Let that title roll around in your head for a bit. Sounds nonsensical, right? Kind of like saying you eat strawberry ice cream because you prefer chocolate ice cream.
The nonsensicalness of my claim is to illustrate the complexity of my choice. Not that I am forced to use OS X, but that it kind of provides me with best of both worlds.
Recently I have been toying with the idea of switching back to Linux for the nth time. What holds me back is the software on OS X I enjoy using and that there are very few mobile options — unless you want to go with Android.
Privacy, as most of you might have noticed, is very important to me. Therefore using a mobile OS built by a company that has a horrible track record for respecting privacy is not an option.
What Apple has managed to pull off is rather impressive. Yet it is a feature that too often seems overlooked. The streamlined experience between desktop/laptop, tablet and mobile device. Same OS, same functions, (mostly) same apps — same experience across all devices.
Ubuntu is giving it a fair go. Their attempt is so appealing I would consider Ubuntu as a good competitor of the streamlined, cross-device experience.
What is odd is how we manage to install Linux on the most peculiar devices. Some even go to great lengths to scale down the OS so it can run on any hardware. Yet, with the exception of Ubuntu, there has been limited attempts to get other major Linux distributions on smaller devices.
My [Linux] flavour of choice is Fedora. It is only natural as I started out with Red Hat Linux (5.2) 15 years ago or so. As it is not uncommon that the first [Linux] flavour you use will be your default choice and benchmark when trying other [Linux] flavours.
Even if Fedora works perfectly out-of-the-box, it is still considered to be a Linux distribution that can often be very experimental. Due to that I thought they would be first to push out a mobile OS — I am still waiting guys.
What has held Linux back is software with horrible UX. The running joke is that is what you get when you do not have a designer on your team and leave the interface to programmers. It is getting better tho.
Looking back ten years makes me laugh at the statement, Linux is ready for the desktop. It was not. And frankly, I am not sure it has reached that stage yet. It is very close mind you, but not close enough.
As much as I enjoy tinkering and tweaking, I found myself doing more admin and troubleshooting when using Linux than I am with OS X. Of course, doing a clean install of most Linux distributions will rarely give you any headache. But users want to change their desktop, maybe add a new keyboard and try out some new software.
What often was an easier solution than spending hours of troubleshooting was to reinstall the OS. Not a solution most enjoy or should go through. Only weirdoes like me enjoy the process of doing a fresh installing of an OS.
Which leads me back to why I use OS X. It is built on UNIX so I can continue to live in the terminal, making fun and useful bash scripts, while still using an OS with a nice UX. Not to mention, when I pick up my iPad or iPhone I am greeted with a familiar UI and even software.
Let us be honest. Apple did not become this big on the smartphone market because they created/tweaked some cool features for their mobile OS. It has more to do with people that already used OS X looked at the iPhone and iPad and said, oh look, I am already familiar with this interface, I have no need to learn yet another interface.
With that said, if some of my favourite apps, like games, suddenly end up on Linux too— especially mobile —then the likelihood of me going back to Linux is somewhat high.
