Canaries in the Mac OS X and Red Hat Coal Mines?
O'Reilly editor Brian Sawyer pointed to an interesting observation over at kottke.org: "If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this. 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." Here's Mark's post. And here's Cory's. And it looks like Paul Bausch might not be far behind. Good timing for Ubuntu Hacks, although we might also want to take a leaf from David Pogue's book, and do a Switching to Ubuntu as well :-) Brian Jepson added to the editors' list thread: "I've been hearing these rumblings as well, but I don't know what to make of them. One of my friends just told me that all this switching away buzz has convinced him to decide against switching to Mac OS X, and he's going to move from Windows to Ubuntu instead."
But never mind Apple looking over its shoulder. How about Red Hat? Interest in Ubuntu is remarkably high. Take a look at the O'Reilly Research - Yahoo! Buzz Market:
Ubuntu garners nearly 30% of Linux searches on Yahoo! vs only about 14% for Red Hat, and only about 2% for Fedora, and the prediction market shows a stock price of $16.15 for Ubuntu, $10.97 for Red Hat, and $8 for Fedora.
(For more background on the buzz market, see the about page. (There's also an IEEE paper describing the Yahoo! buzz market's methodology, but it's a pdf behind a member firewall.) Briefly, though, Yahoo!'s goal with the game is to see whether a futures market can predict search volume, and O'Reilly's is to see whether search volume can predict broader tech trends. Participants buy and sell stocks corresponding to a basket of search terms, which are then ranked against the actual percentage of search volume in the related stocks in that specific market. The graph above has three parts. The top part shows the stock price trend, the middle block shows absolute spikes in search volume, and the bottom shows the percentage trend in search volume. There is also an invidividual page for each stock in the market, which allows you to buy and sell that stock, but also contains a link showing the search terms that are aggregated to make up that stock.)
P.S. The reason the graphs start about June 11 is that we recently did a refresh, introducing new markets on that date.
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Comments: 152
[06.30.06 09:16 AM]
As much as I love Ubuntu, I don't think we can expect any real migrations from OSX-land in the future.
Let's not get carried away guys.
[06.30.06 09:38 AM]
We're not getting carried away, just stirring the pot :-) In the same editors' list discussion, Mike Loukides wrote: "I don't know. At the Rails conference, the laptop census was easily 90%
apple, and I'd say that Windows had a solid majority among the rest. You see the same thing at JavaOne, except more Windows (probably 70% apple, 20% win, 10% linux)."
[06.30.06 10:34 AM]
The most important requirement for any OS: Can it run Counterstrike?
If so, I'll install it!
[06.30.06 10:47 AM]
We're not getting carried away, just stirring the pot :-)
That sounds like something Dvorak would say, like when he hypothesized that Apple would dump OSX for Windows.
[06.30.06 11:20 AM]
Ugh. The Dvorak comparison is hopefully not apt. I do think that there's real buzz around Ubuntu. I'm not saying that just to be controversial. The part that was pot-stirring was the :-)'d comment about needing to write a switching from the Mac to Ubuntu book. And I gave it a :-) for a reason. But as Samuel Delaney once wrote, "Tone of voice: an insufficient vehicle for irony." How much more true online!
[06.30.06 11:58 AM]
You forgot to mention Tim Bray is mulling the switch too. You know, all this stuff is really novel interest. In late 2004 Jeremy Zawadony was kicking Ubuntu around... went with OS X anyway and subsequently went with... Windows (gasp!).
So, at the end of the day... we'll settle down with the tool that suits us or get fed up with it and find one that suits us better.
What I like about you guys (and btw your Safari service is AWESOME!) is that you track this stuff like a spider in her web. Super cool that you share as much of that intel as you do!
[06.30.06 12:00 PM]
Tim, I think your radar sense is on to something again. However, I'd like to offer myself as a counter example in that I am moving from Ubuntu to OS X this weekend when I purchase a MacBook.
Ubuntu has impressed me as the most polished and feature-rich Linux distro I've used so far (among SUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Mandriva). I love that it improves on the robust Debian distro, offering fast development releases and an emphasis on usability. Ubuntu has improved a great deal in just its first two years of existence, and I fully expect alpha geeks and savvy tech users to adopt Ubuntu in favor of Mac OS X in the future. However, there still several limitations to Ubuntu and Linux in general that are prompting me to move to OS X.
First, I find that Linux still requires a large degree of administration to work properly. I use several applications that require a kernel recompile every time a new version of the Linux kernel is released. I like the freedom of compiling my own kernel, the necessity of compiling the kernel in order to use the applications I need can be very frustrating.
Second, Linux lags behind Mac OS X and Windows in multimedia. Great strides have been made in recent years, but managing multimedia content is still difficult. Video editing and DVD authoring are especially salient sore points. Aside from the newly released Picasa for Linux, even managing photo albums is not as simple as it should be. Further, although Linux is so far DRM-free, this also means that Linux are shutout from online media content vendors such as iTunes and other music download services, and Warner Bros, Vongo, and others' new movie download services.
Third, although software integration has improved, the large majority of software for Linux continues to feel disjointed and fragmentary when taken as a whole. Most applications don't interoperate well with others. Simple things like dragging an image from a web page to an office document don't work. As a result, the Linux desktop is a patchwork of powerful individual applications that never quite coordinate well enough to provide a satisfying user experience.
Fourth, neither Gnome nor KDE are as usable or as graphically appealing as Mac OS X or even Windows. I recognize that UI aesthetics and usability are not important for everyone, but I along with others note that the Linux UI is in many ways inferior to that of Windows XP, much less Vista or Mac OS X. Yes, XGL is becoming widely available, but XGL strikes me as a 3D-rendering novelty without good underlying usability justification.
I could list more complaints and others could doubtlessly add their own Linux quibbles as well. In sum, although I expect Ubuntu in time to become the power user's distro of choice, Mac OS X still remains an unparalleled combination of UNIX and polished user experience.
[06.30.06 12:46 PM]
"UI aesthetics and usability are not important for everyone"?
I switched back to Linux from Mac OS X because Linux better met my sense of aesthetics and usability. Don't confuse your sense of taste with a universal directive for How A Computer Should Look.
[06.30.06 02:17 PM]
My Oreillynet.com article "Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop" talks about my current favorite system configuration (for my laptop, anyway):
www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/05/08/dual-boot-laptop.html
Ubuntu's pretty nice, in my opinion. But I have to admit that I haven't yet explored Apple products. I may do so soon, since I may buy a Mac laptop for my daughter when we send her off to college. I wouldn't consider sending her off with an Ubuntu laptop -- not yet, anyway.
[06.30.06 10:44 PM]
I recall being at OSCON four years ago and noticing that about 1/3 of the attendees had Powerbooks or iBooks. Every year since then the numbers increased until it was probably something like 60 to 70% last year. As was noted, recent conferences like RailsConf have something close to 90% Mac ownership. Now that the numbers have gotten so high above 50%, there was bound to be a backlash. Geeks tend not to be comfortable with the whole 'in' crowd thing, afterall. So the backlash seems to be driven, in part, by the need to be different and, ironically, in many of the current programming communities being different means having a Linux laptop instead of a MacBook. Perhaps Apple is not becoming a victim of it's own success among geeks...
