Apple’s Think Different advert… this one…
… is a very apt advert for Apple itself. Apple really do upset the status quo, they do think different, they do change things. Many of the people who use Macs do too.
But we all know how Apple like to control. Think Different speaks to creative people who want the freedom to be creative and change the world, but Apple products speak to people who want be controlled and lead. That’s fine, because Apple have a pretty good vision, they have the resources and the focus to make their ideas a reality and to be fair you can be creative while living with a bunch of constraints.
I’ve been a Mac user for 3 years now. I got sick of Windows XP for its primary school colours, it’s genuine-advantage-copy-protection-threats and hell I just don’t like massive corporations in general.
At the time I wanted to switch to Linux on principle. I didn’t switch for practical reasons.
The Mac was clearly an improvement on Windows (OS X Leopard was going up against Vista at the time) and my brand new machine ran fast. And it was quiet. I was very happy with the change.
3 years later my laptop is basically falling apart. I mean that literally (it’s been knocked about a bit and there are cracks and the battery cover doesn’t close properly). I also mean it in terms of just getting slower as I use more software and fill up my hard drive.
But I noticed another problem a lot sooner with Apple. They are very clever at making you want to use all their other products. They look good together on your desk. And they work better together. Soon you want an iPod, an iPhone, an Apple TV, an Apple monitor… and you want to replace the old versions of all these things. I don’t like this feeling. They drag you into their ecosystem and it’s expensive there.
My open source principles had been calling me to try Ubuntu again and so this looked like a good opportunity to give it another try. I had an old noisy but pretty powerful desktop computer that wasn’t being used, so I loaded it up. For the past few weeks I’ve been running it side-by-side with my Mac.
My first impression was that it was uglier (there’s just a few things that could do with a little polish). But unlike last time, I got wifi working by just plugging in the adapter into the USB slot and entering the password. I started playing around without using it as my main machine, exploring what apps were available and starting to customise it.
And fell in love with it.
Customise is the main point. This is not about changing your wallpaper or a few colours. You can completely change how it looks and operates. You can take it apart, apply a different theme engine, change the default icons, change how it renders fonts, get rid of the GUI altogether if you’re that way inclined. If you have no taste you can make applications look like they are bursting into flames when you close a window. If you want you can even give it a Mac like dock. But you don’t have to.
For people who actually do want to ‘think different’, this is the place that encourages such behaviour. It draws you in and makes you want to get stuck in and change things. And at last it feels practical and simple enough to use.
Believe it or not, I actually believe Ubuntu is simpler to use than a Mac or Windows. You can make it complicated if you wish, but you don’t have to.
It has a problem though. The operating system is great and there are enough apps to do most common tasks. But is there a good enough Linux alternative to the Adobe creative suite? No. A good alternative, but not good enough for my needs. And I’m struggling to get my old iPod to work on here too. Apple certainly don’t want to help make their hardware work on a Linux machine (in fact they discourage such behaviour), so it is left to others to try and support it. And in general many apps don’t quite look as polished as they did on the Mac.
But hey, maybe I should stop buying Apple products if they’re going to try and force me to use iTunes to use them.
And I’m not the biggest fan of Adobe either, with their extortionate pricing and buggy software. Perhaps I don’t have a choice here, but I can perhaps avoid it as much as possible.
If I keep this laptop purely for Illustrator and dump my old iPod for an Android phone, I think Linux may well become my day-to-day operating system of choice.
I know that would be enough to stop a lot of people and rightly so. It’s more convenient to stay with the mainstream and that’s why I’m only just making the switch while others have been using it happily for years. This is a system for geeks and people using their machine for very specific tasks that you know Linux has the applications for.
And the polish?
I’m actually starting to like an operating system that looks a little less polished and a bit more experimental. The things in my house aren’t all consistent and uniform and perfect in the style of a show home. It’s a bit more random. And I like that. It’s home.