Last week I promised to demonstrate why I am not a GNOME zealot simply looking to try to give KDE a hard time. In actuality, I don't use GNOME much at all, these days. Or KDE. I do keep up with them, but my actual desktop home is elsewhere. “Hey, Clippit! Stop staring at me.”
OK, I will admit that was a cheap lead in, but not entirely untruthful. I am typing this story from Microsoft Windows XP. This is only a temporary predicament, though, that I will explain more about in a future column. No, my real desktop home is not Windows XP either; frankly, I do not know how people can stand spending all of their computing time in anything as worm infested and ugly as the latest incarnation of Windows.
As some of you who have put up with my commentaries for the past few years know, I started out with KDE when it hit 1.0. I followed it for several years, and eventually took the plunge of kicking the Windows habit completely and moving exclusively to KDE around the time of KDE 2.1. I did keep a dark secret on my computer though: I gave up booting to Windows, but I kept Win4Lin around to run Microsoft Office and a few other applications I simply could not be without. Microsoft Word, for all of its flaws, still has more of the tools I use and the suite as a whole offered something important for me: perfect compatibility with the documents of my clients.
While I was satisfied with my GNU/Linux desktop, I started getting annoyed when I thought too much about it. It might take me a day to wait for all of the downloads and to make all of the tweaks to get Windows working right, but by the time I installed GNU/Linux on a given piece of new hardware for the first time, configured all of the drivers, and got things working, I'd probably spent just as long, if not longer. Worse, despite my love of the Free Software philosophy, I still ended up with proprietary software up the yin yang: Win4Lin, ATI Radeon drivers, soft modem drivers, and so on. So much for the entirely free desktop.
About a year after my switch to Linux, I wrote a series of articles which I now view as substantially off the mark: I wrote about why Mac OS X was surpassed by GNU/Linux in almost every way. Two friends of mine, who work with Apples, took exception to my arguments, not to mention countless others: I soon found myself bombarded with e-mail as the articles made it onto Macintosh web sites.
I had used Mac OS X 10.1 systems a bit, but maybe I was missing something.
I have virtually no background with Apples as a user, save for a System 7.0.1-based PowerBook 140 I nursed back to health a few years ago after picking it up at a flea market for $30. I decided it was time for me to own a Mac — and use it a bit — to see what I had missed. Not counting on being overly impressed, I went onto eBay and picked up a Ruby colored iMac G3/400 with Mac OS 9.0.4 and then ordered a copy of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar to go with it. I was fairly impressed when I got the system hooked up and upgraded to OS X. Mail proved robust, Safari slick, iLife even more laudable than I expected and Microsoft Office:mac, surprisingly good. Of course, there are downsides too: like the fact that I had to return the first, cheaper external CD burner I tried to connect to it, since it simply refused to work (the second one worked, but requires a third party hack or something like Roxio Toast to make it burn).
And that was that. Until the PowerMac G5 was announced. Now this was a system I could really have a bit of fun — I mean, ahem, get some work done — with. One good thing about writing for a tech magazine is you can justify buying a few things that are otherwise very hard to come up with a reason to purchase. When TerraSoft announced a Yellow Dog Linux pre-loaded PowerMac G5, I ordered one of those aluminum monsters, waiting just long enough to get Mac OS X 10.3 Panther included as well. The rationale: to test 64-bit GNU/Linux and to get a better feel for Mac OS X, as well, on a more powerful piece of hardware than a G3.
When it came, I was under whelmed with Yellow Dog. At the time of purchase, I knew that it wasn't going to support some of the hardware, and that was most definitely the case. They may very well have improved by now, but the point remains that, at best, I was running something much less up-to-date than the then current Fedora Core 1. I couldn't even get my monitor to work with X11 on it until I resorted to a wholesale copying of my working x86 Mandrake configuration. So the test box became a Mac OS X test box.
Having switched to GNOME in September of 2003, I made another jump, from Mandrake Linux to Fedora Core, in January of 2004. Fedora is admirable in its clean, simple design and great integration with GNOME, but it was behind on auto detection and system administration as compared to Mandrake, particularly at the time of its first release. Unfortunately, it was right after I tried switching to Fedora as my desktop that I ended up being ambushed by a large amount of work. Regardless of whether it worked properly or not, this was going to be my desktop.
Several months later I had jobs piled up that weren't getting done because things weren't working right on Fedora. Something dawned on me: here I was fighting with a half way configured copy of Fedora, using GNOME, which arguably borrows most of its good ideas from Apple, while a shiny PowerMac G5 sat in the corner waiting around to be used for testing. Something was wrong with this picture. I decided to pull out the test box and run off of it for a few weeks until I anticipated I'd have time to correct the problems in Fedora or return to Mandrake. It could be a short total immersion test of the system, sort of like what I'm doing with Windows XP right now. Those few weeks came and went, but the switch back never happened. Instead, I absconded of the OfB box for my own desktop and added a PowerBook into the mix.