[07.01.06 07:05 AM]
I noticed something similar at ETech earlier this year. At least 50% of the attendees were using Macs. My manager said that last year's OSCON was the same way.
[07.01.06 04:51 PM]
I would think that a switch away from Mac by one open source zealot and one insignificant author of really bad science fiction novels would only improve Apple's reputation amongst those of us who choose our computer platforms for rational reasons.
[07.02.06 01:45 AM]
I came about this close (imagine my thumb and index finger really, really close to each other 8) to switching to Debian PowerPC. But there was one critical thing I needed; a Citrix client. I normally use the client for Java, but there's no JRE for Debian PowerPC that I've found (No, Kaffe and GCJ just don't cut it). I was going to put WinXP on an old PC I had for just running the Citrix client, but the CD-ROM drive went on the fritz during installation. If I believed in a god, I would think he was trying to tell me something. 8)
Anyhow, I guess I'll stick with OSX for now, at least until the PowerBook finally breaks. It has enough *nix in it to scratch that particular itch without getting summarily infected. Once in a great while, I'll login with ">console" and get a plain text screen just to get it out of my system. I wonder if Mark, Cory, etc. tried that since it seems their respective beefs are primarily software rather than hardware related.
[07.02.06 07:28 AM]
Tim,
I think you're on to something, and where the desktop (fixed workstation) market is concerned, I think you're right (servers are already owned by linux for all but the biggest Apple zealots).
However, without a really well integrated HW/SW combo for laptops, Ubuntu doesn't stand a chance. Power management is still the big sore thumb sticking out. And of course, we'd also need a great HW maker which is hard to imagine give how proprietary VAIOs are and how much Lenovo has screwed up the Thinkpads.
[07.03.06 01:08 PM]
Of course the really tech-savvy run Mac OS X on their MacBook Pro with a Parallels install of Ubuntu - offering the best of both worlds ;-))
[07.03.06 01:57 PM]
Personally speaking, if I was going to switch back to Linux, it would be to get away from what I feel is the biggest problem with OS X and XP: bloat and lack of control. I would run something like Gentoo, Debian, or Arch; distributions that try to be a good Unix instead of striving to recreate OS X or XP.
As for Mark, I find his main reason for leaving the Mac platform to be a bit false. Ensuring that your data will last means keeping data in open formats, not necessarily that your entire operating system must be free.
[07.03.06 02:20 PM]
I agree with Dr. J. These are hardly the people that would be leading some kind of charge, as if there ever will be. They may have an online reputation but to the rest of the word they are nobodies. And if we're just talking about the geek world, there are still plenty of Apple geeks out there.
Ask yourself this, why does MP feel the need to tell everyone he knows he's switching when he knows for a fact it's going to cause a stir? Last week I bought a different brand of bagels at the store, but I didn't feel the need to tell the world about it.
[07.03.06 02:41 PM]
As far as canaries in mines go, I have a Mac that broke about 6 months ago. Based on what I'm reading lately, I'm thinking of just building an Ubuntu box, at least until the MacIntel desktops come out and I can afford one of those.
Whether or not this translates into a "mass migration" is, of course, an entirely different question. But picking Linux over Apple (while within my technical abilities) has never been a serious possibility for me until now.
[07.03.06 02:56 PM]
The Graphics at http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/linuxbuzz.jpg ar a little bit hard to read.
Could you take distinct symbols and larger axis labels?
[07.03.06 03:02 PM]
If I were Apple I'd be worried too
[07.03.06 03:04 PM]
I changed from linux to OSX. I know a big bunch of people that have done so. OSX is way too easy to maintain compared to linux. These so-called hc-applers doesn't turn my head back to linux
[07.03.06 03:08 PM]
I have no plans to switch to Ubuntu.
(That's because I already use it -- but if I didn't I *would* switch!)
[07.03.06 03:10 PM]
I swtiched to Ubuntu. Hardward freedom and better OSS support.
[07.03.06 03:11 PM]
Any sensible person knew this was coming. Ever since Apple starting becoming healthy and competitive in the last eight or nine years, the clock was ticking. Even though Macs and OS X still have a tiny market share, the high profile success of iPods made the the loss of guys like Pilgrim and Doctorow a forgone conclusion.
I like both of them very much, but like most smart guys they do a lot of public posing. Granted they are posing for a relatively small group of people who actually know who they are. Nonetheless they are concerned, very concerned, with the opinions of the cabal of geeks they cater to.
Simply put, Apple is too popular and successful now for guys like Doctorow and Pilgrim to associate with. Just as the vast majority of PC users pick Windows *because* everyone else uses it, Pilgrim and Doctorow, and other intellectuals alike, avoid it for the very same reason. Just like the guy in high school who dresses in all black and dyes their hair purple, guys like Cory and Mark often define themselves by their opposition to the mainstream, not by any reason or logic.
Apple, with the iPod and, lately, the MacBook, has become one of the popular kids.
And Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim have gone off in search of the chain-smoking goth click.
[07.03.06 03:15 PM]
I recently started using Ubuntu "Dapper Drake", and I have been extremely impressed with it ever since. Those who say that Ubuntu provides no real threat either haven't tried it, or dismiss it because it's Linux (no games, etc.). If your hardware is compatible with Ubuntu out of the box, the installation is just as easy, if not easier, than Windows (even for non-technical people). Plus, the Gnome interface is clean and fast, and installation of programs is as simple as checking a box and waiting for it to install. Could plenty of people migrate to Ubuntu? Sure. Will they? Only time will tell.
It really depends on what you use your computer for. If you do music related things, go Windows or Mac. If you're big into photoshop, again, Windows or Mac (although Gimp isn't too bad). If you're a gamer, you might as well stick with Windows, unless all you play is solitare... in that case Ubuntu is *better* for games. But if you're one of the many other people, Ubuntu is a viable and attractive option.
[07.03.06 03:15 PM]
I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Pilgrim decided to switch back. (Then I again, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't.) He's a long time mac user, and the thing about mac users is they tend to want things to be just so. My experience with Linux is that it ain't bad. Very solid, and getting better. But not quite ways that, especially to a mac user, can really get under your skin.
I think the more likely outcome is a drive for open source alternatives to Apple-supplied applications, and a parallel drive to shame Apple into opening up their storage formats more.
[07.03.06 03:15 PM]
Much as I like Ubuntu and Gentoo, I like OS X more :)
Ubuntu is a great distro for beginners, and I will always remember it as the only distro that had wireless and Direct Rendering enabled.
Memory leak problems with Gnome and such on AMD 64 don't make me very happy though, and Ubuntu package repository seems a bit unstable at times =(
I also tend to prefer Solaris 10 for server work, and OS X as a client but YMMV, and Ubuntu is a kick ass Linux Distro!
