Switching

Yeah, I’m going to have a look at Songbird sometime soon – I just like the bells and whistles in Amarok!

There’s some comparative applications in your list that pop into mind. Gnome-do for LaunchBar, Google Desktop for desktop search for example. iWork is a nice bit of software. But I’ve been bitten far too often in the past by Apple-only file formats to use it without getting nervous. But it’s really all about personal preference, and what you value. I value using as much open source software and/or documented, freely-available file formats more than I value the extra 10% usability and polished applications that I’d get from running OS X. Plus, of course, the money I saved not buying a MacBook Pro

Your degree to which open data is important will, of course, vary according to what you do and what you think is valuable. But I suspect as time goes by, the issue of open data will bite more and more people in the behind – mostly in the consumer-level products. If you’ve spent years tagging and categorising your photos, the fact that this metadata is locked up in a binary black hole in iPhoto will matter to you. The same is true of ratings, playlists, and comments in iTunes. It places a small but effective barrier in the way of you switching to another platform – and with customers adding more and more metadata to documents in this way, that barrier will only get higher. I’ll be very interested to see if iLife 09 has made any improvements in this area. I don’t think Apple is going out of its way to do this, although I don’t think, either, that it’s going to expend much effort going in the other direction. But we’ll see.

That’s a very tough question to answer, Steve First, I don’t think there will be a “big switch” as such. There isn’t likely to be any “year of desktop linux”, because shifts in computing rarely happen that quickly. Look at the Mac, for example. Its market share is probably no more than 7-8% worldwide (including mail order and retail), which means it’s taken about ten years to gain perhaps four percentage points. And, by any reasonable measure, that’s been a massive success for Apple, and cost it a great deal in time, energy and resources. Secondly, most people care less about the portability and ownership of their data than I do. It’s taken me 20-odd years of computer usage to get to the point where I care enough about it to duck out of single-vendor eco-systems. For most people, buying iPhoto for the rest of time (because they’re locked into it) is a price worth paying to more easily play around with their photos. And the only way that will change is if Apple gets carried away with its power (and the recent changes its made to iPhoto 09, such as decoupling it from MobileMe, suggest that’s unlikely). That means switchers like me are always going to be a rare species. But – and this is just a hunch – I suspect that there will be proportionally more switchers from Mac than Windows, for the simple reason that if you can use one version of Unix, getting your head around another one isn’t hard. That means, for a technically-adept Mac user, it’s probably easier conceptually to get to grips with Linux than it would be for a seasoned Windows user. But that’s really all guess-work. And my guess is that people who jump from Mac to Linux will add up to the kind of number that Apple’s marketeers would consider a rounding error.

Yes, I know you can export documents from Pages – but that means remembering to export a copy of everything you ever work on, and exporting it again if you amend it. Because the alternative is keeping a Mac around for the rest of time just in case you want to access those Pages documents. And, of course, you’re relying on Apple to carry on supporting opening old document formats down the line (or hoping that a third party comes to your rescue). Good luck opening a ClarisWorks 3.0 document in Pages. I think you may have missed part of the point, though. Of course you can export any image you like from iPhoto, or any song you like from iTunes. But that comes at a price: pretty much all the metadata you added is gone. Now when you have a few hundred songs and don’t bother rating them, adding covers, and so on that won’t matter. But I have about (at last count) 147GB of music alone. While I’m not a big tagger and rater, there are people who invest a lot of time in metadata – and, at the moment, that metadata effectively belongs to Apple, because you can’t take it with you if you decide to move from Apple products. Contrast that with, say, Amarok, which stores its metadata in a MySQL database. You can export it, from there, to pretty much anywhere – and not only is the format commonly used, it’s fully documented. And if you can’t personally do it, there’s almost certainly someone in the Linux community who’s either done it already and created a script, or who’ll tell you how to do it. You own that data in a way that just isn’t true on the Mac. One final point. When I installed Ubuntu on the Dell, everything Just Worked. Wireless, web cam, Bluetooth, card reader, DVD, etc etc. Even the built-in 3G modem just worked, automatically setting itself up to work with my SIM. The one thing that didn’t work out of the box is the fingerprint login – something that I didn’t even know the machine had when I ordered it. And if I wanted it to work, all I’d need to do is install a package from Add/Remove Apps – probably the work of a minute.

Thanks ncus. I’ve used Ubuntu off and on for over a year, and other distros before that – although that’s always been on a “use occasionally” basis. A couple of years ago I tried using it more regularly, but at that point, it felt much less ready for prime time than it does now – driver support in particular reflected Terry’s experiences (above) more than is true now. I’ve actually had the XPS since 12th November, and installed 8.10 on it immediately – so it’s been two months as my main machine. The only time I boot into either Mac or Windows is for one Windows app which doesn’t run under Wine (it’s a pretty obscure one) or to sync my iPhone to iTunes (which, as most everything syncs over the air, isn’t often). I’ve still got a Windows partition on the Dell (80GB – it’s a 400GB drive, so I’ve got plenty of room), but I can see a day in the not-too-distant future when I’ll be getting rid of Windows entirely.

