I’ve been a linux user for the last decade. More, even. I’ve had brief encounters with Windows, most of them horrific, all of them resulting in me eventually giving up and going back to linux, and none of them in the last 5+ years. I hear Windows is getting better, but as we say in Sweden, “bränt barn skyr elden*,” and I’ve come to the realization that I will most likely never use Windows again, even though I’m pleased to hear it’s shapening up after all these years.

One might say I’m a hard-to-please customer. Some might even accuse me of being the worst kind ever. I whine about things that don’t do their jobs, and even if they’re open source and free as in liberty, it doesn’t mean I won’t complain when they can’t do their jobs properly. I recently spew pus over PulseAudio and Ubuntu 9.10 — the worst experience since 1990 — and I stand by what I said, but in the end, I love linux, and it’s unfair to blame it all on the system, when there are so many factors out of the developers’ control.

Hardware manufacturers couldn’t give less of a fuck about linux, unless they’re making server-specific hardware.
Software manufacturers couldn’t give less of a fuck about linux, unless they’re making server-specific software.

It makes for a really ugly scene, sometimes, and people have to jump through living lions while spinning firey globes of radioactive customs officers through quality assurance managers. It’s messy, and it takes hours and pain, lots of both.

And this is an ongoing perpetual circle, where new hardware and new software clashes and collides over and over, year in and year out, in the uphill battle that is the linux desktop scene.

One of the most annoying things about being a linux user isn’t necessarily that hardware and software manufacturers piss in your corn flakes. It can be really frustrating when you’re struggling to get something working and someone goes, “Why are you using that piece of shit anyway. Linux sucks man. Just install Windows.”

Twitch. I mean, dude. Twitch. I don’t think there’s anyone out there as defensive and protective of their operating system as the linux user. We’re the first to take offense when someone tells us linux sucks. You tell a Windows user that Windows sucks and the most probable reply you’ll get is, “Uh-huh, I know that.**”

Sigh. So retarded. Well, I’ve gotten better about that, and these days I don’t have an agenda against anyone. I just know what works for me and what doesn’t, and whatever works for you, you should stick to. I still get picked on for my choice of OS though, playfully of course, and so the last couple of weeks my guilty pleasure has been to say things like:

“Damn, handbrake seems full of win. And it’s available for linux too. (And Windows, but who cares..)”

on Twitter. Which is fed to Google’s Buzz, which appears for some of the people who tend to poke fun at me. Now I’m poking back.

Joke aside, it’s interesting how the tables have turned. One of my best friends who’s a hardcore Windows user (and a skilled tech guy at that) and I have been discussing the whole linux/Windows deal for more or less ten years, and suddenly I’m waving my i*s around and talking about the innovative and prosperous market, while he’s pointing to Android and upcoming tablets that will potentially turn the tide on Apple’s tidal wave of domination. He’s suddenly wielding the open source cap and I’m wielding the closed source proprietary cap. And it happened overnight! Granted, his change isn’t as dramatic as mine — he’s simply opposed to the Mac experience, and will grab at anything that means not having to use a Mac (including some of the Win7 devices that are closing in on the market). In my case it’s a little more extreme, but in the end, I’m just excited about a rare opportunity. In the end, I do not believe the i*s will control the market, but I believe they will lead the way, and I’m excited to be a part of that process, even if it’s an unsignificant part.

—

(* “burnt child fears fire”)

(** except for that one guy in Wisconsin who got real offensive about Windows when *I* said it sucked; never mind me being a hypocrite, but I was completely taken by surprise by this reaction, and immediately labeled him a confused patriot thinking Windows somehow was connected to the pride of America)

Update: timely — MS cancels their “iPad killer”: http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project

Personally I’m the monkey brain blowing type, and I know how bad that sounds. I used MS-DOS and then migrated, unwillingly, to Windows, and from there I bounced back and forth between linux, which was a reeking pile of clusterfuck poured delicately over a yummy-looking pile of maggot-excrement and Windows. Still, linux did beat Windows even then, because Windows back then was about as useful as a web server made up of glued-together sheep wool and saw dust, with no ethernet port, and so finally linux is where I remained. Mac OS was like an unfathomable, lurking beast in the village marsh — I knew about it, I’d even seen it occasionally, touched it once or twice, but … as a kid I happened to like games, and Macs just didn’t have much of that back then.