[07.03.06 03:17 PM]
I don't think that this news has any relevance in the real world, as much as I'd like to believe the contrary, especially when we take into account that it's Ubuntu these people are talking about. As much as everybody loves the whole Ubuntu concept, and despite all the buzz, it's still an inferior desktop OS, from an end-user standpoint, when compared to SUSE for instance. It needs a lot of tinkering to be really usable for tasks that a XP or OSX user would take for granted - not that other distros don't, but Ubuntu has always required a bit more. In the end, Linux in its various forms is improving but there's still a long way to go before it reaches OSX. I'm a linux enthusiast but I need to go the extra mile to get everything in 'working order (DVD & general multimedia support, wireless etc.) BTW I've abandoned Macs for PCs thanks to positive experiences with Ubuntu and SUSE, but the real reason is that Apple asks about $4,500 for an iMac in Brazil (yes you read that right, four thousand and five hundred dollars). I decided to buy a Dell laptop and build my own desktop and travel to Argetina and Chile with the money instead. Linux allowed me that. :-)
[07.03.06 03:18 PM]
hi tim,
as Antonio said "However, without a really well integrated HW/SW combo for laptops, Ubuntu doesn't stand a chance. Power management is still the big sore thumb sticking out. And of course, we'd also need a great HW maker which is hard to imagine give how proprietary VAIOs are and how much Lenovo has screwed up the Thinkpads."
Michael Dell has said that DELL does NOT intend to pre-package/install lots of linux distros. I'm thinking that in 6 months, DELL will start experimenting with Ubuntu -- especially the server version. That should give them enough experience to start working on the Desktop version -- which means that most Laptops from DELL could probably have full support for Ubuntu in about a year ?
BR,
~A
[07.03.06 03:41 PM]
I've gone the other direction too - added a macbook pro running OSX to my collective of machines.
My main machine will always be linux (not intending to buy a mac desktop anytime soon), but OSX just suffers from less of the little annoyances than linux does - none of which are big on their own, but they do accumulate.
Having said that, the reason I waited until the intel machines to try OSX was so I could run ubuntu on it if OSX sucked.
[07.03.06 03:41 PM]
Uh, Tim would be "stirring the pot" to get Apple to re-open the kernel, eh?
[07.03.06 03:47 PM]
In response to "which means that most Laptops from DELL could probably have full support for Ubuntu in about a year ?"
Hopefully you are right especially because of all the recent releases of laptop systems from Dell that use the expresscard technology that Ubuntu barely supports, if at all.
[07.03.06 03:53 PM]
conundrum: Cool, trendy style versus geek cred
and "Mini-Me" evil corporation versus "Humanity to others".
Wizard Jobs seems like he's asking us to "pay no attention
to the man behind the curtain" except maybe he's really
the wicked witch of the West bearing high markups,
proprietary offerings and things DRM.
For the IngSoc drones at a Two Minute Hate this may in fact
be a good thing. Thinking different is tough.
[07.03.06 03:58 PM]
mark wrote:
"It really depends on what you use your computer for. If you do music related things, go Windows or Mac. If you're big into photoshop, again, Windows or Mac (although Gimp isn't too bad).(...)"
I think it's weird that people, specially geeks, claim they use their computer only for a few things. I mean: who doesn't listen to music, sometimes edit or record a track, have pictures and want to edit some of them, sometimes have to make a small video, code or heavy text-editing, etc. I'll stop here, to each his own. A computer have to allow me to do everything I think of, and even things I never thought I could do. And I want the basic conf. to be easy to do, I rather spend my time doing things.
That's what OS X is to me. From Photoshop, ProTools, iMovie, FinalCut, Logic, iDVD, etc. to bash, ruby, web dev., TextMate, etc. All well integrated in one OS. No Linux distro I tried allowed me to do as much.
In response to the article, check this Rui Carmo's post
[07.03.06 04:04 PM]
I've a Ubuntu box. It controls my X10 devices. Other than that it just sits there. Photoshop runs just fine on my G5 PowerMac; not on my Ubuntu box. And no, I'm not interested in Gimp as an alternative. Ubuntu also doesn't run Adobe Lightroom.
Ubuntu doesn't recognize my wireless card so a WRT54G with DD WRT in client mode substitues.
Ubuntu's not bad but it's not OS X by a long shot. Many of my old gripes about Linux as a desktop resurfaced when I installed it. The major difference being they were easier to overcome. Still, it ain't OS X.
The nerds are welcome to it.
[07.03.06 04:09 PM]
I use Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude D610. It took four weeks and seemingly endless trials to get a kernel that ran stable on this machine. Despite serious attempts, sound still does not function all the time. OpenOffice (which I'm sometimes forced to use) is slow, buggy, and instable. The only multimedia application that works is mplayer on the command line.
Apart from this, Ubuntu is a decent distribution.
I'm what people call a linux geek. I've been using linux since kernel 2.0.16 or so, I've installed Debian here and there, and I know my way around problems.
But my next computer will be a Mac. I just don't want the mess any more. I want a system that works without me spending nights on configuration and bug fixing.
Even if not everything is perfect: With Mac, there at least won't be five different sound systems that interfere with each other.
[07.03.06 04:21 PM]
I switched from 0S 9 to Yellow Dog back in the day, does that count? Then OS X came out and I switched right back. Ubuntu is a far cry from Yellow Dog, but it's also a far cry from OS X. I simply can not think of a single reason to bother with it on a desktop Mac. Now on the server... that's a whole other story.
[07.03.06 04:30 PM]
When bbedit does an Ubuntu version I 2 may switch!
[07.03.06 04:35 PM]
Ubuntu rocks... OSX rocks...
but I see them as different things... I'm a musician so:
OSX allows me to use a Motu 828 MKII firewire audiointerface ... I can use LogicAudio... Ableton Live... MaxMSP... It's my favorite music machine.
Ubuntu is my favorite computer desktop.
see what I mean ?
=)
[07.03.06 04:49 PM]
I like Ubuntnu and am using it at work. The only thing I don't like about it are the modifications they've made from stock GNOME. This is one of the reasons why I originally switched from Mandrake to Fedora, and then to Ubuntu. I want to use a stock desktop environment without any vendor-specific modifications. This was the case about a year ago but I don't like the recent changes in 6.06. The new icon theme is pretty good though. I guess I can compile from source (which is what I used to do) but then I can't use the awesome package management system.
[07.03.06 05:09 PM]
I have 7 computers at home, and three of them are Macs: An Intel Mini, a dual G4, and a PowerBook. I clearly don't hate Apple, but I'm certainly no fan-boy either.
Although I like the look of the hardware and its small footprint, the mini is fairly mediocre as a media center, and I honestly regret the purchase most days. I am awaiting a Linux distro that can run on the hardware at this point, as my previous media center was a Linux machine and it rocked until the day the motherboard died.
My G4 is my music workstation. There is really no substitute for Logic Pro, but I must admit that the system is not very useful to me for any other purpose.
The Powerbook was initially going to be a portable music notepad, but it ended up being far too underpowered for the task -- even with an external firewire sound system and external drives. I more-or-less gave the system to my wife who is a graphic designer. She's just as comfortable on Linux as on any other OS. She (like me) misses Amarok on our media system.
What it comes down to for me is this: for specific tasks like music or graphic design, there's no beating Mac OS X. For general purpose computing (web browsing/design, listening to music, email, programming, system administration), Linux (and especially Ubuntu/Kubuntu) is so much more usable for me.
