The OS Wars are over

I’m smugly running ubuntu.

You are missing something Neil. Brooker isn’t part of any breed, Brooker is Brooker. He’s also consistently brilliant.

here here!

(sadly, I think my significant other will be buying me an iphone in about a month. Given that I’m an ATT customer about done with my last contract it makes sense, but still….)

Indeed – long my Brooker continue to be infuriated, with Windows keeping his bile up.

And I’ll continue to read it on my adult’s Fisher-price playcentre aka MacBook.

I saw it the first time round in the Guardian — it gets better with time. It is very funny. I feel sorry for the Vista engineers. (Disclosure: I too am tormented by Vista, trying to avoid it for years, but couldn’t be bothered to argue about the missing, promised XP option on my last laptop). Like the old British Rail (about to return) folks just enjoy kicking it too much.

Also, I was at a small dinner party last year, where the host grabbed a hold of me for about 40 minutes to demonstrate some mac photo album application with face recognition. I can certainly fake enthusiasm for a couple of minutes when necessary, like everybody else, but that was too much, way too much.

That said, Vista was f*cking awful, so I’m going to identify another category of smug users: Technically proficient Windows users who stuck to XP while they waited for Windows 7. I witnessed a few of managerial types insisting on a Vista upgrade against my advice, only to see their performance drop precipitously. This is not simply a perception issue. A PC Magazine benchmark comparison of XP SP3 vs Vista SP1 last year had XP beating Vista on 9 out of 10 benchmark tests.

Electronics is boring. Gadgets are boring. Electronic gadgets are über-boring. It’s time wasted in the pursuit of time, wishfully but never actually, gained.

Electronics is boring. Gadgets are boring. Electronic gadgets are über-boring. It’s time wasted in the pursuit of time, wishfully but never actually, gained.

If I were to write this I figure I’d do it on the side of a tree or something.

Jeesuz, I must really be out of it! I’ve used PCs from early DOS days (not to mention Unix, Xenix, Linux and even OS/2 boxes) and Macs on and off. My main (home) machine has run on Vista for two years without problems. To get equivalent specs on a Mac would require nearly twice my budget. I’m a humble scientist. What are you guys? Architects? Fashion designers? Movie editors? Snobs?

What are you guys? Architects? Fashion designers? Movie editors? Snobs?

I got an exceptional deal on a used machine.

I’m a humble scientist. What are you guys? Architects? Fashion designers? Movie editors? Snobs?

Really? Most of the scientists I know use Macs. These days, when giving a talk at a conference one tends to look out on a sea of Apple logos as people peck away at their laptops while paying only marginal attention to what’s happening in the same room.

Patently ridiculous. This Brooker character may be brilliant but one could never tell it from this bag of barf bytes. Not a hint of anything new or compelling here as re the “OS Wars.” The same bile countless others have spewed non-stop for the last 15 years. As noted above, the linux fanbois easily match their mac cultist counterparts and then some. Many of the comments here reflect the same stale and humourless thinking.

If we’re chatting about Charlie Brooker, let’s also mention this.

“I suppose you could argue that walls are intrinsically better than people at tennis”

Being an IT consultant and (non-evangelical) linux user (mandriva 2010) is a bit like being the only atheist in a room of warring theists, or perhaps the science advocate in a room of climate change denialists. Like science, linux is simply utilitarian, and it’s also free and works painlessly so it’s just not as exciting as the tabloid scare world of Windows (“Danger! Danger! Insecure! Do you really want to do that? The others are all out to get you! Insecure!”) or the “Look at me! Look at me! I’m so sexy! Don’t you think I’m so sexy? Hey look at me again!” world of Macs. And of course the fact that both Windows and Mac OSs are insanely expensive brings cognitive dissonance into play – their users must argue vehemently for them in order to avoid facing the fact that they’ve been conned like complete mugs.

linux is simply utilitarian, and it’s also free and works painlessly

Which version is the least painless?

