Not A Fanboy
Posted by Jaymz, November 8th, 2007 in Everything/Nothing, Linux, Mac, Slice of Life, Software, Tech, Windows
The biggest problem with tech or platform communities nowadays is the whole community part of the equation. Take the Mac community, for example. OS X is a wonderful OS, and generally speaking, Apple makes great hardware. I’ve had zero issues with my original Mac mini, I love my new iMac to death, and I’d kill my grandmother for a Mac Pro, despite the iMac now sufficiently fulfilling all my Mac orientated needs.
The thing that kills me is that everytime I go out to seek a Mac orientated community, it’s almost 90% fanboys, chasing after trends and brandnames. Well, I don’t do brands - I do technology. This is why I can confidently say that Vista’s doing great as an operating system, despite spending most of my time on a Mac, and mostly running strictly XP on my big iron gaming system until recently. Despite my past issues with Ubuntu, I’m still of the opinion that Linux is one of the most versatile and powerful operating systems out there.
The problem is that all these OS’s have their problems, and not one of them is capable of fulfilling all my needs. XP has inherent security dramas, partly due to poor design but mostly due to being the largest target out there. Plus, XP has a bad habit of degrading performance over time, requiring me to reinstall every 6 months to keep things fresh. Vista’s ironed a lot of its teething issues out, but is still lacking in general performance and such for gaming in comparison to XP - plus the extra security and UAC bullshit is so downright obnoxious, that my first impulse is to disable it - which kind of defeats the whole purpose (and no, OS X isn’t anywhere near as obnoxious as Windows is in this field). Examining network settings was a simple process under XP. In Vista, it’s fish through a dozen fucking dialogs, UAC prompts, and wonderfully designed yet detracting Explorer windows for what a right click and a context menu selection would do.
In regards to the Mac side of things, OS X can’t play games and for an OS designed to be “media rich”, it sure sucks at the media side of things. Linux is a new flaw every day, when you run it as a desktop OS. You might have X11/Xorg graphic dramas one day.. networking will be borked the next.. Samba will irrevocably screw up another day.. you spend more time troubleshooting and fixing the OS’s shortcomings and configuration than actually using it. In a server role, where the only thing that gets installed are the distro supplier’s sanctioned updates, bug fixes, and security patches, then Linux is all manner of awesome. As a desktop? Fucking forget it.
All of this, of course, is strictly my opinion. Others have different opinions, and I can respect that. As a matter of fact, I envy those who can use Linux as a desktop and have no dramas. I envy those who run Vista and have no issues with gaming, and can put up with the UAC stuff and the one-step-forward-two-steps-back changes to the user interface. I envy those who are capable of playing back their perfectly legally acquired media under OS X, without having to use several different players to do so, and do it with one player that works well for them. Me, I’m just not there yet. The thing I’m getting at is that each OS has its flaws and benefits, and only those who refuse logic and common sense into their mindset would declare one OS to be entirely perfect, and another to be an absolute failure.
This all essentially comes from a difference of opinion that a learned colleague and I have over operating systems, platforms, and what have you. Unfortunately, he has a bad habit of hating the things I love, but it’s all cool, and I can respect his opinion, because I thought Simoun was a festering pile of shit whose only gimmick was snail-shaped gunships powered by lesbian kisses, and I’m sure our opinions on Aria would differ greatly, if I could go longer than 5 minutes before falling asleep. Yes.. this paragraph is dedicated to you, Negs. ,-*
But seriously. There’s an enormous community of Linux users.. Mac users.. and christ, even Windows fanboys have moved beyond Neowin’s forums, and making XP look like OS X 10.2, that have the problem of having to make their choice in platform superior over the other guy. It’s like a nerd form of waving their dicks around, only with the premise of being more refined (Ha!). The Windows community has become even snarkier nowadays - they even have entire armies of bloggers, like that worthless faggot, whose name escapes me, who has to resort to the same childish shit that some other worthless faggot pulled off at the 2007 WWDC.