[07.03.06 05:10 PM]
I work on both Mac OS-X and Linux and I have to admit that usability-wise I think that KDE is much better than OS-X.
3 things that drive me nuts about the Mac:
- you can't resize a window by dragging any edge or corner (you have to go to the tiny thing in the bottom right corner)
- the finder can't sort directories separately from files and you can't type in the path name
- raise on click and click to focus are not customisable
[07.03.06 05:20 PM]
Why choose? For years now, I've used a Powerbook with OS X and a dual-monitor dual-CPU x86 desktop machine with Mandriva Linux.
Both run much of the same open source software (Emacs, Apache, PHP, bash, perl, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Audacity, etc.) and easily network together with Samba and ssh/scp.
They work well together. I tend to do photos, music, video, etc. on the Mac using iLife. Photoshop is nice on the Mac, but I also use GIMP too, on either one. I tend to do web development on Linux, although I sometimes use Dreamweaver on the Mac (mostly I use Xemacs). But there's no hard and fast rule, it is whatever I feel like and is convenient.
I do tend to try to pick applications, where possible, that run on both Linux and Mac, so I can choose when/where to use them.
If you want a cool Linux desktop, check out e-live (http://www.elivecd.org/), a very cool Linux distro using Debian with the cutting-edge version of the Enlightenment window manager. The "live" in the name refers to the "live CD" approach - but you can also install it from the CD. I think I'll switch to that (I already run Enlightenmment instead of KDE, GNOME, etc.) next. Ubuntu didn't impress me.
[07.03.06 05:26 PM]
Am i the only person who noticed that on the chart above nowhere mentions anything about MAC OS X? The buzz about Mac is incredibly high. No time soon is Ubuntu going to surpass Mac. Apple has released a new version of X with the exception of this year. Every day more and more people make the switch to Mac noticing how much better that they are then windows and other operating systems. I have tried Ubuntu, Solaris and multiple other types of UNIX and LINUX and i cant find anything that beats MAC. And plus with apple making it's own hardware they are one of a kind. Plus as mentioned earlier nerds don't like being with a crowd and like to use something different.
[07.03.06 05:42 PM]
Heh...
More like noobuntu.
Ubuntu doesn't even come with a compiler afaik.
Switching from OSX Tiger to Ubuntu isn't a smart choice.
After all, OSX is a BSD-based OS, and imho BSD > Linux.
[07.03.06 05:53 PM]
MP's problem has little to do with OS X. He states that he wants to be able to view his content in 50 years which he claims Apple will not allow him to do. However, if one reads his previous article concerning long term storage, one will notice that his problem is not file formats or closed-source software, but that he is a data pack-rat who thinks that going to a completely open OS will solve all of his problems.
As long as he is unwilling to pick and choose which data to keep and which to part from (does he really think that being able to view what star rating he gave a song 20 years ago will help him?), no OS can solve his problems. He is on the path to living in a technological cave, constantly making sure that years worth of worthless data (in addition to the unquestionable mountains of good data) are backed up, and then again remotely, and that all of his formats are properly viewable, etc. He is far more concerned with preserving data rather than in producing it.
FOSS is great in theory, but the entire platform lacks the cohesiveness to be usable by any more than those who are geekier than thou. All Linux distros, including the much hailed Ubuntu, are little more than an utter mess when looked at as a whole.
[07.03.06 05:54 PM]
I've used Linux for about, um, 8+ years (IIRC). Debian mostly. I've tried RedHat, and (what was) Mandrake. Currently run SuSe on a server at work but definitely prefer Debian on servers (it is The One True Way ;-) ).
Generally though I've hated Linux on the desktop (or my laptop). Basically I have very little patience for (what I consider) to be very simple things not working (like my sound card). Yes it would help if a great many manufacturers weren't dorks, if more people wrote drivers instead of the bazillion ICQ clients in existence, such is life.
So I've used Windows (and OS/2, MacOS (classic & OSX), even OS/400) and despite all the vitriol I have for MS and the headaches Windows has given me, it has by and large done the job. Recently 2 mates of mine bought a MacBook each. I was tempted, sorely. (Now I truly understand why that logo has a bite out of it, Steve Jobs you sired a comely wench...)
Then I tried Ubuntu 5.5, nice, installed ok, pretty much everything worked. Dapper came out and I tried it, then blew away my Windows install. It just friggin worked! Out of the box! Everything installed and set up fine - on a laptop! I did have to compile the driver for the WiFi card myself but goddamn if the documentation on the Ubuntu Wiki wasn't easy to find, clear, concise, accurate and helpful, it was *easy* - I mean dead easy, so easy you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.
I know this was about Apple, but damn if this isn't the single best desktop Linux distro ever - it is the one that finally got Windows out of my house (my flatmate just started using it too). A mate of mine saw it this evening and now HE wants it installed (and he knows nada about this sort of thing).
I haven't missed a single Windows app, (well, ok, I miss WinAmp, but that's it, honest).
[07.03.06 06:08 PM]
Jon --
You were asking for a graph that shows Mac OS X vs. Linux. (I had introduced the graph to talk about Ubuntu vs. Red Hat and Fedora.) There is a general category in the O'Reilly Research/Yahoo! Buzz Game for operating systems, which shows Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux etc., but it's not at the level of detail that would show Ubuntu.
(Sorry, Moritz, that the graphs aren't any bigger. However, I don't have the source data handy to regenerate them (see, it does matter!); I'm just clipping the graphs from the Yahoo! Buzz Game site.)
[07.03.06 06:19 PM]
I'm a "multiplatform" user. Haven't seen mention of many of those here. Anyway, I've got a Linux server /desktop at home -- acting as a Web/File/Media server, as well as a desktop. I have a ThinkPad T41 running XP. It's soon to be ebay'ed because I bought a MacBook Pro shortly after BootCamp was announced. Funnily, I haven't put BootCamp on the MBP as I found Parallels (think VMWare) and it runs Windows XP for the extremely small sliver of things I can't do on my MBP. Those include running Visio for work, and recently streaming the World Cup football matches from ESPN 360.
As a long time Linux and Windows user, I have to say that I really love OS X. Fantastic desktop. Lot's of mainstream apps. X11 and BSD under the hood. Open source at your fingertips. It's an OS powerful enough for an old Linux hand, but simple enough on the surface that I'd feel good putting one on my mother's desk and driving 1500 miles away. I can't say either of those two things for Ubuntu or Windows, and can't forsee being able to do so for several years.
[07.03.06 06:22 PM]
FWIW, the point of this entry was not to say which operating system is "best." That's a personal decision. The point was twofold:
1. When some long-time Mac diehards switch to something else, it's worth paying attention. And I know these guys. Despite the cynical comments that the Mac is now too popular for people who just want to be cool, I don't think that's a factor at all. In both cases, it's a combination of frustration with some of Apple's policies and the fact that the alternatives are getting better. They don't have to be as good as Mac OS X to be good enough if the perceived negatives are high enough to encourage the switch.
