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OSCON 2008 Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek wraps last week's event with Inside The OSCON 2008 Conference, which pulls together interviews with Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, MySQL's Zach Urlocker and Sam Ramji, who directs Microsoft's Open Source Lab. Best quotes: 'We will make a significant attempt to elevate the Linux desktop to the point where it is as good or better than Apple,' from Shuttleworth; and 'If I would start a business tomorrow I'd do it in the netbook marketplace. I'd build a dead-simple $200 device that targets sports fans, women over forty,' from Zemlin." We discussed Shuttleworth's better-than-Apple proposition while OSCON was going on. Update Jamie noted this OSCON Summary Video that might also be worth your time.
What exactly doesn't "just work" in your estimation? How are we defining ""just works"? If you take a Mac from the Mac store and sit down and use it (i.e. don't install a bunch of garbage on it before you figure out how to use it), well, most people find it pretty intuitive. You say you have problems switching between "maximized" applications -- which applications are those? Most OSX programs do not start up "maximized", and usually switching applications is a matter of clicking a window behind the front one. Or clicking the red or yellow dot in the upper left hand corner of most windows and then clicking the window behind. Most people figure this out pretty quickly. If that's your best example of Macs not "just working," it seems to prove the opposite case -- Sit down in front of windows and figure out the same thing (a lot of Windows apps actually DO startup "maximized"), or a linux machine (which could look like anything depending on the window manager installed and the programs opened). Of course a Mac doesn't "just work" in the sense that no computer "just works"; the human being always needs to do something to the computer, but MacOS X does seem to make it easier to figure out what the human is supposed to do next.
They use Macs because "they just work".
I constantly hear this quote from Mac fanboys but it doesn't make any sense. The implication is that other computer systems don't work. I'm on a machine that dual boots Windows and Linux, and guess what? It works!
And you know what else. Nearly every server in the world is on Linux or Windows and they work too. And most businesses are running Windows or Linux and it works there too. And finally Linux and other non-Apple OS's are running nearly all of the embedded systems in the world. And what's most interesting about this is how microscopically small the amount of these people who think Apple "just works" is.