Hey Ian, it’s time to update your http://technovia.typepad.com/about.html page, as it’s till mentioning that your prime machine is a Mac! –Tristan (who is now on a Mac after switching from Windows to Ubuntu to Mac until I get back to Linux for the exact reasons you mention).

I’m glad to see that there are Mac users moving to Ubuntu. I really think Ubuntu Linux is a (note that I did not say “the”) system of the future. Yet it misses an important brick in my opinion which is: an easy to use app store for newcomers to find their way through searching and installing new applications. With this idea in mind, we went on coding with a friend of mine and released allmyapps ( http://www.allmyapps.com ) last week. We really want to position it as an app store for ubuntu linux as, today, we think that what hurts most, is when people finally realize that they cannot do (read “don’t known how to do”) anything with their shiny new laptop / netbook. If the linux desktop is to succeed one day, an app store is a must have! As you’re a mac user who switched to Ubuntu, I would really appreciate any feedback for your side on allmyapps! Thanks!

“Anona”, congratulations on being the first person here to fall into the category of “cliched platform fanatic”. You obviously didn’t bother to read to the end of what I wrote, so I’ll repeat the last paragraph here, just for you: “And that’s a good thing, because monocultures are bad. I want Mac OS X to improve and thrive, just as I want Microsoft to continue to make Windows better. Competition is good, and strong competition between three computing platforms which all take different approaches is a healthy thing.” My choice does not have to be your choice, and what works for me doesn’t have to be what works for you. By seeing the world in black and white, in terms of “pro-Apple or anti-Apple”, all you’re doing is making yourself look silly. The world is more complex than that. If you’d have bothered to read what I wrote, you might have picked up on something: being on the leading edge of innovation isn’t as important to me as having open formats, and a platform that gives me more choices than Apple’s does. Even if Apple was at the bleeding edge of brilliant innovation, that wouldn’t matter to me as much as avoiding closed and proprietary solutions which limit my choices in the long run. And to your final point: I hate to break it to you, but the “mainstream marketplace” is all about Windows. And, again, if you’d have bothered to read what I wrote you’d know that having “the mainstream solution” isn’t important to me, if that “mainstream solution” means being locked in to a single vendor. I hope you enjoy your Mac – it’s a fine product, produced by a great company and a hugely-talented group of people. Now if you’d like to stop sneering at the idea that other people might just care about different things to you and have different priorities, we can all get along just fine.

Hi Al – the MBP was beginning to show its age, performance-wise. Games, for example (and particularly WoW!) were really sluggish. I thought about converting the MBP to Linux, but it takes a lot of tweaking to get everything working properly (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro1-1_1-2/Intrepid). While that’s the kind of fun project that I’ll probably do when I get a free weekend (or two), I wanted something that gave me better performance and was generally more “Ubuntu-ready”.

Good points, David. The Pages 09/Word problem you describe is exactly what I’m referring to. You can bet that Microsoft Word will open those files – but does that mean you have to be locked into Word for the rest of time? Microsoft would certainly like it! The “what happens if I switch again?” question is a good one. One of the benefits of open source software is that it tends to be cross-platform – for example, Amarok has been built on Windows and (in an early form) on the Mac too. More importantly, the specfication for how the data is stored is open, which means – in theory at least – getting the data out in a form which can be imported into something else is relatively easy. Of course, that depends on the “something else” being able to import metadata… but that’s something that I would hope even closed source software would want to support. After all, if you want people to switch to your platform, you want them to be able to bring their data with them. It’s important to note, though, that not all open source software correctly documents formats. XCF, the native format for Gimp, is only partially properly documented (for reasons which are too complex to go into) – the developers regard the source code as the full reference to the format, which isn’t overly helpful. They have, however, decided to move to a new, fully-documented format based on ODF in the future. And of course, you’re right to say that in the future, the tools will probably be available to switch. Cunning users tend to find ways to reverse engineer these things, although sometimes it can be horribly hit-or-miss (sometime I’ll write up the tale of trying to merge two iTunes libraries with third party tools…) But, for me, that just raises the question: Why should I have to jump through hoops and pray that some third party manages to reverse engineer something, when Apple could just do the right thing in the first place and use open formats, or document what they do? Especially when there are platforms around which don’t follow that path. As I said, though, it’s up to each individual to weigh up what’s right for them. There’s no single “true path”, and it’s the competition between different software platforms, and different approaches, which keeps everyone honest.

I've been kind-of pondering it. Or rather, pondering how to phrase it.