I'm not suggesting that there is a major wave of departures -- just a few early warning signs. Mac OS X is clearly the laptop OS of choice at O'Reilly conferences, and as some have noted, it's a super choice for those who want both desktop apps and a familiar UNIX development environment. (It's still my personal choice.)
2. Whether Ubuntu is a threat to Mac OS X or not, it should certainly be on the radar of the Linux vendors.
There's another point that I didn't make in the original post that I will make now: all of the debate about which operating system will "win" or "is better" is largely irrelevant in the long term. The fundamental platform is changing. The internet, not the device, is the platform, and "software above the level of a single device" is the new norm.
All of the new killer apps (almost all of which are internet apps, from Google to eBay to Skype), and they are largely agnostic as to what operating system you happen to be running.
It's a very competitive industry again, and everything is up for grabs. In an unsettled market like this, anything can happen, and companies need to be alert to competition from unexpected directions.
[07.03.06 06:35 PM]
Indeed when comparing to other Linux distributions, Ubuntu enjoys far more attention then others; however, this article astonishes me much that the analysis is based on a game!
I have had personal experience with that yahoo buzz game. At the earlier days it is enjoyable, however later this virtual market is growing full of cheaters who create thousands of fake accounts and artificially inflate certain markets so they rise and drop several hunderd percents of price within, say, 30 minutes. And this game is used as a supporting evidence! Ha!
[07.03.06 06:52 PM]
I agree that this is an interesting metric to look at, but I'm a little concerned as to why these people are switching platforms. They seem to be focueed on an overall strategy of lock-in that I don't believe Apple has ever espoused. All of these people have complained about DRM and file format issues which are universal to the industry. I am tempted to say: "You can run, but you can't hide," but I don't think it's that simple.
There is a tendency for we geek types to oversimplify and generalize to substantiate our points. I feel like this might be part of the reasoning behind these folks switching to Ubuntu. Linux has come a long way, but it is subject to the same market forces that MacOS and Windows are. There is no vacuum here where somehow Linux gets out scott free.
I will personally stick with OSX and will remain happy. Cory and the others will switch to Ubuntu and undoubtedly find a brief solace from the issues that they say they are worried about. These things are all fine.
As for the Radar, I think Tim's point is valid and deserves notice within O'Reilly for their future activities. Apple has nothing to lose at this point. And from what I know of Apple they do notice this kind of stuff. I also know that Ubuntu has been on the radar at several Linux vendors for quite a while as a potential competitor in the desktop space.
[07.03.06 07:02 PM]
Abel.hk -- The more interesting part of the buzz game to me is the bottom third of the graph. That shows the actual search volume on Yahoo! While people might game "the game", gaming the Yahoo! search volume is a very different proposition.
Of course, the Yahoo! search population is very different from Google, in our experience. It skews more consumer, while Google skews more technical.
And as noted in the post, we aren't yet prepared to say that search volume actually predicts trends. The point of the game is to watch this data over time, and only if it does turn out to be predictive, to take the data more seriously.
We're still in the early stages of learning how to let the internet tell us stories about what we collectively are thinking. It's a new frontier for opinion research.
[07.03.06 07:08 PM]
I do think this is the beginning of a serious trend (and I say this not only because I was thinking of it myself ;). I suspect many a geek moved to OS X a few years ago b/c linux-as-desktop simply wasn't ready yet. Too much hassle for the payoff; sometimes there is a balance to be walked between adhering to ideals and productivity/practicality and lots of geeks decided OS X was the better compromise: unix underpinnings with a UI you couldn't laugh at.
I abandoned my own two-year experiment with Linux about a year before Ubuntu came to the fore. At this point, it (linux/gnome/ubuntu) is now ready for prime time, for most geeks' uses.
Over the next two, three years things will stratify into three clear groups: windows for the masses, os x for candy-minded graphic/web designers and linux for the properly oss-wired code monkey.
The trend is beginning, but it's not something Apple needs to fear b/c the geek market is no longer (if it ever really was) its target market. It was ever the average consumer who is ignorant of (and couldn't care less about) the unix underside. So the drift is limited. Microsoft should be concerned before Apple.
As for mathew's comment earlier, it only shows your ignorance/youth. It is more than the counterculture aspect -- these two guys were with apple when its popularity was well higher than it is today.
[07.03.06 07:11 PM]
p.s. I'm pretty sure I'll be trading in my ibook for a SUSE-certified thinkpad before fall.
[07.03.06 08:09 PM]
Cory Doctorow is a jackass.
Only the 2% of Mac users who are total asshats will move over to Linux. Most Mac users don't use Mac because they're asshat geeks, they use it because they're designers and Mac is a superior OS to Microsoft.
This is retarded speculation, basically designed to try to fuck over Apple. Thanks dudes. Way to go.
[07.03.06 08:15 PM]
Lets get real. Anyone who read their switching stories can see they dying to go Linux/Open Source anyway. The silly complaints about Apple "locking up" their day are the giveaway. Your average user does not yet want to mess around with admining their personal machine including long time Unix weenies like me. They sure don't want to do apt get for their apps. There are just too many advatnages to the Apple hardware/OS combination and the very high quality of Mac software. There is nothing magical about Ubuntu btw. Great OS for sure but not any better than existing Linux offerings other than the catchy name. I'm quite sure Apple has nothing to worry about.
[07.03.06 08:31 PM]
"As for mathew's comment earlier, it only shows your ignorance/youth."
That was a really dumb thing to say.
[07.03.06 09:26 PM]
You could compare Linux to Harley-Davidsons before the 80s. They were great signs of freedom and rebellion, but you spent four hours working on them for every hour riding them. Finally, Harley looked at the Japanese bikes and realized people in general want something reliable and nice to look at. They changed(as Apple did?), and by the 90s were the bike to have. Meanwhile Linux is looking like Triumph bikes!
[07.03.06 09:47 PM]
Those of you who are arguing about the "common man" switching to Ubuntu are missing the point. When powerful, very public members of the Internet community begin to switch to Linux, it signals that Apple has finally jumped the shark with their ridiculous bifurcated attitude toward open source. Eventually it will trickle down to the masses.
The height of hypocrisy is to publically espouse an open architecture for the software that runs the Internet and our lives, and then to pay through the nose for the privilege of being a victim of Apple's DRM and lock in. I wonder how many of the people who are defending Apple in this thread would also defend Microsoft's efforts to keep their Office data file formats baroque or closed. Both Apple and Microsoft are relics of the last century.
[07.03.06 09:56 PM]
I realize alpha geeks aren't big on thrift, but no one has mentioned cost. I would think it matters to some people.
Here's my story. I can blame my Linux experimentation on Second Life. I use an old redhat server via CLI at work, but my home machine was a G3 iMac. (I replace computers every 5 to 7 years). Then I discovered SL at the beginning of 2006. My G3 wasn't going to run it. My options were
1) Buy a mini for $500. Hope SL ran on the barely fast enough processor and ATI card. If it didn't there was no way around it.
2) Build a linux box. SL was getting ready to release an alpha client. For the cost of a mini, I could assemble a system that clearly met the SL spec. If it didn't work, I could fall back to XP.
