Fitting the battle of life

Well, the pwn to own contest has come to an end, and after the early exit of the MacBook Air, the Vista laptop was the second to go, leaving the Ubuntu machine still standing at the end.

It’s not a particularly scientific contest - I’m sure the Air went first because it was a more desirable prize than the Vista laptop, but the fact that the Ubuntu machine ‘won’ doesn’t surprise me, and probably doesn’t surprise anyone else either. The Mac succumbed to a flaw in Safari, and the Vista machine apparently a flaw in Adobe’s flash player.

There are security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu - or there would never be security updates - but for the moment, we’re safe.

Well, I heard about debatewise earlier last term when the guy running it came to one of our debates to talk briefly about it, but it’s only now (when I remembered about it and dug out his card from a pocket) that I’ve had a good look and signed up, and started to contribute.

Today I came across a debate titled ‘Macs are better than PC’s‘, which, aside from its flagrant misuse of the apostrophe, is just a silly thing to `debate’. I will keep half an eye on it, but we all know what happens when an argument (yes, argument, not debate) like this starts up. Rule #2 of the internet: Reason holds no sway over the fanboy.

I’ll admit I did step in to offer a counter-argument, but that was only to point out the futility of the topic. I’ll blog about the actual concept and the site itself later this weekend; I just needed to get that off my chest.

In other news, I think I had better sort out my categorization and tagging.

I’ve been playing around with avant-window-navigator today, after hearing bits and bobs about how cool it is. It’s basically a linux version of the Mac OSX dock, with some fancy customisable effects (you can choose how programs bounce around, whether it’s 3d or 2d, that kind of thing - the usual open-source ‘how you want it’ philosophy).

Unfortunately I’ve noticed two issues so far: firstly, and most annoyingly, some icons are rubbish. The Thunderbird and (to a lesser extent) Firefox icons in the shot above have bits of white around them, which looks a little silly (this is also something I’ve noticed about favicons in firefox with dark themes - it shows up more). Secondly, I’ve not worked out yet (though I’m 100% sure it’s possible) how to stop windows maximising past the upper edge of the dock - at the moment I can’t reach some buttons that get hidden behind it. I’m an idiot. Awn Manager ->  General: “Maximised windows don’t cover the bar”. One simple tick and my second ‘issue’ is resolved. That’ll teach me not to look through config options properly. Of course you can also set it to auto-hide behind maximised windows, which is probably preferable and doesn’t waste screen real-estate.

These issues aside, I think I’ll keep this experiment going for a little while and see how I do.

Following on from my post this morning about the non-cost of OpenOffice versus MS Office, what happens when you don’t have much money to buy a new computer? The ‘average’ consumer isn’t going to want to be scouring the shops for bargain parts, worry about static discharge and getting jumpers set right by either upgrading their computer or building one from scratch - especially if they need the mobility of a laptop (and 2008 could well be the year laptops overtake desktops in terms of sales). So, what to do?

[Note: I've started with the base models from Dell and tried to match specs as closely as possible.]

As an Ubuntu user, I would always recommend anyone to use it. I’d almost go so far as letting them take my laptop for a test-drive for a couple of days. (Almost.) I’m sure with a little gentle encouragement, a little guidance when they need it, they’d fall in love. Oh, and it’s free, I’d tell them. You can get it from Dell, I’d tell them. Wow, all this for free? I’ll get one of those, not one of those hideously expensive Vista machines then, they’d say.

Well, here’s the problem. Take the base models, the Inspiron 6400 and it’s Ubuntu counterpart, the 6400n. With the same specs (1.60GHz cpu, 80GB hard drive, one gigabyte of RAM, the same Intel graphics), the Ubuntu machine actually works out £10 more expensive than the Vista Basic machine. (The Ubuntu machine starts at 512MB memory, which would be enough, and is £20 cheaper overall, but in the interests of fairness…)

So what is that extra £10 doing there? It’s there because companies pay to have their software pre-installed on retail computers, which of course reduces the overall cost (and, in a way, locking you in) - remember all those ‘get your internet here’ icons on the desktop last time you bought a Windows computer? Ubuntu doesn’t do that - it wouldn’t fit with the philosophy, for a start, and you can’t make something free any cheaper.

One argument that says that the £10 doesn’t matter is that Ubuntu comes pre-installed with even more (useful) software than Windows does out of the (retail) box. Look at the GIMP, for instance. It’s not an equivalent to MS Paint. It’s an equivalent (for simplicity’s sake!) to Adobe Photoshop. Which costs over £500. And that’s with a 10% discount from the nice people at Amazon.co.uk. Look at it like this: that £10 pays for a whole lot more than it looks like it pays for. Think of it, perhaps, as a one-off registration fee for unrestricted access to the Ubuntu software repositories. To the community support network that exists. To complete customisability of and freedom over your computer. And £10 is less (to continue a theme from my last post) than ten pints of beer. So you’re only losing what, two nights (maybe even one!) of drinking? (Remember also that Dell is enabling multimedia out of the box, so the £10 probably covers some kind of license for that too.) Let’s also bear in mind that Vista Basic is, well, basic. Ubuntu comes in one form, like Mac OSX, which has all the features in it, not some myriad different forms that give you more as you pay more. So it probably isn’t a fair comparison to choose the Basic option anyway…but we’re going for a cheap computer here.

To return to the £10, it’s also a signal to send to companies like Dell that there is consumer demand for Ubuntu-based (or even GNU/Linux-based in general) computers, and that’s a signal that in my opinion is worth £10 to send.

The £10 ‘Linux tax’ on Dell computers is actually very good value for money, I would say. Just wish I had the other £330 to buy the damn computer with.