I like to think of people going to IETFs as tinkerers: they want to develop new protocols or make existing ones better. I would say perfect Linux users!

But no, most of them prefer Mac OS X, why? Because "it just works". And this is true. If you use Linux on a laptop you will probably need to fiddle a little to get everything working. On Mac OS X this isn't the case, it will just work.

Why do I still prefer Linux? Because it has thought me everything I know about computers. Especially in the old days, it needed a lot of hand holding to get boring things like sound working. I want to stay sharp, on the edge and get to know (new) stuff. I want to run a mailer daemon on my server, I want to play with new code. I want to get distracted and sometimes I'm forced to get my hands dirty and figure out how PulseAudio works. This takes, but, you will always learn something new.

If "Mail App" grinds away on the CPU and takes the load up to 100% you're stuck. If "mutt" has such a problem (if ever!), I can probably fix this.

And this is the crux of the matter... How can it be that people who want to tinker with stuff be content with a platform which is specifically designed to prevent tinkering?

I'm convinced Ubuntu can deliver the same user experience as Apple, but with 100% open source software.

Keep on tinkering!

Related reading

• The personal computer is dead

When you watch a downloaded DVD all this has been removed by some evil hacker. So you can just watch the movie without all this crap. _{Downloading is legal in almost all countries.}

So thanks to Disney and other large (and evil) companies we are now in the following, ironic, situation:

When you play by their rules you get "punished" by having to watch ugly warnings.

When you play by your rules your movie watching experience is not diluted with scary warnings.

The movie industry does not have clients anymore, they only see criminals...

Now I was always intrigued by computer viruses, so I bought a book about it from Dr. Fred B. Cohen, called "A Short Course on Computer Viruses" (2nd edition, ISBN: 0-471-00768-4). See this link for some texts out of the book.

Fred Cohen has invented the concept of a computer virus. At the time (around 1983) nobody believed that such software could be written and that it would work... I think this was even demonstrated on UNIX systems, oh the irony :-)

Anyhow in this book, there is the following text, paragraph 3.2 Technical Defenses with Major Flaws (page 64)

.. That means you cannot write a program D that correctly determines whether or not other programs are viruses, unless that program: runs forever without a result - or has an infinite number of false positives - or has an infinite number of false negatives - or has combinations of these three problems

So basically you can not write a program that will always correctly identify a virus.

Still people tried, so now we have virus scanners. In paragraph 3.2.6 "Virus Scanner", page 72,73, Cohen says the following (wording slightly changed)

A first problem is that they [virus scanners] are only good against known viruses in personal computers.

A second problem is that they tend to take a noticeable amount of time to scan a system or network for these patterns.

A third problem is that in order to remain effective, a scanner must be update often.

With the Internet the last problems seems to be solved, but infections also spread faster, so basically the update problem remains as bad as it was in 1983.

So the inventor of computer viruses writes in 1983 that anti-virus scanners are useless.

And there you are in 2009, running two (or even more) anti-virus scanners to make you feel safe. Who are you fooling?

There are so many alternatives.