Even though I had never assembled a PC before, I went out and bought components. I ended up with Ubuntu since I had some install cd's sitting around from a previous episode of "I'm going to try installing this on an old machine."
SL worked and I upgraded to dapper this month, The Linux box is now my machine and the old iMac is now my wife's (we had shared). To be fair, I probably use the linux box because the processor is much faster than the G3, but I love the software choices.
Not that Linux is perfect. I put an AMD 64 bit build on the machine, which means I can't get a Flash player. My other complaint is for Steve Jobs. Despite several attempts at a workaround, I cannot get my Linux machine to talk to my iPods.
[07.03.06 10:23 PM]
Hey, if they want to switch, thats fine by me. I read both of their blog posts, and pretty much found their arguments unconvincing at best. How much of an idiot do you have to be to believe that ANY content created today will still be "usable in 50 years"? And your "fair use" rights are limited by law, not by Apple. And do we want to talk about the quality of OSS versus Apple's product line? I mean, really? Firefox is clunky, and doesn't render half as nicely as Safari or Webkit. Camino is cool, but buggy. Thunderbird is slow-running, bloated, and sports a ton of corruption problems. Sunbird isn't reliable. VLC doesn't have half the feature set of Quicktime Pro, and offers some pretty ugly playback.
And lets not get into Linux. I work in both OS's...I'm a filmmaker and graphic designer. What person is stupid enough to compare Linux's range of professional apps with Apples library? Cinelerra vs. Final Cut Pro? Jahshaka vs. Shake? Audacity or Ardour vs. Logic? S5 vs. Keynote? And let's not forget Apple's 3rd party developers...GIMP vs. Photoshop? Inkscape vs. Illustrator? Scribus vs. In Design? Nvu vs. GoLive or Dreamweaver? OpenOffice vs. MS Office? And I could go on and on.
Yeah...you pay for your software on a Mac, but you're paying for 10 times as much functionality, stability, and reliability. Linux and the OSS community make great apps with some serious drawbacks for anyone who uses a computer as a tool in a non-computer field. In order to match Apple's functionality in Linux, you need to drop significantly more money on top-shelf, commercial-grade apps, like Avid.
Finally, lets talk about elegance. Some people complain about the inconsistencies in Apple's inteface design, but at least its only cosmetic. The inconsistencies in design organization across Linux apps is a nightmare. The controls always feel clunky and inelegant. The themes are a joke staright out of 1995. And I could go on.
I gave Linux a go, but I was no where near as productive as I am in OSX, and the results of my work were significantly compromised by using less-than-adequate OSS tools in Linux.
Maybe someday that will chnage. We'll just have to wait and see.
[07.03.06 10:48 PM]
Cory Doctorow is a jackdaw, always attracted by bright shiny objects.
[07.03.06 10:57 PM]
I switched from OS X to Ubuntu weeks ago and have not looked back. Even on the same hardware, Ubuntu is faster, surprisingly easier to use in many ways, and I have found the Linux community to be far more helpful and friendly than the Mac community Just reading some of the idiotic reactions on the various boards reinforces the biggest problem with Apple is that like the old Amiga it has become more of a cult than an actual product worth using any longer.
[07.03.06 11:27 PM]
I dont see any real advantage (exept maybe playing World of Warcraft) of MacosX to Unix (i prefere Gentoo but thats a detail) and im switched nearly completly. But this is more due to the fact that apple switched their CPU to the FUD based x86 stuff. With this switch they lost me as a Customer and as this fact i also have to switch the OS, and there the onloy choice existing is Linux. Unfortunatly its now getting quite expensive to circumvent the x86 Monopolised (and so uninnovative and futureless) Market.
[07.03.06 11:30 PM]
The funniest thing about this is reading all the Mac users gripping on every site carrying this. Lash out, worried Mac snobs, keep lashing out. These people obviously feel threatened enough that it's causing them to blow a gear and start trying to belittle the messengers with things like "I don't write about buying bagels, why should these guys write about switching OS's?" or "no one knows who these guys are anyway." Uh, apparently YOU do. My guess is if MP, CD, et al were switching to rather than from Macs you'd be the first in line with the "attaboys."
[07.03.06 11:34 PM]
James Ryan, good luck. I tried the switch, and it simply didn't take. In fact, I took a serious speed hit when it came to high-level photo-processes and video and audio rendering. I also found that ALSA is a load of garbage as the underpining of an audio system, and that most of the Linux codecs weren't on par with their Mac and Windows counterparts. I aslo was increasingly frustrated by the rudimentary nature of many libraries we take for granted (a la Flash, mpeg4, Quicktime, Real, etc.) While we're on the subject, library management on Ubuntu is a ryal pain in the ass. For example, Cinelerra and Cinepaint both require the same version of openexr on the PPC, but they each require a different iteration of the library, and the libararies are in conflict. So, you have to choose your tool, becasue they won't co-exist on one box.
Finally, none of the "professional" deisgn apps conform to the formats used in the pirnting industry, and the CMYK definitions are actually approximations since very few OSS development teams can afford to pay Pantone for the library. That translates into bad color reproduction. Even those apps that deliver PDFs are poluted with artifacts on press. If all you do is cruise the web, send emails, and take a few photos here and there, you'll do fine with Linux. Unless you're in web development (not to be confused with web design), because then Linux is one hell of a platform.
Otherwise...I'll take a pass. The quality of my work is too important to me.
[07.03.06 11:38 PM]
I think people are reading a bit too much into this OS X to Ubuntu switching. Sure, a couple of prominent, long-time Mac users are moving to Linux, which is interesting. But how many more people are moving from Windows to Mac every DAY? I don't hear anyone saying "a couple of prominent life-long Windows users have switched to Mac...should MS be paying attention because Windows might be doomed?"
I'm exaggerating, of course, but you get my point. Mac to Linux switching is less common, so it gets more press attention. Apple claims that 50% of its customers today are Windows users buying their first Mac. I imagine since that's a much more common thing, it's not reported on as widely.
[07.04.06 12:36 AM]
Canary in a coal mine indeed. If Cory Doctorow does something I can feel safe about doing the opposite. For all his talk of freedom he just comes off like a spoiled elite.
No problems sticking with OSX for me. Going back to Linux on a laptop, or for any client side work besides network and server admin would be like chopping off 6 of my fingers and one thumb. I like having stable printing, fonts and clipboard, much less apps that dont get in my way and let me do what I want to. Oh, and drivers. I like drivers.
[07.04.06 12:46 AM]
Hilarious, all this publicity about people switching from Mac to Ubuntu all of a sudden. I've been using Ubuntu (and before that Gentoo) on my Macs (iBooks and Powerbooks) for a few years now. Dual boot, but I hardly ever use OSX. Used the get funny looks (if not outright accusations of herecy) at conferences and meetings from the same kind of people that are now making lots of noise about switching.
Actually been thinking about switching to OSX because my current (webdevelopment) job requires a lot of multimedia support...
Whatever the future may hold, my next computer will a) be an Apple and b) run Linux, unless those should become mutually exclusive.
Of course, one of the main reasons I will continue to buy Apple is that when I need hardware-support that isn't in Linux, I don't have to boot f***ing Windows...
