Operating System of Choice

I have long despised Windows. I have to support it at my day job and in supporting it have grown to despise it. The lock-ups, the weird behaviours, the overwhelming amount of evidence that it has had feature after feature bolted on to it instead of having been engineered for security and multiuser capabilities, the number of malware programs that take full advantage of Windows users...it drives me nuts.

Many years ago I started using Linux. I found it to be flexible and far more stable than Windows ever was. It had great features while at the same time none of the licensing bull artificially limiting the operating system that Windows had; for example, Windows NT Server is basically Windows NT Workstation with some registry hacks in place to cripple it. You were even limited to a certain number of client connections to the operating system because you didn't pay a few extra hundred dollars. With Linux I could run a web server with as many connections as I wanted, no licensing limitations.

Today my main workstation is running Linux and my workstation where I'm employed is running Linux but my employer-supplied notebook computer is a MacBook, so I get to play with Apple's OS X as well now. This has influenced some of my opinions on the current state of operating systems.

Linux is still a strong contender but I run into a few shortcomings that are significantly annoying. Case in point; my webcams. There was a kernel update in the Ubuntu repos where after updating, my web cam no longer worked properly. I later found out that some applications will work with the webcams, while others don't. Searching for a solution...something that seems to be common in using Linux...yielded no solution other than running what is now a kernel several releases old.

And so far there doesn't seem to be any work being done to get these cams working again. Since it works with some applications and not others the consensus seemed to be that part of the interface to the drivers that interact with the kernel has been changed...so of course blame is shifted to the developer that used a library that no longer works.

Huh? Basically, no one takes the blame, and no one seems to be working on fixing it, and even if they were there's no one to really ask about it or get updates on the situation.

I have issues with the computer working with sound properly. Sometimes it just disappears. I end up having to restart the pulseaudio server on the system (most people probably just restart the computer).

The fact that I have freedom in configuring and using my Linux system is where a lot of its power comes from; at the same time, the fact that I can use an image capture program to get motion captures from the my webcams but can't use a live viewer of what my webcams are viewing or use Skype on Linux to view anything but a garbled green video image is very frustrating.

Then there's the Mac. The Mac is nicer in that most of what I have will just work. I can usually get work done on it. When I have to go through and restart a rogue PulseAudio process I end up thinking that the next time I am looking at a new computer I may very well get a Mac.

But I know I have issues with the Mac as well.

For example, when I secure shell from the Mac into my Linux system, it seems to take forever to connect. From what I can find it has something to do with DNS lookups, but I'm not sure because even after trying to change some settings in the configuration file it still takes forever to connect.

Another problem is that OS X doesn't have any of the neat features inherent in X Windows. For all the issues with X, one of the greatest features I use is to remotely run programs so that the display appears on the computer I'm sitting at, but the drive, resources, processor, etc. are all on the remote computer. This means that if I have Thunderbird set up on my desktop computer with all my filtering rules and preferences then I can run it on a remote computer without redoing all my preferences and filters. It also means that if the computer I'm on is slow or low powered while my desktop has plenty of processor speed and memory to spare then my mail program can be run on the weak system with the only bottleneck being the network connection.

OS X can't do this. It can run an X server as an application so I can launch programs on my remote computer from the MacBook, but I can't launch applications on the Mac so the display comes up on my Linux computer. Note that this is different than remote control software like VNC; those programs show your desktop and let you see the desktop as if you were remotely using that desktop. When you're bringing up a window of your files in a window or reading your email through that then someone else in the room, who you may not see since you're somewhere else, can be sitting there reading your email along with you. Forwarding X doesn't do that.

There's also an issue where things on the Mac either work well or don't work at all. I just plugged one of my webcams into the MacBook; nothing happened. The MacBook wants to run an iSight or it won't work at all without a special third-party driver.

The last big issue I have is with Apple Support. Apple support is great; quick turnaround, relatively easy to work through...the problem is that if I have to call them it's probably because the hardware has a problem. There's no easy way to get new parts without sending the computer away and I really really really do not like sending my personal data to a company where you don't know what is going on behind the employees-only door. While I don't think they're stealing my data or going through information I still have that hesitation in not knowing for sure unless I encrypt everything first. It's the same feeling I have to shove aside in going to a fast food joint. Hear the rumors of people spitting in the food or doing other nefarious things to your burger because you looked at the fry cook in a way they took offense to? It's always in the back of my mind, and I don't like having my tax information, documents, personal images, etc. being sent off to another company to trust that they won't dig through my data.

The Linux system on the other hand can be pretty easy to get parts for since it's a PC with generic parts. The Apple system I can try getting parts and void my warranty coverage if I replace my hard disk or some other part. Very annoying.

The musings here can be summarized as this: I hate Windows. I really like Linux but am running into some limitations that are starting to wear on my nerves. The Mac is very nice and is a strong contender...for the home user I don't hesitate to recommend a Mac, having converted my wife and mother to MacBooks...but even the Mac has some issues that if I switched over I'd have to find a way to work around the problems.

It shouldn't be a problem until the time comes when I have a few spare thousand dollars to spend on a new configuration for my workstation. But it never helps to think about what I'd do differently next time around.