Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Thursday 29/06/2006

Annoyed Mac users are switching to Ubuntu, says Boing Boing, following up the story with a link to a useful collection of tasty things a new Ubuntoid might want to load. Although, to be accurate, the BB article says that one annoyed Mac user is switching and another is considering it. Not sure that qualifies as a bone fide trend, even in the blogosphere. But assuming there's a grain of truth in it, what's the reason? Apple's fondness for locking stuff away in proprietary formats. And once the switchers decide to make the break, they might consider getting Mac hardware — but as it's all Intel anyway, you get a much better bang per buck by buying a PC and throwing XP away.

Back at the work desktop — some nondescript HP machine, which is a sad reminder of the HP9000 series workstation that I used in my first job — Ubuntu has been running for a few weeks, 14 days of which have been since the last reboot. I've not missed Windows more than a tiny bit, so much so that I'm going to delete the Windows partition, move Ubuntu into a much bigger house and just have XP around as a VMWare virtual machine. I'm not sure that I'm strictly allowed to do that under the Windows EULA, which doesn't mention my rights or responsibilities for virtual environments, nor what it'll do when I have to confirm my Windows Geunine Advantage Super Friends Club. If I'm forced to do without it altogether then, darn it, who am I to disagree?

Not that Microsoft says people should worry about licences. It's all going to be so much simpler soon, according to the company's UK licensing manager Ram Dhaliwal, when the company introduces a new set of tools.

"There is a Nirvana but basically it is just a mindset change," he said. "The bottom line is that you have got to do the review, find out what you have got, find out the licenses [costs]. But once you get past that, all it is is incremental changes."

That makes no sense to me. People are complaining that the licences cost too much and are too difficult to understand, so the answer is to run the software and pay up? That reference to Nirvana is enlightening: in Buddhism, a step towards this is achieved when you learn to cease desire. Stop wanting to save money and get good value, and you will not suffer?

Never mind.