Of canaries and coal mines
,----[ Quote ]
| At the time, Jason said, “If I were Apple, I’d be worried about thiOf
| canaries and coal miness. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs
| to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow.
| Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal
| mine with stuff like this.”
`----
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/01/17/of-canaries-and-coal-mines
He 'converted' his family too. How things change.
Related:
One year with Linux
,----[ Quote ]
| Any modern Linux distribution presents a good "out of the box"
| experience, with friendly defaults and familiar metaphors. But a
| year ago, several people recommended that I try alternative window
| managers, and at the time, I didn't understand why. Now I do. It's
| difficult to explain. People say that Ruby On Rails is
| "opinionated software." I suppose all software reflects the opinions
| of its authors, but some are certainly more opinionated than others,
| and window managers, as a class, are more opinionated than most. If
| you have strong opinions about software -- and I do -- then it is
| worth your time to find software that shares them.)
|
| [...]
|
| One year later, I look back on comments like this, and I just
| laugh. Sorry, Anonymous Commenter, you couldn't have been more wrong.
| You got it exactly backwards. When your operating system finally
| comes with a package management system that is both comprehensive
| and extensible, you will of course be welcomed... to the 1990s.
| In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy my time with Linux.
`----
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/02/one-year-with-linux
2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop
,----[ Quote ]
| …At least in the Pilgrim family.
|
| Over Christmas break, we did a three-way computer upgrade: my sons got my
| parents’ old Mac, my parents got my old desktop, and I got a new desktop. Of
| course I’m still running Debian Sid (I just moved my old hard drive to the
| new computer), but the big news is that my parents asked me to migrate them
| to Linux. They are now happy users of Ubuntu 7.10 with Firefox, Thunderbird,
| Picasa, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and gnome-games.
`----
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/01/04/my-parents-desktop#comment-11104
,----[ Quote ]
| Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a
| new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote
| at length about switching to Ubuntu. I've been thinking about this a
| lot recently, and now John Gruber's written And Oranges, a fine excursus
| on Mark?s piece. I'm pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe
| sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the
| state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick,
| physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email--the record of
| my life--away in a proprietary undocumented format. I've had this happen
| once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear
| a funny sound? That's a camel's back, breaking.]
|
| [...]
|
| Will I Switch? · Yes. For Mark?s reasons, and because I'm pretty darn
| sure that either Ubuntu or some other distro will eventually get the
| key things right.
|
| Alternatively, Apple could open-source a few of their apps so we could
| all fix the pain points, and they could start having an actual
| conversation with the world. Nothing less is acceptable.
|
| As John Gruber points out, neither Mark nor I are exactly typical.
| But you know what? I think that if the GNU/Linux/Solaris community
| can sustain its current level of energy and progress, and if Apple
| maintains its dysfunctional communications culture, there are going to
| be better choices just not for me, but for a lot of other people too.
`----
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/06/15/Switch-From-Mac
|
|