the non-nerd versions – ubuntu, suze, mandriva

I use the commercial Powerpack version of mandriva 2010 (cost 69 euros) so it has the manufacturer’s commercial driver for my graphics card that looks sharper than anything I see on the PCs or Macs I use at my clients. And I recently test loaded the completely free ubuntu 9.1, openSuze 11.1 and Debian 5 on an oldish Toshiba Satellite laptop and they all looked better than the Windows XP they replaced, so without having investigated too much I’d say most linux distro graphics are as good as you would likely see anywhere. Drivers used to be the big problem with Linux until Vista came along and did driver disaster ripoff on a scale that made solving linux problems seem a real doddle. The worst linux problem now is if you have some specialist software that only runs under Windows – but Macs have the same problem. With linux that is easily solved with a dual boot (which linux always sets up automatically when you install it) or a virtual machine running inside linux. I use both because most of my clients use Windows.

Now two people I respect are telling me I’m missing something. I tried again to no avail. The frustrating thing is that I doubt there is anything anyone can point to that will help me. I can see the jokes: they seem tired and obvious to me. I am no mac evangelist but I am a Terry Pratchett evangelist; I think I’m experiencing something of the same frustration I sometimes get when someone who is intelligent and has a sense of humor just doesn’t ‘get’ TP; only this time I’m the tone-deaf one.

It’s funny though. Like the mouse here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/06/the-openoffice-mouse.html

That’s hilarious, an own goal if ever I saw one. On the other hand who ever uses all those internet buttons on the top of Microsoft keyboards? Like the commenter I use and hate OOo but only half as much as I hate the hideously user-unfriendly MS Office 2007 which has even more useless buttons, icons, panels, etc etc. It’s the software equivalent to those ugly bloated petrol guzzling 1950s US cars with enormous metallic toothy grills, head high tail fins and fox tails on the aerials.

PS Substance Mc, my answer re graphics and fonts is trapped in moderation, something about it obviously looked too much like spam – nothing ever works perfectly in computers or life.

Ceri, isn’t The Dread of Being The Wrong Sort of Person exactly the fear the advertisers are targetting and that Charlie Brooker is satirising? The problem for Microsoft and Apple is that operating systems were pretty much sorted out a long time ago and the only way to keep selling a product that should by now be as exciting as shoe polish is to keep stuffing it up with useless extras on one hand and creating identity warfare advertising on the other. We all sadly to some degree manufacture part of our identity from the products we buy and endorse and the PC/Mac culture war is one of the most pathetic examples of how advertisers manipulate us by inflaming this false sense of identity. I use linux but the linux world is full of micro cults around obscure distros and the last thing many linux geeks want is universal acceptance of linux because they would then lose their sense of embattled specialness, a syndrome that also afflicts some parts of the LGBT community I must add.

This house has 2 PC s running XP, 1 laptop with XP, 1 eeepc running linux, and 1 x 22″ Mac.
The Mac cost more than two new more powerful PCs would have cost. The Mac is reliable and never needs twiddling.

Except I can’t easily upgrade the Mac myself. The DVD/CD recorder /player on the Mac has borked. To get it fixed will cost me nearly the price of a new PC, because it is built in, is a Mac brand (marketting lies) and has to be taken to the store @ min $100 labour.

To replace a PC DVD would cost me around $55 and take me 10 minutes to do myself.

Perhaps not the worst thing about the Mac is the underlying presumption that truth is beauty, and conversely, I originally bought this thing for my elderly mother, for whom its only useful function now is the screen saver, an endless cornucopia of family photos. What sets my teeth on edge is its unrelenting cuteness, dramatization of routine functions, celebratory pentatonic burps and farts, just like my cell phone, most likely not entirely coincidentally.

isn’t The Dread of Being The Wrong Sort of Person exactly the fear the advertisers are targetting and that Charlie Brooker is satirising?

that was my take on it too – and for another bit of parody on the way we are corporate tools, see the Onion’s “Sony Releases New Stupid Piece of Sh*t”

Oh. How arch.

