Next Year Is Perpetually the Year of Linux on the Desktop ⇥ verynicewebsite.net

John Moltz reacts to Dan Gillmor’s piece on switching to Linux:

Every year I try Ubuntu and every time I find it an excessively fiddly environment that gives you all the tasteless design choices of Windows with all the confusion of why your sound card isn’t working that you got installing your own Sound Blaster in 1995. […]

I get the arguments against Microsoft and Google and even Apple (although Gillmor can never seem to bring himself to mention Apple’s push back against back doors). But I guess I just don’t want to pay for them all day long by using a phone and computer I just don’t like working with.

There’s something to be said for the nebulous quality that is niceness. It’s impossible to quantify, yet completely noticeable when it’s lacking. I’ve spent a far amount of time with various operating systems, but I consistently find OS X and iOS to be nicer than competing OSes — niceness is the reason I’d pick Windows Phone over Android.

In a similar vein, I think some of the “low-hanging fruit” spotted in iOS and OS X recently is due to a decreasing feeling of niceness in both OSes. For my tastes, they’re both still better than the competition, but there has been a noticeable reduction in just how nice they feel to use every day. The significant introductions sprinkled throughout 2015 — a new Apple TV, Apple Watch, the iPad Pro, and the MacBook — makes it feel as though Apple has laid the groundwork for their near future, however. I’m looking forward to 2016.