People are starting to realize a thing or two about Ubuntu and Linux on the desktop in general it seems. One of the big profile Switchers have gone back to OS X, Tim Bray details why he is going back to a Mac. He has some gripes with Ubuntu, frankly they are not huge gripes but apparently for him enough.
I think the bottom-line is he hates the Apple applications and never thought of trying Thunderbird and friends on a Mac, shocking, anyway so now he realized he can get those same apps on a Mac and not be data-locked into them he feels happier going back to the Mac
Well, I don’t know. Weirdly, now that I’ve realized that I can have a decent application suite that doesn’t lock up my data and runs on whatever OS/Hardware, my desire to get off the Mac has moderated.
He also touches on some of my general issues with Linux on the desktop, people seem to think they have to retain it as a free thing so they don’t bundle useful stuff and they don’t buy decent sets of fonts etc, I bet if Ubuntu releases a pay version that has fonts, flash, codecs and all that sorted out they’ll see a huge bunch of people switching, I’d pay for it.
Then there are the fonts. Anti-aliasing is an optional extra on Linux, and I wasn’t willing to do the sources.list wrangling to get the bleeding-edge allegedly-anti-aliased Emacs. Also, lots of fonts Windows & Mac people use every day just aren’t there on Linux. There are apparently some gyrations and downloads and things you can do to get some of them.
I couldn’t get Flash working (complaints about the amd64 architecture), which meant lots of irritating little holes in Web pages everywhere. Not being able to watch YouTube is a real time-saver, though.
I think people want to just get on with it and not have to muck about with bullshit options these-days, I’m sick of fiddling with fiddly software to get simple things working, and that’s the achilles heel of Linux Desktops.
UPDATE: Scoble also sounds in on the font issue, he mentions the cost of real fonts and so forth and also calls them the achilles heel for Linux, freaky.
