(Publicado por OSDir.com)

I’m a long time Linux user. Let there be no mistake. I have Linux servers out the ying yang. But, two years ago I was smitten with OS X and the easy wireless connectivity that iBooks could give me. Two years later I’m abandoning OS X and Apple.

Let me paint the picture. I was at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in 2002. Blogging was just getting hot and so was geek talk about OS X. iBooks were awash at the conference. Folks were checking their email from home, reading their favorite websites, some were blogging live at conference sessions, and I was stuck with going to the gallow that was the connectivity room on the basement floor with only the odd attendee there to remind me I wasn’t at the conference by myself.


I had an great 15” Dell Inspiron with Redhat or Mandrake on it at the time. I loved that thing when I went to LinuxWorld a few months before. Now I wasn’t so sure.

I did my best. I found a BestBuy, picked up a Linksys card, hoofed it back to the conference, and tried to get it working. I’m no guru, but I’m no slouch either. I spent the next three days trying to get that card to work. I hunted down another Linux user to ping his brain over it. He sounded like he knew what he was doing but could only offer a furrowed brow by the end. On the last day of the conference I ordered an iBook from my hotel room.

I’ll readily admit that OS X has lots of yummy goodness for *nix people. I’ll even tell you that I still want to play with GarageBand really bad. But, here is where my story goes awry.

Over the last two years my first iBook’s logic board blew up three times. (Read on. I know this is hardware vs software.) The first time I sent the iBook for repair it was sent and back in two days. Frankly I was astonished at the service. The second and third time, without any complaints about the service, I was a bit ticked off about the hardware. Apple replaced the iBook with another and I thought I was on my merry way. Not so. The same thing has happened to the replacement.

Despite all the hardware trouble that could easily belong to any other vendor given the position of the moon and which way the wind is blowing, this really ends up being about the software. (For the record I do not let Apple off the hook for actively ignoring the fact that the LBs in these iBook are craptacular, and for giving me the run around from customer relations with platitudes about the product.) You see when your iBook breaks down and is at the shop for a week, you still have work to do. So where did I go? To Linux of course. I have a tower here that my kids use and that I’m currently writing from. Each time the iBook’s logic board died I came to this machine and reset everything, as I was usually in-between installations, so I could get back up, running, and productive. I was suffering from vendor lock-in because I couldn’t run OS X on my little beige box. Sure, I could have bought a G4 or G5 tower, but let’s just say I’m not feeling that comfortable about buying hardware from Apple at the moment despite everyone else’s great experiences, and that I’m lucky that my main software use lies outside of the “i” applications.

So, after setting up Linux for the sixth time to deal with my lack of an iBook to run OS X on that deep seated guilt over not using Linux on my laptop has been given reason to come back to the surface. I must say that I feel I’ve been extremely patient about this whole ordeal. When the iBook comes back, today possibly, I will be sticking to running Linux on it. I’ll run some tests to see whether I like Yellow Dog Linux or Mandrake for PPC best on it, but I won’t be using OS X henceforth.

I simply can’t bear the pain of the hardware vendor lock-in anymore. I’ve had the latest iBook partitioned with Yellow Dog Linux already and it works like a champ for anyone interested. That’s why I can say with such certainty that this is the path for me and my laptop henceforth.

Since I still require a laptop, the plan is that I will run Linux on it, back it up nightly because there is no convincing me the seventh time is the charm. When she blows again I’ll be back up on my tower within an hour instead of a day with all my usual settings and tweaks. I won’t miss a heartbeat of work or endure any more pain from lock-in. Off the iBook will go for a seventh time and Apple can do whatever it decides to do in control of my computing future with it. I will no longer care. My software, like my hardware, will now be back in my control.

In the end this story is about much more than software and hardware. It really is about freedom from the tyranny of any vendor’s lock-in. Given a bit of patience I would have had wireless on that Linux laptop within months at the most. I had metaphorically bitten the forbidden fruit and it was sweet. Comically, it was an Apple. So I’ll end this tale with a quote that Benjamin Franklin might have written were he in my shoes – “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little wireless connectivity and neat-o eye candy deserves neither liberty nor other yummy goodness.” Luckily, Linux and cheap commodity hardware continues to be there for me so I can come back to the hardware freedom that I so weakly abandoned.