Brian Kerr

There’s something to be said for the social component of desktop computing. The code you’re running came from someplace and there are some people or organizations on the other side of it. Maybe it’s a bunch of usability marketroids. Maybe it’s a bunch of trendy, strenuous hipsters. Maybe it’s just this guy. One of the unexpected glories of running OS X is the proliferation of uppity individuals who wrangle XCode and/or the masses in order to come up with something really great: Michael McCracken’s BibDesk, Alcor’s Quicksilver, and Allan Odgaard’s Textmate are just a few examples. These are things you can’t get anywhere else. An iTunes-style PDF dumpster slash academic citation overmind. A weirdly elegant blackbox that takes your data apart and puts it back together again like a pile of Legos. A text editor that does everything you need without getting in the way, or too far out of the way. You can’t get this stuff anywhere else. So it’s with not a small amount of resistance that I’ve fallen for Ubuntu this summer. We’re using it as the userland for a largeish project, and it’s really remarkable how far things have come since I last ran Linux as my desktop (in 2001 and 2004). GNOME is getting these mature apps that are really worth attention: F-Spot, Nautilus, Metacity. What makes it so much fun is that whenever you find something particularly elegant, you can drill down just a bit, into the man pages, into the docs, and identify the person or organization who cared enough to make it that way. Not to mention the stuff that’s been streamlined past the point of visibility: it’s hard to appreciate what you don’t notice.