This was back in the ’90s though. Ten years later, I find myself running Ubuntu 9.10, released about 4 months ago, and it feels like I installed Windows 3.1 all over again. The new pulseaudio service that is supposed to handle what ALSA cannot, is filled with wagons after wagons filled to the brim with stinking diarrhea, stretching to the horizon and beyond, steadily and irrevocably being injected into my blood stream. It – literally – fucks – with – everything – I – do. It fucks with mplayer, it fucks with Firefox, it fucks with World of Warcraft, it fucks with Skype, it fucks with Ventrilo. It literally clusterfucks itself into fuckblivion, and it just keeps on fucking itself like a horny teenager on prom night. Pardon the French. It has, for some ungodly reason, a new input method handler (for non-alphabetic languages, like Japanese), which resulted in me having to help my fiancée rip it out and put the old one back in because the new one — you guessed it — sucked balls and worked nothing like what a Japanese person would expect.*

And then on the far, far other corner of the spectrum I am simultaneously using my new MacBook Pro and iPhone, learning the ropes of Xcode and reading up on iPhone development in general. It’s cool. It’s closed. Oh, so closed. It puts me, the soulless donkey, between two stacks of hay into which the disastrous organizational abilities of Open Source has peed in the one, and the detrimental-to-evolution, devastating-to-our-rights Apple has peed in the other. Neither pile looks very convincing right about now, but hunger is the greatest spice of all, or so they say.

A fellow developer sent me a coupon to get his game on my iPhone to test it out right before it was going to be shipped, and then I got “this coupon can only be redeemed on the US iPhone Store”. That was the first cultural shock that lead down the path of cultural shocks. To develop for the iPhone I actually have to buy an Apple Developer account for (at the cheapest) $99 a year. It’s unthinkable for an old commie linux user like myself that I’d actually have to pay money to help them make their product better, by adding content to it, but it’s Apple, and they are in their own playing field.

Actually, I was convinced a long time ago that the whole closed off, shut off, hold my ears and screw my rights deal was a failure, as proven by Microsoft time and time again, but seeing Apple now, today, was as big an eye-opener as was the first time I ever visited the (North American) South — I’d been convinced from childhood that religion was being phased out in the world, in favor of reason…

Ultimately, I’m conflicted. As I grow more accustomed to the antics of my MacBook (and indeed, to a non-Mac user, there are quite a few, like the unwillingness to maximize, for one), I grow impatient with the bullshit of my main desktop (linux) machine, I grow annoyed with the feeling of being chastised and told where to stand and what to do by my Mac, and if there’s one thing I’ve become more aware of, it’s my rights as a user. The iPhone and the upcoming iPad are clearly changing how we think about computers in general, and while half the crowd aren’t half as impressed as Apple wishes they were, there’s such a huge potential in these two devices alone that nothing will be what it used to be by the time they’re old news.

So Apple is the pioneer, and we’re dragged along. I’m excited and, ultimately, conflicted.

(* I’ve seen this before. I’ve been using linux for over 10 years. I’ve seen the pattern. It’s time to stop this retarded behavior, folks. You can’t throw something random into the distribution, release it and “hope for the best”, and then have it actually working better than its counterpart three years later. It’s not acceptable anymore. We’re better than this. But I saw it with Firefox, replacing Mozilla. I saw it with ALSA, replacing OSS. (Fuck, ALSA replacing OSS is even today a big clusterfuck of clusterfucks where people sacrifice baby maggots daily just to get their set up of game + team speak app of choice in place.) And I see it again, with pulseaudio and ibus.)