My rationale was simple: as a system administrator, I spend enough time working on others' systems. By the time I get to mine, it is lucky to get security updates applied: I need something that just works. When I first started using the PowerMac, it did just that: all of my printer's functions worked, my DVD burner worked right (unlike my internal CD-RW under Fedora), photos downloaded beautifully and were organized immediately by roll in iPhoto, USB mass storage devices where automatically mounted with easily accessible icons and so on. Not only that, but I discovered what a lot of other UNIX-like users have realized about OS X: you aren't giving up the things you love about UNIX-like operating systems. I was able to keep administering Red Hat Enterprise Linux via OpenSSH run directly from the included copy of Bash and, occasionally X11 over SSH; moreover, I was able to keep using applications such as Gimp and OpenOffice. Many FOSS applications actually work better on the Mac. JEdit, for example, almost seems tailored for Mac OS X. The Mac also has its own healthy ecosystem of Free Software applications, and thanks to Apple's elegant design tools, it seems like Mac OS FOSS applications actually have more spit-and-polish than many that appear for either GNOME or KDE.
I was sold. Mac OS X continues to offer appealing features to power users, such as shell based access to the new Spotlight search mechanism in OS X Tiger; until you've seen how beautifully Spotlight works, you have not experienced the future of searching through data. And while I decried the necessity of pretty drop shadows as much as the next self-respecting power user, I've come to realize something about the Aqua GUI: the glitz serves a real purpose. When icons jump on the dock rather than giving focus to an application, the user gets the message that something needs to be done without being interrupted. Drop shadows and the finely rendered text, buttons and other neat items Apple can add because of Quartz Extreme's ability to move the heavy GUI lifting to the GPU may not seem important, but they are easy on the eyes, help to make things stick out when they should and are designed to be appealing, not simply flashy. Touches such as having open and save dialogs slide out of the parent window, instead of being separate dialogues, make it easy to keep track of what belongs to which application. And Exposé serves to make it easy to keep many applications open and well managed without the hassle of virtual desktops. Perhaps best of all, the Mac has drag and drop that actually works consistently and predictably across the board.
When using Aqua, you get the feeling that every inch of the GUI is the way it is for a purpose, that every button was fretted over to find just the right place for it. As a UNIX-like system user, I also appreciate the design technique of one tool for one job. Instead of building Swiss army knife applications, Apple has created numerous less featured applications that do a few things really well and are tightly integrated together — take the iLife suite: all of the applications focus on particular parts of the multimedia equation, but are tied together.
Moreover, many of Apple's other technologies are extremely laudable. Bonjour (nee Rendezvous), Apple's implementation of ZeroConf, works perfectly for the task of integrating an ecosystem of Macintoshes, network printers and other devices. The stack of technologies Apple uses for networking its systems, in my experience, has provided the most reliable peer-to-peer configuration I've ever been able to achieve. Bluetooth works out of the box with my Nokia smart phone. .Mac sync keeps my desktop and laptop synchronized — even some of my application settings — eliminating the normal hassles of being a two computer user.
Apple has succeeded in out UNIXing longtime UNIX-like desktops while providing an eminently usable system that certainly surpasses Windows, and I would say both major X11 desktop projects as well.
I have not given up on GNOME or KDE, don't get me wrong. They are still progressing, and already are excellent for office work, especially in large deployments of homogenous systems that decrease the need for individual tweaking. However, the big cats of Cupertino eat the lunch of those same desktops when it comes to small deployments, deployments that require multimedia support, and especially cases involving portable systems.
If you are a GNU/Linux user, why is this relevant? With the advent of the Mac mini and the upcoming Mactels, GNU/Linux faces a serious competitor that plays to its FOSS roots, by offering a system based on a foundation of FOSS (under a license similarly restrictive to those of some of the desktop oriented GNU/Linux distributions, such as Linspire and Xandros) at a price that is highly competitive. Apple's software stack is generally recognized as almost unbeatable, making a challenge to Apple even more difficult.
For the GNU/Linux desktop to capture the SOHO and SMB desktop segments in the future, one or both desktops will need to grab onto an iron clad focus of simplicity and ease-of-use. If I have become somewhat of an advocate of GNOME's methods, it is for a simple reason: I have seen a better desktop and it is Mac OS X. The GNOME people are building a GUI that, while not anything close to OS X (yet), is following Apple's playbook, and therefore equipping GNU/Linux for the rapidly approaching days when Windows is no longer the choice by default.
It is time for GNU/Linux to become insanely great.
Things aren't all rosy as a Mac OS X user, however. I'll return to this subject in an upcoming column to talk about some problems on the fruity side of computing.