I mortgaged my future with a Mac

This post would constitute a good/constructive reply to the latter article : 25 Years to Mac - How Ubuntu Pushed Me Away from the PC[1]

[1][http://randomdrake.com/2013/02/23/25-years-to-mac-how-ubuntu...]

I'm not sure I understand the specific complaints in the post. The metadata in iTunes is stored in a standard way, attached to the audio files themselves. All the playlists, repeated track infromation, etc, is stored in an XML file with simple structure. This should be as easy to convert as if the music database had been stored anywhere else.

Similarly, for iPhoto, much of the metadata is attached to the photos themselves. The album information is in very simple XML. I'm not sure how the cropping, rotation, etc, are stored, but the final JPEG can be exported from the UI, and nearly all these applications are highly scriptable.

Storing data in any application results in some restrictions in how that data can be transformed and/or used in the future. The iApps use fairly transparent data formats that are accessible to pretty much any programmer. I'm not sure if there's any open source alternatives to these apps that make it much easier to pull out data. Putting data in these apps is not mortgaging your future as much as putting your documents in MS Office format, for example.

So...she admits settling on the best option available, and complains that downgrading would be uncomfortable?

Based on that article, I think Ubuntu probably would push me away from the PC, too. I used a variant called "Goobuntu" (guess where...) during my tenure at one particular company, and it was a mixed bag. I'm not sure how much was due to Ubuntu itself and how much was from the local meddling, but it was wonky in ways my Linux boxes normally aren't.

Put it this way - my machine at work was some beastly multi-proc Pentium 4 something or other, and my machine at home was some random gunk I put together using old parts from Micro Center. It was so old, I had to special order the CPU online because nobody in town still had them in stock. I live in the valley, and could drive to AMD in under 15 minutes. That's just nuts.

Still, my machine at home was far more responsive than my workstation ever was. There were tons of weird glitchy times where it would just sit there and lag for no apparent reason. I didn't even get the worst of it, since I ran a minimal window manager. People who went for the full-on "desktop environment" (KDE? GNOME? whatever it was on that distribution, I don't know) had even more anomalies.

When I hit my hotkey to pop open an X terminal and don't get my shell prompt in a blink of an eye, something is very wrong.

Edit: forgot something. My home machine was faster over my cable modem + ssh tunnel to work than my work machine was sitting on the corp gigabit Ethernet. Think about that.

She.