Me? I’m all for this guys’ approach on the whole situation. What we need is a new community of what I like to call “multiplatformers”. The people who realise that despite personal preferences or leanings, that everything out there today reeks of failure and narrow-mindedness, and be done with it. It’s like religion, people. You’re all happy to continue enjoying your mythological beliefs if it makes the prospect of dying sound better to you. I’ll continue with my scientific view of the universe, thank you very much.. but hey - power to you for having something that provides meaning and purpose in your life. Just fucking keep it to yourself.
5 Responses to “Not A Fanboy”
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Hello and welcome to Respect Sakura, yet another shitty blog under the premise of being an animu blog, when it's really just about Jaymz's tech leanings, spending habits and crack-inspired ramblings on topics noone cares about. Oh, and that other guy posts stuff sometimes, too.
Please be warned that this site may contain strong language, adult themes, and sexual discussion about characters that may appear underage but are really over 18, and anything that may look or sound illegal really isn't, you just imagined it because your mind is sick and twisted, and it ain't my fault so don't you dare blame that shit on me son.
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And you know what, I couldn’t agree with you more on everything you said here. Even on the Simoun bit. I’d actually pay to see Simoun die in a fire.
Anyway, I don’t think I could use OS X every day. It’s nice, shiny, easy to use, etc etc, but there’s things that have always bugged me about the OS X interface. And there’s the obvious lul games.
Ubuntu is fantastic. I really must give Canonical a pat on the back for this, because it’s as close as any Linux distro has come to being my permament desktop OS. *But* (there’s always a but), there’s still too much work to initially set stuff up. nVidia drivers, for instance - I didn’t just click an installer and have it do all the work for me. No, I ended up having to Google for instructions on installing the binary drivers, because a Linuxfag’s worst nightmare is actually proprietary code. My server however still runs Gentoo. It’s been running Gentoo, doing my torrent bidding, fileserving, music streaming and web serving for months on end with its software RAID 5 array, just happily chugging along. Until every once in a while, at 2pm on whichever day it chooses, the driver for the onboard nVidia ethernet starts chucking a world class hissy fit, fills the system logs with errors and the thing becomes inaccessible without rebooting it.
Everyone knows about Vista’s flaws, so I won’t even go there. Suffice to say that I think UAC is absolutely useless. I mean, installing spyware used to involve popping up an ActiveX control that said something like “BONZI BUDDY SEARCH” in big letters, then asking if you want to install it. People still click yes. Why? Because most people are idiots, and will just keep clicking yes because the computer keeps going if they do. And if you actually pay attention to the security prompts, then you probably don’t need them anyway, because you probably don’t click anything and everything without checking what it is first.
I’m still sticking with XP for now, because I think for me, it’s about as good as an OS gets. It’s not bad to look at without being weighed down and sluggish from it, it’s (generally) fast, it supports the most software, it’s got mature drivers, and it doesn’t have to ask if I’m sure I want to scratch my ass. And my servers will stay with Linux, because let’s be honest, that’s where Linux belongs. My Gentoo box can hold a solid 40-50Mb/s from it’s RAID 5 array over gigabit.
Your blog needs more automatic linebreaks.
Some kind of bug with this particular version of Wordpress. I’m due to upgrade to a more recent version, so that should fix it.
Edit: Fixed.
“I couldn’t agree with you more on everything you said here. Even on the Simoun bit. I’d actually pay to see Simoun die in a fire.”
Actually, that stuff was just to get at Negs. I haven’t finished either Simoun or Aria, admittedly, but I don’t consider them bad anime at all. I just have a million other shows that require watching first.
I find Ubuntu extremely stable and practical for work, but there’s no way I’d use it as a primary OS for a desktop. For development, despite the way that faggots will hug their IDEs and whatnot, you simply cannot get more versatile and powerful than the combination of the GNU development chain Vim.
That said, Ubuntu uses Gnome as standard, and a lot of the good new UI features end up getting sucked into Gnome while Kubuntu is left out in the dark. Which sucks, because KDE is a vastly superior window manager (and is also not shit brown)
Wild: I’d rather not hear that Simoun is bad from someone who gave a perfect 10 to Sola :P