[07.04.06 01:01 AM]
You always seem to get the following pattern in these kind of 'switcher' stories:
Switcher:"I've switched from OSA to OSB because of reasons X,Y and Z"
OSA user:"But OSB can't do T,U or V well enough for my work! I don't want to switch to OSB!"
The OSA user is of course completely missing the point: The switcher has their own personal preference terrain, for which they've decided OSB is the better match.
The switcher is *not* suggesting that his terrain is the same as everyone else's, nor that OSB is automatically a better match for other people's preference terrains. Even so, OSA users seem to feel threatened anyway, and rush to justify their choice of OSA.
[07.04.06 01:30 AM]
Phil: bingo.
It's a question, really, of how many people OSB-types represent.
[07.04.06 01:37 AM]
I've always used Linux but it's still as much of a tweakers and fiddlers OS as ever. I wouldn't dream of trying to use it when I actually need to get something done.
Great to mess about with though.
[07.04.06 01:58 AM]
"me" said:
"As for mathew's comment earlier, it only shows your ignorance/youth."That was a really dumb thing to say.
why? It's true, the Mac has been way more popular than it is today. Macintosh market share peaked at 12% in 1993 [arstechnica article]. better ax someone, son.
[07.04.06 02:56 AM]
Wow, we've finally found two humans who are swithing *away* from the Mac. Let's use thousands of column inches writing about them!
[07.04.06 03:07 AM]
I really like Ubuntu but I think about buying a Mac because I have to do DVD Authoring (which is not very convenient with dvdauthor etc) and multitrack-recording/sequencing.
The biggest problem for me and the only reason for me to use MS Windows is that there is no convenient audio stack for LINUX. JACK is far too complicated, especially when running USB or FIREWIRE interfaces.
I own a AUDIOPHILE USB interface and it works fine with ESD or alsa, but I gave up on running JACKD with it.
There are great sequencers like Rosegarden or Ardour, but they depend on JACK.
If there´s a convenient way to use more audio/video editing applications I´ll finally switch to LINUX.
[07.04.06 04:53 AM]
Who cares? Really.
It was about time Doctorow ate his own dog food anyway. Inbetween big upping all his mates no one give a fuck about.
[07.04.06 07:05 AM]
I prefer MacOS because I use Mathematica, the superior computer algebra system, and this does not run well in Linux, or Windows.
[07.04.06 07:34 AM]
Canary in a coal mine? Puh-lease. Nobody cares. For those few who do it will be forgotten by next week. As far as alpha nerds go I feel safe doing the complete opposite.
[07.04.06 08:46 AM]
Ubuntu has great potential as a desktop operating system, but open source projects have been notoriously bad at attracting usability and design talent. Apple can afford to put these folks on the payroll and thus continues to have the upperhand on its operating system experience for consumers. I don't expect Ubuntu to have nearly as good of a desktop experience for years to come.
I am running Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro with Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows running in Parallels, when needed.
[07.04.06 09:01 AM]
I am amazed at the cluelesness of a lot of the people posting in here. The reasons for shifting are real, rational and important to some people. They are realisations that have come out of hard won experience. It has little to do with the products and a lot to do with the way apple works as a business.
I see a lot of people jumping up and down because linux does not not have highend graphics and multimedia software (well actually it has got quite a bit of highend gear - its the middle ground that is sorely lacking). The thing is if you don't need these sorts of tools or don't have 1000s of dollars to spend on them then this is kind of irrelevant.
Openess is important. Its just not today important or next week important. You however would be a fool to ignore it all together.
In the short term I don't think it will be so much of a loss for Apple as it is an endorsement for Ubuntu. The medium to long term is much more uncertain however.
[07.04.06 10:18 AM]
I believe that what Mark, and Cory have been saying may have an effect, but perhaps only among the more "tech savvy". Cory is a member of the EFF meaning his words (despite what you think of his SF Novels) will carry some clout. Although I don't know much about Mark Pilgrim, I did read his
" rel="nofollow">'when the bough breaks' blog entry
...and I feel he made some valid points... His main concern is that he won't be able to access the data he has created in the years to come. He then jumps to the conclusion that this problem will be solved by using Open Source Software.
The main point I took away from his article is that we as consumers, need to PUSH for open document standards. I have many documents I wrote in high school, and first year university that I can't open anymore because I don't have a version of word perfect that I can install on my Mac, and Word can't seem to figure out what to do with them. Will the same thing happen with everything I've created in Word in several years? And how about my iPhoto Library? Sure all the JPG's will be there however what about the metadata, and time and effort I've put into sorting them?
If apple pushed to create Open Document standards they could continue to lead the way in innovation however ensure the interoperability with other vendors, and relieve my worries about what will happen to all of the content I've created in the future...
[07.04.06 10:28 AM]
Danni Coy, are you suggesting that our reasons for staying with Apple are any less rational or important than yours for switching to Ubuntu? I couldn't care less about other people's perceptions of Apple's corporate behaviour. I don't switch to Ubuntu because my computer is a tool, not a toy, and I need an OS and software that works. Apple works. Linux doesn't, unless you're willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars. If someone else wants to tinker-around with lesser tools, they can be my guest. I've got work to do...and a picnic to get ready for. So, happy 4th.
[07.04.06 11:56 AM]
Two people do not a movement make.
[07.04.06 12:05 PM]
Hey Tim; if you think the the market will bear a "Switching to Ubuntu" book, I'd be happy to help out. Working on Ubuntu Hacks was a total blast. :) I switched off of OS X to Ubuntu (mostly, anyway, I still have a couple of OS X boxes around) when Warty Warthog released, and I haven't looked back. OS X isn't bad, but the options Ubuntu and Linux provide me I just can't get anywhere else. I'm at the point where I can do everything under Ubuntu that I did under OS X.
Yes, it's Linux, so it does require some messing around at the command line to get everything working just so. Like all good things, though, it's worth the effort.
[07.04.06 12:44 PM]
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Ubuntu%2C+RedHat+%7C+%28red+hat%29&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
google trends I what I like to use for these types of comparisons, I can't wait until it "graduates"
[07.04.06 01:52 PM]
Here's another google trend certain to inflame the discussion:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Linux%2C+%22Mac+OS+X%22%2C+%22Windows+XP%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
[07.04.06 04:51 PM]
While hardly a star blogger, I've also switched from OSX to Ubuntu. My reasons were simple, I simply fell in love with it after installing it on my G5.
As a result I chose not to buy a MacBook as I'd planned, and bought with a laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled (from http://system76.com).
Apple has a bit to learn from Ubuntu:
Systemwide upgrades - Every application, right down to the kernel at the click of a button.
Virtual desktops out-of-the-box
A real Uninstaller. OSX has so many duplicate system files all over the place.
Cost free upgrades!!!!
Ubuntu is faster on the same hardware.
Unless you're a Photoshop junkie, there's really little reason to hold onto a Mac these days (and even then Crossover Office will run it apparently).
Even my iPod works fine with Ubuntu. I'm not a very tech-savvy user, I just want my damn computer all to myself ;)
Bye Apple!
