this article:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/ballmer-and-microsoft-still-doesnt-get-the-ipad.ars