Just kidding. Sort of. Switched back to Mac this past summer and it’s great. Except for the part about half my brain being removed due to my inability to figure out the OSX interface conventions after a ten year absence (just learned how to save to subfolders tonight).

Another great option is Wubi. It lets you install Ubuntu Linux as a file on your Windows partition—if you decide you don’t like it, just delete the file and everything’s back the way it was before.

My free, unsolicited advice is to set up a VMware server (it’s free) and try out Linux as a virtual machine on your current computer. The free VMs that are available have a pretty wide range of usability and a wide range of sources—but Linux is kinda like that anyhow.

By the way, Steve K, as a general thing, advocacy works better when it isn’t structured as “Your choices suck…”

I don’t actually want to. I have a severe case of depression and have too many problems with routine life making me feel sad. My computer is a tool, and what I care about is that it work like the tools I use in the kitchen and elsewhere in my home, to help me do the things I want to do comfortably and without hassle. I’m a Mac user because Apple hardware and operating system and OSX software do that best for me; friends of mine use different hardware and software as suits them.

As a young man I put a lot more time into my computers more or less as ends in themselves, tinkering with the hardware, tuning the OS and apps, the whole deal. If I were 21 again I’d likely be a fairly hardcore Linux user now. But I’m 42, and computers aren’t my job. I can compile kernels; I just don’t want to. I can set up monitors for nightly updates and patch or recompile programs; I just don’t want to. I like that my computer lets me put more time into the things that I’m actually interested in, in ways that match my physical needs (adjustments to compensate for optic nerve damage, for instance; OSX is way ahead on handicapped accessibility issues, or rather for my issues, just as Windows is the best place for speech recognition for individual users) and my aesthetics.

If I found myself treating my computer as an object of any more intense or more complicated emotions than the appreciation I feel for all well-designed tools, I would promptly ditch it and go find a different computer that didn’t do that.

It looks to me like a region dedicated to universal values like truth, beauty, freedom, and cooperation, values that transcend petty local concerns like a particular corporation’s bottom line.

Less wine next Thanksgiving, friend.

Ben, I had that region menu pop up once when I was using a Mac, and it didn’t let me select the region code I wanted: Region 0. I don’t think selecting Region 0 is immoral. It looks to me like a region dedicated to universal values like truth, beauty, freedom, and cooperation, values that transcend petty local concerns like a particular corporation’s bottom line. I think a more interesting question than the morality of Region 0 is whether it wrong to give your money to the enemies of Region 0, to what Ben Bagdikian calls “the Media Monopoly”? The answer to that question should be clear by now: at no point in time should you give any more of your money to the Media Monopoly. They take it and pollute the public sphere w/ sensationalistic trash like Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney.