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keating

Mark Pilgrim (of Dive Into Python fame):

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-b...

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/26/essentials-2006

Cory Doctorow (of Mac tattoo on bicep fame):

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/29/mark-pilgrims-list-o.ht...

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Both of them switched for political reasons, for what it's worth. If you use and enjoy commercial Mac software, your politics are already somewhat desync'd from theirs.

Cory Doctorow jumped on the bandwagon of what he thought was a movement away from Apple, and in reality, these are basically the only two people who left. I doubt many at Apple were sad to see him leave.

It's a bandwagon he was destined to jump on -- he's an activist for openness, for heaven's sake, so moving to an open platform is hardly shocking. One might wonder what took him so long.

I wouldn't call wanting to be able to get at your own data a "political" reason.

It's possible to use OS X without locking any of your data into their horrible apps, I do it every day. That's a reason to switch away from Apple apps, not a reason to switch off of the platform.

Then again, if you don't use any of their apps, it's kind of a strike against the whole "it just works" thing that's supposed to be central to why one would use a Mac, don't you think?

the hardware just works. My computer never crashes. Ever. Sleep and hibernate work without any tweaking, which I don't think is possible on linux (IME with, literally, dozens of distros on laptops).

That's why I like my mac.

I think it's hard to come up with real examples of where Apple applications really hijack your data, and next to impossible to find examples where they made it harder to get to for no good reason.

Here's an interesting 1-year post-mortem from Mark Pilgrim on the benefits of Linux regarding package management.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/02/one-year-with-li...

Yes, and in it, he claims it's easier to keep Ubuntu up to date than it is to keep a Mac up to date. To hell with empirical evidence, look at how simple that command line is! No way is my mom's MacBook that up-to-date!

Personally, I keep Ubuntu up to date by waiting for the little icon to pop in my tray that says I have updates, and I don't need the command line to do any part of it. It still updates all the packages I have without having to worry about looking for updates for various programs separately. I personally consider this a huge improvement over updating software by going to various websites or having several different updaters running in the background (or simply not updating your software), but perhaps you don't have non-Apple programs that need to be updated, or perhaps you don't consider this a disadvantage. Whatever works for you, works for you.

BTW, I'm fond of the command line for getting some kinds of things done, but even if you don't feel comfortable at a command line, it's a highly efficient way to tell someone how to accomplish a task (as opposed to something like Step 1: Go to the System menu, drop down the menu, expand the item labeled Administration, and click on the item labeled "Synaptic Package Manager." Step 2: click on the Search icon..., etc.). For a task that can be accomplished in one or two commands, it is often the case that there might be 10 steps involved in explaining how to navigate a GUI.

That's awesome. I keep my Mac up to date by... wait, how do I keep it up to date? Let me check, am I up to date? Well, shit, I am! How'd that happen?

Glad you have neat buttons and elegant command line tools to do it over in Ubuntu-land. Sounds like a fun project.

> That's awesome. I keep my Mac up to date by... wait, how do I keep it up to date? Let me check, am I up to date? Well, shit, I am! How'd that happen?

Cool. Did it just update itself from Tiger to Leopard too? That's pretty awesome!

It was actually a matter of putting the cd in, starting the installer, and choosing the "update" option.

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