A while back I read a great post by Alex Payne, which hit very close to home for me, about his periodic need to consider switching away from Apple. I've had a similar storied history of using both OSes. I was first a long-time Mac user. Then after OSX came out and I used it for a while I realized the parts I really cared about were the UNIX-y bits, so I ran Ubuntu for quite some time (including a tiling window manager and trying to spend as much in the shell as possible). Then I had kids and I discovered I didn't have 14 hours try and get suspend and wake working or fiddle with xorg.conf, so I switched back. And now here we are again. This latest round I think has to do with my feelings about Apple as a company and where it's headed, but I don't think it really matters at this point.

However, I would like to document this round; that way I'll have something to refer back to, not only so I can say "What happened the last time I did this? Oh yeah" but also so I'll have something to gauge progress with. Perhaps by next time these issues will be resolved, and we can settle the matter.

Anyway, I recently nabbed a Thinkpad at work, installed Ubuntu 10.10 on it, and spent a week or so with it as my primary machine. The time was right for this experiment:

• I spend 90% of my day in vim, a terminal, and a browser.
• I don't use a lot Apple software heavily, or I'm not a "Mac-like" user, or something. My usage of iTunes, Mail.app, etc is minimal.
• The Finder bugs me. I shouldn't have to patch it with Launchbar, Divvy, Growl, etc. (as great as those apps are).
• The OS matters much less to me now that stuff is moving to the cloud -- hello Gmail, Google Docs, Last.fm/Grooveshark, etc.
• Webapps are getting so good that they merit using instead of having a dedicated desktop client. The OS integration of Tweetie is nice but again, #newtwitter is fine for my light needs. And OS integration can also mean easier distractability.
• Finally, I reset the feeling of being held hostage, or of being dependent, because I'm too busy or lazy to switch. I want to aim for flexibility and (yes I said it) freedom.

Great parts

OK, first the positive:

• Monitor, wifi, sleep/wake, keyboard special keys, external devices, printing -- all worked out of the box for me. This is amazing, as previously I felt like I was an Apple user to basically pay for supported hardware.
• The appearance is stunning. Gone are the days of the fugly super-nerd desktops. (Although obviously you can have that too if you want.) I feel like it's on a par with the Mac; the typography is polished (another previous sticking point for me), and I like the customizability and choice.
• Sane spaces management. This is a breath of fresh air, as I can't seem to make OSX's Spaces work the way I want.
• It goes without saying but package management is wonderful, both for its similarity to deployment on the server side, and for more thoroughly integrated desktop software.

Not so great

And, stuff that is still irksome:

• The hardware is ugly. I'm suprised this mattered to me, and it's not about rounded corners and fanatical attention to detail; I really like the feel of Apple keyboards/trackpads and the minimalist aspect. (Granted, I could run on Apple hardware, but then I'd have to play the "is my hardware supported?" game.) (Also, that would just feel weird.)
• I could not get behind the keyboard shortcuts.
  • I could maybe get used to ctrl as a primary modifier, but it feels twisty, and I'll never get "just remap your capslock!" under my fingers.
  • Using an external Apple keyboard means alt is option and command is meta, but on the Thinkpad meta is where option is. (If that makes any sense; basically keyboard shortcuts were different depending on where I was sitting.)
  • The use of ctrl-c/v for paste means in a Terminal I need to ctrl-shift-v, and in gVim I'd need to remember "+p. That is, I had to maintain context-aware copying and pasting, which was severely annoying.
• There were lots of tiny polish issues. The icon display when using alt-tab was terrible (pixellated, not cleanly scaled svgs), inconsistent icon states (the menubar Evolution icon looks like no mail, but when alt-tabbing it does), occasionally a window would not come to the foreground as expected, etc.
• Don't like how switching is going to yank my phone along with it. I don't know enough about the current state of Android phones to consider using a non-iPhone (not to mention I'm pwned by my carrier).
• I'm a frontend developer, so I still have to deal with Photoshop. Don't say the Gimp.

Results

My overall impression was that Ubuntu is now in a kind of OS uncanny valley. The community has made some amazing achievements since I last was a regular user, and they deserve much admiration and appreciation. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. Like in the security industry, if you do your job really well, nobody notices and nothing happens. And that also means that any tiny missteps are magnified and come immediately to the forefront, where the experience is very jarring. So we're out of the era when using Linux meant "you're going to have to invest time learning this". Now the expectation is that users can jump right in -- which is simultaneously a major accomplishment and a major hurdle to overcome.

So, I'm typing this back on my Macbook. If I were solely a backend developer, I would probably officially make the switch. However, I'm not, and while I occasionally have multi-hat abilities -- indeed this is likely the source of my perennial switching investigation, ultimately I'm a frontend at heart, and there's something that still feels appropriate about the Mac, so here I am. Maybe next time, though.