And while we are at it, Moore’s Law say that computers double in power and speed every 18 months. That being the case, why are my computers more sluggish and clunky now than my AT machine 20 years ago?

Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 is not too bad. Except it always tells me that the battery in the eeePC is out of order when I boot the machine.

I tried several flavours of Linux on my Eee and they were all significantly worse (buggy, slow) than a plain WinXP install. Eventually I just gave up and installed Mac OS X on it, which runs delightfully. YMMV. ;)

Eventually I just gave up and installed Mac OS X on it, which runs delightfully.

Hmm. If Mac enthusiasts are monks, what shall we call Hackintosh enthusiasts?

“Except I can’t easily upgrade the Mac myself. The DVD/CD recorder /player on the Mac has borked. To get it fixed will cost me nearly the price of a new PC, because it is built in, is a Mac brand (marketting lies) and has to be taken to the store @ min $100 labour.”

Buy an external USB/Firewire drive. The US Apple Store has one for $119, you can probably get cheaper ones.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/TV638VC/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&mco=MTA4NDkwNDE

I don’t believe that “buy an external drive” is an ideal solution if you bought your iMac to look the way it looks instead of an iMac with another cable poking out to a drive sitting on your desk.

@63,@65, for some reason I’m reminded of 1960s British motorcycle fanboys…

Off-topic, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s published its latest list of university rankings. I think someone here long ago pointed me to a good paper on the difficulty of duplicating the results they’ve achieved based on their own numbers: anyone have a pointer?

On topic, the Macs in the big enclosures (which I prefer to iMacs) are quite wonderfully easy to add or subtract drives, memory or cards from.

@58 Steven Tempting, very tempting but a wee bit too geeky for me (yes, I know this doesn’t make any sense coming from someone who has installed a Linux distribution) :-) .

@steven

Occasionally the Cult of the Apple reminds me of the world in the alternative Simpsons universe where Ned Flanders is the Supreme Leader of the Universe.

sosudiddleme

Linux is a cult as well, it’s only that its followers tend to be 95% male, generally rather unattractive and often socially inept – so if you gave me the choice… runs, ducks for cover.

Wow, this article was fair…and balanced!

‘Dear Windows users: your OS sucks; I hate it.’

‘Dear Mac users: your OS is excellent; I hate you.’

It’s funny in that funny fun way that’s actually not funny.

MacBook – $999. This is the lowest priced laptop on the Apple website.
Dell Inspiron 14 – $449. $619 when configured more-or-less to the same specs as the Mac. Bargain basement – lowest price is about $299. Apples sell for a price of 3 Dells.

Desktops START at $1199 for apple. For Dell, try $299 (closer to $800 for a similarly outfitted machine).

The Apple had better be more stable and easier to use than the Vista machine – you could buy from 2 to 4 Vistas for the price of a single iMac.

Now, it is probably true that comparing ordinary Dell computers to Apples is unfair. The Dell XPS Studio line is probably a more fair comparison.

But that is the thing – most people don’t need that much machine. Windows computers are the machines of the common man. Macs are Lexi, or Infinitis, or other pretentious car brands kitted out with a moonroof, an automatic transmission with 7 or more gears, 8 airbags, and model numbers which helpfully rank each car in order of its exclusivity so you can keep score. A smug “you should get a Mac” to someone having trouble with a several-year-old Windows machine is the same as saying “you should get a Lexus” when someone talks about how their ’02 Ford is in the shop. In other words, it is a way of publicizing the Lexus/Mac owner’s status and power to those of lesser means.

