Sunday, March 26, 2006
Move over Bacon
There are people out there that put away their 12 sided dice just long enough to perform benchmarks on disparate computing platforms. They test floating point operations, 3d gaming frame-rates, and if they're feeing particularly pragmatic, office productivity metrics. One thing they've never quite been able to measure well is FUN.
I know there are plenty of people out there that punch their time card, sit at a desk for eight hours, then go home - never caring in the least whether they enjoyed their computing time. Not me, I actually like working on computers that do fun things. If my computer took three times as long to open an Excel spreadsheet, had half the Quake 4 frame-rates, but I never yelled at it in frustration and smiled every once in a while at its coolness - my friends, that would be the computer for me (disclaimer - I don't use Office Productivity applications or play 3d games).
OS X has had a corner on the market for fun computing for quite a while. The lack of spyware and viruses is just a bonus. Now, my happy dual G5 has taken a back seat in the fun department to my wonderfully beautiful Linux desktop. Thanks to my new hero David Reveman over at Novell, the next generation of Linux desktops will be chock full of eye candy - or as many would say "useless eye candy". Those that say that of course find no utility in fun... they also roll 12-sided die, shower infrequently, and the closest they've been to a woman is watching reruns of the Golden Girls.
I've got virtual desktops that are finally usable. I've got kick-ass ways to switch between applications, both with a cool alt-tab function and with the Expose'-done-right knockoff feature. Lets not forget the true transparencies and crazy zoom accessabilty feature. Thanks to all these features (and wobbly jello windows) I can interact with my computing environment in a much more organic way. I love it. Get Ubuntu, use it, become one with it.
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