/me waves
[07.04.06 05:05 PM]
I was a UNIX guy before moving to Windows and now I am thinking of moving to Ubuntu as well. (I was thinking of doing this before reading your post btw).
UBUNTU FOREVER!!!
[07.04.06 05:14 PM]
So, if OS X is steady, and Windows XP and Linux are trending down, I'm wondering what's filling in the empty space. Does it just mean that people are getting used to XP and Linux and don't need to search on them? Or is VMS making a comeback?
It'd be nice to see what (if anything identifiable) caused the peaks, particularly the one at the start of the fourth quarter of 2005. The time points that are shown don't seem to have much to do with the trend lines (with the possible exception of F).
It's hard to interpret this without more detail on what sorts of searches we're seeing.
[07.04.06 05:25 PM]
WOW, two or three nerds have left OSX for Ubunctu! Yep, that certainly explains why MacBook sales have skyrocketed so high recently.
Now, if Apple is lucky, maybe two or three more nerds will leave and Mac sales will increase all the more then the projected 39% increase recently posted?
Please: post more articles like the above; I can always use a good laugh!
[07.04.06 05:26 PM]
I am a musician a with experience setting up and using Windows, OSX and Linux machines.
I have noticed a few of the "if you use it for music, stick to Windows or Mac" type comments here and I thought I would share my experience.
Setting up OSX for music is a no brainer. Everything just works.
Setting up XP requires inserting this CD, removing it, inserting that CD, rebooting, updating that, etc, etc.
XP is painful, and even once it is set up, I have found I get lower latency from the 2.6.15.25(?) ubuntu kernel than from XP using the same hardware (MAudio Delta44, Edirol UM-2). I have heard similar reports about MythTV versus Windows Media Center, and I think it may have something to do with Windows enabling too many useless services by default, but I really couldn't be bothered finding out.
Ubuntu did require some work to get real time audio going. I think I copied about ten lines from a web page to a terminal and hit enter. To install software, rather than buy and insert CDs, I checked boxes in the package manager and pressed "apply" to download and install. Having previously tried debian and hacked at it for hours/days, I am amazed at how easily and well everything works.
The Mac option is really nice until you look at the price tag. To buy all the software I need for quality realtime audio mixing/processing costs thousands. That's on top of the over-inflated mac hardware/OS combo.
Ubuntu is a different mind set from either mac or windows for audio production, but it's no longer a nerd only domain and everything I have tried to do so far is as easy if not easier than windows or mac. Add to this the fact that there is a studio version of ubuntu in the works....
So if you use it for music, stick to Ubuntu or OSX, the latter only if you have deep pockets.
As for games, I'll be trying out some opengl windows games with wine next....
[07.04.06 05:48 PM]
Pak99 -- Not at all your reasons for staying with apple are perfectly reasonable and rational. There are tools that are available or work better on Mac and that is a fine reason to stay with the platform if you really need those tools. That is a whats best for today decision and sometimes we need to make those.
If like the gentleman who are switching you didn't have any pressing need for the tools that are only available or work so much better on a Mac would you see the situation differently?
[07.04.06 06:25 PM]
S Leonard:
Have you tried Freewheeling (ubuntu)? It is a hell of an application once you figure it out, especially in a live setting.
My take on Linux Audio - (I do do audio work under linux)...
Midi is not really up to an acceptable standard Rosegarden is close but needs track automation.
Loop compositors (like soundtrack on Mac) are not really stable or mature enough to be useful (so far I have looked at LMMS and wired)
Ardour is a very decent multi-tracker and well beyond toy status. No midi is a killer for a lot of musitions (especially those who haven't figured out how jack works ;) )
Hydrogen is pretty much as good a drum machine as one could ask for.
There are at least a few nice softsynths.
Jack I believe will be a killer app if a few of the rough edges can be smoothed out. Easy to use Session saving and reloading is essential. Also I would like to see the syncronisation between jack enabled apps to be more comprehensive.
Patchage is a really good manager for wiring jack apps together - especially when your setup starts to get a little more complicated.
JackRack lets you stick effects pretty much anywhere in your jack wiring. Creox is also quite good but not as flexible.
and finally FMIT (really nice instrument tuner) rounds out the utilities.
Is it worth the effort - depends on what you are doing and whether you are going to focus on what you can do or can't do.
I use it to record multiple inputs with effects and quite involved looping live. (I am currently using a presonus firebox).
[07.04.06 06:42 PM]
To the user who claimed that Mathematica does not work as well in Linux as it does in OS X: hogwash! Mathematica works just as well in Linux and Windows, as it does in OS X. I have used Mathematica on all three platforms. In fact, the linux kernel arguably provides better performance than either Windows or OS X. You may prefer the look of OS X's window manager, but the underlying functionality is the same. For OS X users who doubt the performance advantage of linux here is a link: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/. His measurements have been much argued about but they appear valid.
[07.04.06 07:11 PM]
One other thing about Doctorow, as an Apple shareholder I think he is exactly the wrong kind of customer I'd ever want as an advocate. He bitches far too much. Personally he is the reason I wouldnt give to the EFF in the past. Now that he's no longer an employee, my wallet has opened.
I also do pro audio production. I've looked at what linux has to offer, it just doesnt compare with whats on the market for Windows or OSX. Danni Coy spelled it out well, but until linux has something as good as Logic and works with my Mackie Control seamlessly, I'm not going to bother wasting any more time with it.
PS I've been using linux for servers since 95, I have no problems with it for that, but it aint the workstation for me.
[07.04.06 08:14 PM]
I too am swapping from OS X to Ubuntu, but I can't say it is totally easy. The reasons for me have to do with Apple's move away from open source when they moved to Intel. Though it hasn't been easy, it is getting easier with each new release of Ubuntu, and each move of Apple away from open source.
[07.04.06 09:22 PM]
"Geeks" switching to Ubuntu? Who cares who uses what. Your computer does what it does for you, for your needs. If I drive a BMW to work every day, and my coworker drives thier Honda, we still get there. It seems to me that for every step that Apple gets ahead, there is someone that wants to take a bite out of them, put it in an article in a paper or on a website. I think that Mac users should be a little bit more open about why they have stuck with the company so long, and talk about the good things they do, like being devoted to environmental awarenessl the why and how they continue to innovate., A company that started in a garage, and is basically the beginning of personal computing as we know it should deserve a little credit these days. Apple is a company focused on customer service in thier retail stores, they offer a service where you can learn anything from how to move a mouse (for those retirees, to learning how to use Shake or any of the consumer or Pro applications that the company makes) for $99 bucks a year called ProCare. They want to make things easier for the general public to use thier computers. Why would Apple be concerned with a few people that want to make things harder on themselves like the person that posted before me.
[07.04.06 10:01 PM]
Wow, this is very interesting indeed. Seems many folks may be making the move, or considering the move, from their previous main OS to Linux.
As an avid Windows user since Windows 3.1x (and a Linux user as well), I have recently moved 98% of my computing to Linux (dual boot with XP Pro) since the WGA Notification Tool fiasco.
[07.04.06 10:05 PM]
I'm another counter-example to this supposed "trend." I recently switched from Linux to OS X. I had been using Linux since the 1990's and was at one time a very big booster of it. My