Dan Gillmor: This Mac devotee is moving to Linux

However, one good reason he has to move now as opposed to later, is that later might be too late. Moving to a new platform can be costly and difficult and Linux can be trickier than most to pick up. He might want to have more experience with it when the time comes to drop Mac entirely if that's his goal.

Speaking of "use what works best": I still have the MBP to run Photoshop, precisely for that reason.

I don't necessarily agree with him that OSX will inevitably go walled, but given that belief his behavior is sensible.

"There are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

Apple not only "tolerates" walled-gardens, they build them and encourage others to do so. That is enough reason to not use a Mac.

Consoles aren't trying to replace general purpose computers, iOS devices are.

Sony have nothing to do with being part of the stack of any operating system, and while Microsoft owns XBOX it too has little-to-no integration with Windows. Your comparison therefore seems irrelevant.

Comparing the Apple App store as a 'better place to do business' than XBox or Sony PlayStation is also strange as the two are completely different in terms of proposition, customer demographic, development resource requirement and potential return on investment.

My primary concern with Apple and the iOS platform is how they block applications that they view as strategically damaging. The best examples are Google Voice and any ad platform other than iAds for use within apps.

Do I miss the iPhone? I miss the "Apple experience" in some ways, but not enough to move back.

I think Apple is underestimating the power of small but influential communities like this one (followers of Hacker News). The more technologically fluent one is, the more likely you are to move away from the iPhone . . . even though you may have used and loved Apple products for years.

Losing this community will not affect sales numbers directly, but it will affect investment of ideas into the iOS platform over time.

I anticipate more innovation on Android than on iOS until Apple changes their protectionist ways.

However, the default kernel state is require a codesign for everything.

Maybe it's a bit chicken-and-egg to get that to happen - people won't buy Linux boxes until it works on every machine, but makers won't try to get it to work on their machines until people are buying Linux boxes.

I did manage to buy a Linux box from Dell a while back. Even though I immediately wiped their custom install and upgraded to the latest version, set up dual-boot, etc, buying one with Ubuntu pre-installed was the best way I could determine to make sure the hardware would actually be compatible.

As the situation of Linux on laptops has improved, however, it's been harder to find installation write-ups, which probably means that people who have no problems simply do not bother posting detailed accounts of the fact that they have no problems! I mean, here's one, but how many people are meticulous enough to write a blog post about the fact that their laptop works, and then add the post to http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ so I can find it?

http://wernerroth.de/index.php/2009/12/18/kubuntu-910-runs-a...

So true success stories are mostly invisible, or at least outwardly look the same as the "success" stories where a guy applied six kernel patches and wrote a shell script that he runs manually whenever he needs to hibernate and claims, "Hey, wow, my laptop works great now, and it was so easy!"

For a person like me, who doesn't want purchasing a laptop to turn into a major educational experience, it would be nice to have some way of knowing whether a specific laptop will work out of the box with major Linux distributions.

Is it IBM versus Lenovo difference, I wonder? IBM used to be fairly good about using reasonably open or at least industry-standard hardware when they were running the ThinkPad show.

To be clear, GNOME adopted an OSX like desktop.

Laptops can still be a little dodgy though. Support for common desktop hardware is very very good in modern Linuxes but laptops can still require a bit of tweaking. If you want to run Linux on a laptop you need to either do a bit of homework and make sure you buy something that works well or buy a pre-installed machine with support. If a novice friend asked me for advice on switching I'd probably suggest the latter. Nothing takes the shine off a new machine like having to download and compile drivers by hand.

-- Install: Gets better every time. Rarely have issues anymore with the basics of video, networking, sound, etc.

-- First boot: Gets better every time. Things tend to look nicer, fonts are nicer, icons are better, defaults are more reasonable. Installing software is easy.

-- First week of usage: Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist. No amount of perceived freedom justifies downgrading my applications, dual booting, emulating, etc. Just not worth it.

He writes "As noted, I've been happy in the relatively free Mac world. But given the slowing pace of Mac OS development, there's reason to believe Apple is mostly milking Mac OS users. Will it phase out serious PC development? Or will it eventually move its command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac? Apple says it's committed to the Mac's future. I'm not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player."

It hasn't been all sunshine: I installed Kubuntu on a new desktop 3 months ago, and a month later had to do a complete wipe/reinstall to Ubuntu. I couldn't find the incantation to completely switch to Ubuntu using apt-get.