The Ringtail

I’ve been thinking about a quote I picked up from John Gruber:

“The head of Black and Decker once said, folks don’t buy our products because they want one inch drills, they buy our stuff because they want one inch holes.”

I’ve often felt, as a project manager, that I get called in to help people buy drills, and my real job is to help them understand that they need holes. Trouble is that a famous quote from Einstein is also true:

“Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework within which they were created.”

Unless your client understands the truth of this, they are never going to be in the market for holes and you should leave them alone to get on and buy the drills.

… which means that I’m now officially giving up writing about OS stuff. A timely tweet reminder from an old colleague made me realise that its not about the OS, its about the apps. There’s things I love about Linux, but there’s also a couple of mac apps that just seem to work the way I think - Devonthink and tinderbox - and other apps which just do things a lot (for me) better than their libre counterparts - Photoshop, Lightroom, Logic. Sometimes I feel I get work done on Linux despite the OS, not because of it; most keenly felt when doing anything design/art/music related.

Sure there are other issues, like software freedom and liberty, but while I use proprietary apps on Linux I can’t see that as a draw to using it really, and the mac really does beat it for creative work. Getting audio set up and working took a while on Ubuntu Studio last week and I didn’t really get it working close to anything like I needed it to. I just plugged in and started recording on Logic, with great guitar tones, no latency, and support for my MIDI keyboard ‘just working’. A lot of it is familiarity, but its not just that, the interface and ease of use mean that the path to familiarity is smoother too.

So I’m back in the Mac saddle again, and concentrating on the apps, not the OS that runs them. Well, at least until the end of the day anyways….

We bought a dolls house on eBay for my daughter last week. Bit of a bargain, only £10 net, but probably around £60 gross when you take in the petrol and lunch on the seafront at Worthing. Cracking day out though - wonderful ham, egg and chips in the cafe and a bracing walk on the pier certainly blew the start-of-the-year cobwebs out.

Now I’m starting to get a little jealous of her new project and I’m starting to think what I can do as a new craft-based hobby. I do a lot of programming work, which I find very creative, and I still take a fair few photos, but I don’t do a lot with my hands. I’d like a good solid craft hobby that I can get started on, something involving some skill that will take a while to get good at, but I don’t fancy knitting or needlework or anything like that. Any ideas?

I’ve been thinking about the whole FLOSS thing after my last few posts. I’d like to try and be a bit more rigorous in pinning down what is perturbing me. I think the issue stems from two sets of arguments.

Firstly:

1. I am using Ubuntu because that is what I have used for a while and it gave me a good route in to GNU/Linux and FLOSS
2. I want to ‘do the right thing’ and support free software.
3. I am concerned about where Canonical is taking Ubuntu (see this article and the follow-up post and comments for a better discussion than I could hope to give here).

Conclusion: Ditch Ubuntu, install a free distro and build up from there.

Corollary: I will, realistically, have to use Windows at work if I do this.

Secondly:

1. I’m lucky that my work allow me to use my own laptop at work, and that I can choose to use GNU/Linux on that laptop.
2. Ubuntu does everything I need to work effectively at work, except use Outlook for email.
3. The totally free distros that I’ve tried don’t, at least not without a fair bit of time spent configuring them (leaving aside issues of having to work with other folks proprietary formats and programs).
4. I can’t do the configuring at home as I need to be in the work environment to be able to check that the configuration actually works.
5. Time spent configuring is time spent not working.

Conclusion: I can’t work effectively enough with a totally free system, I should stick with Ubuntu.

Corollary: I can carry on using Linux at work if I do this.

Clearly I should keep using Ubuntu and be able to use Linux at work and home. I’m convinced this is the best conclusion, and it’s one I have come to before, but I still feel a nagging doubt that I want to go with conclusion 1. This is where the title of the post kicks in, and where my solution has made itself apparent.

I will offset my ‘proprietary footprint’ in the same way that people offset their carbon footprint. For every proprietary app I have to use, for every closed-format file I have to save, I will donate some code, write some documentation, or evangelise to one more person about FLOSS. It’s time to stop thinking of just me and my setup and to think about being part of the wider community. There are clearly lines to be drawn, and I will always choose the free solution over the proprietary one where I have a real choice. But where that choice is taken away, by IT rules, by having to collaborate where others use non-free tools and files, I will use the non-free, but try and give back to the free community as much as I take away.

This is more positive than being wholly-free myself but not giving anything back to the community, which is where I think I would have ended up if I hadn’t spent so long pondering this. Ideally I’d do both, but I don’t live in an ideal world - this idea feels like a step in the right direction.

This may be a bit stream-of-consciousness, apologies…

I just read a post about a proposed addition to Ubuntu 10.04 - Ubuntu’s integrated music service. This sounds pretty good to me. Additionally, I can see that it might start to make people think about, at the very least, giving Linux a try. So far so just-what-it-says-in-the-link. My thought is really about the burden on a user such as myself when things like this happen. Why? Read on.

When I was a Mac user it didn’t really matter what I said about them as Apple’s marketing machine was quite capable of swaying opinion without my help. Ditto for Microsoft (the effectiveness or otherwise of the Jerry ‘n’ Bill ads notwithstanding). With Ubuntu I feel it does make a difference what I, and all other Linux users, say and do. If someone looks over my shoulder on the train and sees me using Gnome on Ubuntu they would probably be interested to find out what this non-Windows thing I was using was. If they see me using the Awesome WM under Arch Linux they will probably shake their head and look the other way at what a luddite I am. It doesn’t matter if I know that the command line is more pwerful, or that getting rid of distractions and unnecessary processes makes I and my laptop more productive. People will want a free alternative if it looks like something they already know.

At my old job I was running openbox. All was set up nicely except that I had to drop to the command line to connect to a Windows share. Someone came over and asked to see a document, I popped up a terminal to connect to the server and retireve the document and they said (in essence), “this is so much harder than using Windows, why bother”. Forget the fact that it was actually quicker to go from start to open document, forget the fact that all the software I was using was free, this was ‘harder to do’. Had I popped up Nautilus and clicked on the shared drive and browsed down to the file like I would have on Windows, I’m sure the impression I’d given would have been that it was at least as easy as Windows. And it’s free!? Sign me up.

Because of distros like Ubuntu, Linux is making ground. I’ve had quite a few people say, ‘oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to try that out’ when I’ve mentioned I use Linux. I’m pretty sure they meant Ubuntu, and I’ve always straight away arranged to get them a CD to try it out.

My overall question is - as a proponent of Linux, and someone who will happily bang on about it to others, what pressure is there on me to use a distro like Ubuntu? Is it something in the makeup of a Linux user that makes them try and make life hard for themselves or is that just me? Ubuntu does all I need and more so why don’t I be a good global citizen and use it, help to promote it, make it visible? I think its the ‘and more’ that puts me off (see last post about Arch), but I don’t think I could really say why I feel the need to economise on RAM, processor use and disk space when I have more than enough to spare.

I’m not really sure what I’m even saying here, but I think there is a sea-change in the offing, and Canonical may well be the ones to boot Linux into contention for once. I’m just not sure what my role in it should be, but I genuinely feel I can play a role in this, something I never felt with Apple or Microsoft. What’s a boy to do?