Relatively Ignorant Blog

Mark Pilgrim’s recent announcement that he is switching away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux after very many years using Apple’s products has caused a few waves. John Gruber reacted back at length and Mark replied spelling out his gripes in more detail. Tim Bray thinks he will switch soon too. With the weight of these eminent thinkers on my head, I thought more about why I switched to Mac 18 months ago and whether I would switch again. (Leaving aside the matter that I have just bought a new MacBook Pro and won’t be changing for a couple of years at least.)

My overriding feeling is that I switched because Windows really annoys me. I had used and programmed Macs and PCs on and off over 15 years and was sick of the whole Windows thing. I still use Windows at work (I have no choice) but wanted a different experience at home. I’m getting into digital photography and felt the Mac would be a better match to my ‘creative side’. I also like the geeky side of Mac: it’s a Unix box under the hood and has a real scripting language built-in.

Perhaps the tipping point for me was about presentation. For example, I care about the way language looks: not only spelling and punctuation, but typography as well. (Evidence: I own a copy of Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style — a beautiful book.) So I want to be able to type the correct quotes, dashes etc. in any application, not just Word and those with some kind of auto-correction. On a PC, it is a pain: at work I bother to type Alt+0145 and Alt+0146 (with leading zeros, on the numeric keypad) when I want open and close single quotes. (And it’s an extra challenge on a laptop without a numeric keypad.) On a Mac it is much easier (although not always intuitive): Option+] and Option+} (respectively) – a single, combined keystroke, not four. The folks at Apple thought of that in 1984.

I agree with a lot of Mark’s concerns about format lock-in and, luckily, have avoided them. I have stuck with cross-platform, standard apps that I used on Windows: notably Firefox and Thunderbird. I also use OpenOffice for the small amount of office-type stuff I have to do.

Could I give up what I have now and switch to Linux? A quick look at Ubuntu today (running under Parallels Desktop on my MacBook) reveals the best Linux desktop experience I have had so far. Perhaps 70% of the functionality I want is there. (Adobe Lightroom for Linux? Not likely, I fear.)

But not enough to switch yet. (How do you enter a RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK in Ubuntu?)