Mark Pilgrim announcement to switch away from OSX:

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was “free enough” to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn’t beautiful anymore. I’ve worked around it or ignored it for a long time, but eventually the bough breaks.

John Gruber’s response:

And the truth is I’m not entirely sure he’s making the right decision, even for himself. Forget all the niggling details he cites, and focus only on his central beef — that Apple is a company that does not “get” openness, and that this deficiency is going to hinder Pilgrim’s long-term access to the data he’s creating. But if that’s the case, and Pilgrim has been using Apple computers for 22 years, why hasn’t it happened already? Openness isn’t binary, a choice between totally open and totally closed, it’s a continuum. The question isn’t “Does Apple get it?”, but “Does Apple get it enough?” But from the perspective of someone immersed in the free software culture, where everything operates near the extreme edge of the open/closed continuum, it’s easy to see how things begin to look binary — not open/closed, but totally-open/not-totally-open.

And Mark’s counter:

I’m not claiming that either Free Software or open formats are a silver bullet. There are many risk factors, and Free Software mitigates some of them some of the time. There are many layers — data on top of applications on top of operating systems on top of hardware — and open formats can reduce the friction between some of them some of the time. They’re both lubricants that help you to slide out one layer and replace it without the whole thing toppling down. Apple would prefer that I not replace any of their layers, and they have gone out of their way to increase the friction between them.

Which brings us back to John Gruber’s oranges. His counter-argument — that lock-in hasn’t been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now — could not be further from the truth. It’s been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I’ve spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app “upgrading” me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format… and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It’ll be the last time they get the chance.

It looks like Eclipse is doing some nasty stuff advanced hacking in SWT on GTK. This bug is fixed in 3.6M2 but you can work around the issue in Eclipse 3.5 by launching Eclipse through the following small shell script (assuming Eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse-3.5):

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/eclipse-3.5/eclipse

photo credit: tschörda

If you need to install linux on a laptop, choose Ubuntu over the other derivations. There is simply more time and people working on the Gnome version of Ubuntu versus the KDE or Fluxbox derivations. When I installed Kubuntu 09.04 (Jaunty) things weren’t “just working” like they do on my desktop. Having always preferred KDE to Gnome, I have never really tried the pure “Ubuntu” experience. I have to say, especially for laptops, the experience is radically different and ultimately superior.

I think I still prefer KDE over Gnome. If you still wanted the KDE experence on a laptop, I would recommend trying a distribution that is more focused on the KDE side (like OpenSUSE). For me, I prefer a Debian based distribution, though to be honest, it has been a while since I’ve tried OpenSUSE. Pure Ubuntu on this laptop has been a pleasure to use, so I’m going to stick with it — though I now need to figure out how to customize and theme the hell out of it =)

photo credit: zopeuse

Kubuntu 09.04 (Jaunty) has been an absolute pleasure to use on my home desktop. Everything just works, and works really well. I happen to choose an Nvidia graphics card when I put it together. Turns out that was a very good decision.

Lets turn to my laptop (a Thinkpad T42). It has an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 inside. There is a semi decent open source driver implementation that it used by default. However, for some reason I’m running into crashes. Ubuntu upgraded their Xorg X server, so ATI’s Catalyst driver (version 9.3) no longer works. Theoretically, this should be fine — ATI is coming out with version 9.4 — however ATI made the decision not to support their older cards with version 9.4! And they’ve said they won’t update their 9.3 driver to work with the latest Xorg version! Arg!

photo credit: sanofi2498
ATI — You Suck!

I think I’m basically screwed. Any new linux install (no matter the distribution) will have this latest Xorg — there is just no way I can use this laptop with the latest distros! I’m probably going to reinstall it with 08.10 (Intrepid) so at least I have a functioning laptop.

I wonder… will ATI’s 9.3 driver work with Windows 7? If it doesn’t, they are also screwing over all the Windows users out there to the same fate.