For me, the key thing about Macs is that I spend very much less time maintaining them. Even a few hours a week reclaimed from spyware checking, driver conflict troubleshooting, and the like adds up to someone who depends on her body’s limited ability to sustain focus and concentration to do productive writing. I can do the troubleshooting, I just like not having to, and if I assess my time at bare minimum wage, a price gap of even a thousand dollars pays for itself in a matter of months. It’s not just writing time, either – it’s the reduced medication bills from reduced stress, and a lot else.

The fact that I like Apple’s design aesthetics and find them a good fit for my apartment helps, but it isn’t decisive. Nor is any of the above an assertion that anyone else is doing it wrong. I mean, I have friends who actively do find a certain rugged fun in troubleshooting mastery, and I can understand that as a hobby not all that much difference from shooter computer games. This is just why it makes sense for me.

Beryl: I hear stories like that. And I have stories like it going the other way, of trouble with Windows. I think that user hostility – that whole “this is so not what I want to be doing, dammit, why is this working this way and not that” – looms larger than almost anyone gives it credit for.

The phenomenon I find really interesting is rare but not freakishly so: the person who seems to make a particular type of computer crash simply by being in the environs. James Wallis can do this with Macs, I’ve seen it done, and I ran into a couple people who were like that with Windows when I worked in my university’s computer lab. I don’t know of any real effort to look into it, and would be curious.

Oh, it’s also true that a lot of software made for both Mac and Windows sucks in the Mac version.

Why on earth Mikhail believes that Mac users cannot upgrade memory themselves is beyond me. I’ve bought 3rd party memory and upgraded two systems without problem.

I never meant that Macs are more complicated or difficult to maintain than PCs. What I said is that a much smaller percentage of their users know how to do that compared with PC users. It’s your basic self-selectioon. I don’t know why Macs attract people who like using them without having any idea of what’s inside, but that’s what my extensive IT experience tell me (as well as other qualified people’s observations). It’d be great if someone actually did some statistic on this…

Charlie Brooker is leaving out a lot of history. Windows users now are much lower key because they now are the dominate OS. Many years ago (1990-200) things were very different and windows evanlgiism has at it height. One of the problems to days is the general low quality of PC hardware. One significant example is lack of ECC memory functionality on desktop and laptops.
“ALL” computers used in business or medical applications need ECC memory. Just about all computers at some time run spreadsheet or database applications. If numbers are being stored or numbers are being manipulated (arithmetic) then the computer definitely needs to have ECC memory. So the only users who might not need ECC are those who use their computers solely 100% for full time gaming or movie watching. ECC memory also helps reduce problems of computers crashing or locking up because of corrupted data in memory. Even a reduction of one crash a year fully justifies having a desktop computer with ECC memory.
You really DO need ECC Memory
James Hamilton’s Blog
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/07/YouReallyDONeedECCMemory.aspx

Real Business Quality desktop PCs with ECC memory and virus resistant operating system can be found here:
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/ComputingSystemsAndAccessories.html

Salutations, gentlefolk,

A little over a year ago my old computer, running Win 98 SE, reached point of imminent failure. Being out of work, I acquired a replacement running Kubuntu Linux 8.04.1 (Hardy Heron), kernel 2.6.24-14, KDE 3.5.10, and have concluded that Linux is:
annoying
aggrevating
frustrating
time wasting
ugly
lacking necessary utilities
lacking documentation
Not Ready for Prime Time
Unfinished, and never likely to be ‘finished’ and suitable for the average person to use to do Real Work.

The people putting together Linux (I know a couple of Linux ‘gurus’ with recognizable names.) are doing it for their own pleasure. There’s no mechanism for collecting feedback or suggestions from ‘lusers’, and no one interested in putting them into code if there was.

It’s likely to stay a ‘niche OS’ forever. Recommended only to youngsters wanting to learn about OS code. In other words, an educational toy.

I am hoping that I get a steady job in the near future, and can afford to upgrade to XP. (Note: I got my first PC in ’86, have owned three Macs, wouldn’t get another even if I could afford one.)

Yours, John Desmond