Operating system analogies

After reading Neal Stephenson's excellent ebook In the Beginning was the Command Line I was struck by the brilliance of his OS analogies (the book was written in 1999 but still holds true today):

• Apple OS X: a beautiful, reliable, ergonomic, brilliantly designed, European coupe. The only problem is when you open the boot everything is covered by plastic, and the only way you can repair any problems is by returning the car to the manufacturer.
• Windows anything: an ugly, inefficient, unergonomic and poorly designed station wagon that nevertheless became incredibly successful.
• Linux: an incredibly efficient, military-spec machine that never fails and can do 100 mph at 100 mpg over rough terrain. Anything and everything about it can be altered in the field by the user. Oh, and it's completely free and support is also completely free.

Other analogies that spring to mind from the Star Wars mythos:

• Apple OS X: Queen Amidala's shiny spaceship in A Phantom Menace. Really nice to look at but a bitch to repair if something goes wrong (not that anything does go wrong unless you're being attacked by someone).
• Windows: tricky. I'm inclined to go with Star Destroyers: big, slow, ugly, cumbersome, but incredibly powerful (but not by virtue of good design).
• Linux: the Millennium Falcon. The best there is, and fully user-alterable. However the anaology breaks down when you consider that the Millennium Falcon is fairly unreliable, and requires constant maintenance.

The Heavens align...

I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy a new PC (with Vista, natch --- read the tagline) and now this happens.

ION: I've been reading Neal Stephenson's classic essay In the Beginning was the Command Line.

Let me just review my real reasons for not just using Ubuntu:

1. I use Dreamweaver and Photoshop, and I see no reason why I should install a completely different operating system just so I can run two of the three applications I actually use in WINE.
2. That's it.

What I really need to do is buy a new hard drive for the 'ol lappy and fire up Ubuntu on that.

Aha. A plan.

Ubuntu Update

This is by way of being an update, rather than a full blown review.

There are many aspects of Ubuntu that I like and there are some I dislike. The ones I like are:

1. There is no need for tedious and memory-consuming virus scans.
2. When new hardware is plugged in Ubuntu waits for me to do something about it, instead of trying (and failing) to be helpful by providing Autorun features as Vista does.
3. Change is good. It's refreshing to use something other than Windows.
4. There seems to be much greater scope for personalisation than with Windows.
   

All these things said, for the average and casual user there isn't a great deal in any of this. Most of the above points are more to do with the general crapness of Windows rather than anything good about Linux/Ubuntu.

Things I don't like about Ubuntu:

1. After dual booting Ubuntu with Vista I can no longer disable my Synaptics touchpad.
2. Ubuntu does not include native support for DVDs or mp3 players. I know that this is a niggle and shouldn't be a big obstruction, but for the casual and lazy user (like myself) it is just irritating.
3. New things scare me.
   
4. Ubuntu defaults to being so like windows that there doesn't really seem to be much point.
   
5. I've been prodding the bash shell or whatever it's called and it's all very oldschool and cool but to be honest I don't want to have to learn a whole new language just to get my PC to work when a GUI would do. And yes, I know that I can do pretty much everything through the GUI but I'm lazy.

OK - my conclusion so far is that there really isn't much point to Linux. If it's ever going to go mainstream it will be through things like the Asus Eee, which Charles Stross comments on at length here.

I'm still having trouble understanding the ubiquity of Microsoft Office in business, when OpenOffice is free and does exactly the same thing (at least as far as 90% of corporate users are concerned).

I think when I buy a new PC or laptop the first thing I'll do is install Ubuntu and use it from day one. This way I will avoid falling into the habit of using Windows.