Khoji On Tech (and more)

The operating system debate is so dated that it’s getting to the point where it’s embarrassing when people get heated up about them. Nowadays being passionate about a particular OS makes you look about as cool as those people who used to build their own bomb shelters during the Cold War. Get over it, it’s over and everybody won.

In my work I use Windows around half the time, OS X around half the time and Linux quite frequently. All three systems are now powerful, mature, reliable and easy to use and I don’t really have any difficulty with any of them. All of them also have major annoyances, such is life. That’s not going to change on this planet anytime soon.

If pressed I could do everything I need to do in any one of these three major systems without feeling any pain. I happen to earn my money with Windows software but that’s more a coincidence than anything else – it’s the market I stumbled into, I have no particular Siamese connection to Windows.

OS zealotry is a little like HiFi zealotry: People who are totally into HiFi equipment tend to be surprisingly disinterested in the actual music they play on their HiFi equipment, just as photography equipment zealots see everything in a photograph except the photograph. Musicians, by contrast, are so highly attuned to music that they can get everything out of it on almost any equipment, and true photographers will produce stunning images with a Lomo or an Instamatic. In the same way, OS zealots tend to be configuration fetishists who don’t actually do all that much with their computers — or they do a great deal, but if you look at it closely most of it turns out to be glorified busy work.

Ultimately, an OS is just a desk and a workbench. It’s what you work on, but it’s always your own craftsmanship that counts. Particularly now that excellent tools are available on all the current workbenches.

Again, it’s over, everybody won, and it’s not an issue any more.