A friend sent me an interesting list of essentials for the ex-mac user switching to linux.

Yeah. ok. Whatever. I already did that, and then went back. I was an everyday desktop user of linux, had a linux laptop, blah blah, from like 98 to 2001, and felt all ideologically proud and all, I even wrote my own live audio manipulation software for music peformance using a tangled thicket of perl, sql, and csound code.... but in retrospect all of that was a pain. I switched back to the Mac when I wanted to start doing desktop video stuff again and Final Cut was the killer app and still is. Not only that, but OS X gave me the unix command line anyway. And I never looked back. Despite my rant from the other day here, the mac is still so much more a pleasure to use than anything else, and I'm just done being an ubergeek. I don't even have development tools installed on my powerbook. If I have to compile something to use a piece of software on my personal worskstation, fuck it, there must be something else.

Really, even for me, user experience and interface are king now, and Apple just kicks ass at that. I recently switched from using the free, open source Audacity to using a pirated copy of Soundtrack Pro. Stupidly, Soundtrack Pro doesn't even do an important step in my podcasting workflow that Audacity does (exporting to MP3 - i use iTunes to do the conversion now), but it's worth it because Soundtrack Pro just has the easier to use and more beautiful interface. It has the standard key shortcuts that every soundeditor i've loved for the last 12 years (soundtools, protools, peak) has had, not to mention others that it shares with Final Cut. It feels good to use it. Audacity feels like I'm building a house with half-built, ugly tools that cut my hands when I hold them. The feel and look of the interface is what matters, even if one has to sacrifice a bit (just a bit) of power.

And I don't believe that "replacement" linux apps would even be that much more reliable than their Apple counterparts. Shit goes wrong all the time on linux boxen, tho not as often as on widoze, of course.. They may be a little better than 6 years ago, but not that much. It's just that so many geeks simply love to fuck around on computers for their own sake, so it seems okay to them. Well, I just want to get work done, I don't want to feel like an amateur mechanic fiddling under the hood of my hotrodded Mustang GT all day just because I can. I'd rather have that fucker on the road, taking me real places, even if it's just a Honda Civic.

As my friend Mykle once said, "Unix is like a Rubik's Cube, you can mess around with it all day and feel really good for solving it but you still haven't gotten any work done."

No, I want to, as the redneck pickup truck bumpersticker says, "Get R Done"...