Open at Adobe

There are a couple of interesting blogs out today that are around Linux (on the Desktop) and Mac OSX.

It starts with this post on OSWeekly.com.

Matt Asay, in his blog, The Open Road, discusses choosing between Linux and Mac.

Dan Reisinger, in his blog, NewsBlog, mentions it in Linux and its identity crisis.

First, let me point  out that I have used a Mac ever since killing a Dell 5 times in an eleven month period.  Nothing to do with the operating system, but a whole series of interesting problems, like the system refusing to believe it was undocked, or the keyboard splitting in half. Needless to say, I was quite pleased to be able to move to the Mac, and with the Intel based ones, am quite capable of having the best of all worlds. (There is a lot to be said for virtual machines and desktop software, as I first stated back in 2001.)

Dan (who I don't know) offers that while Mac is maybe more friendly, Linux doesn't need to approach the friendliness market. Ouch. Without the widespread market adoption, there are a number of interesting software products that just won't make it on to the platform, nor will there be relevant adoption of the open source offering to drive said market. And yeah, there are work around's, but honestly, how many people want to install QEMU to run on KVM under Linux 2.6.20? But, as Dan puts it,maybe that shouldn't be the Linux market. Linux, to paraphrase, is all about the advanced user experience; leave that feel good stuff to the pablum providers like Microsoft and Apple.

Matt (who I do know) states that Apple may well be the best of both, under the hood tinkering and best of breed creativity  software.  (Now, if we could just do something about that dratted Office for the Mac product). I tinker on my Mac all the time, I keep a console window open on the dashboard just for that reason. I may not hack to the level of Linux (e.g. I wouldn't consider replacing the scheduler, to use another recent Linux crisis, but hen,my Mac is my production system.)

Honestly, though, what's the real fuss? Maybe they aren't the same thing, but then, shouldn't Linux reach for the larger desktop market?

Short answer... yes.

Skipping virtualization, there are still any number of software packages that make it impossible to shift my family over to pure Linux. And yes, before the hate mail comes in, I know there are alternatives. It's not me that is the headache, but the other, non-tech types (though they themselves are pretty darn technical).

So, while I can state that Linux is a great answer, it's not the only answer.  And I can state that its not only the ease of use that is missing, its the key applications.  and without a larger market share on the desktop, those applications have no need to support Linux.

So, yeah, I do want my Mac friendliness and functionality. My wife wants her Family Tree Maker, and my son wants his games.  And all of those are enabled by Linux reaching out to the broader "make it easy" market.