Gnome Founder Miguel de Icaza Solves Identity Crisis, Moves To Mac

Miguel de Icaza strikes me as someone who would be an Apple user. Swayed by pretty shiny things that look cool. The many bonehead ideas this guy has come up with over the past few years for the FOSS world has been mind-boggling and I dare say stupid; now he admits that Linux has taken a backseat to an overpriced, over-hyped, underwhelming Mac. I've been using Linux on all of my machines for ten years and I continue to do so because I'm passionate about the platform and fully believe in the goals and ideals of the FOSS movement. To say nothing of how impressed I continue to be by the shear power of Linux and the ingenuity of FOSS developers! Evidently Miguel de Icaza is not. I say it's been nice knowing you Miguel...don't let the door hit you on the way out. Long live Linux and open source!!

Quoting: I say it's been nice knowing you Miguel..

Or, "so long and thanks for Gnumeric," or...

http://i.imgur.com/CiXJjXc.gif

Macs are winning over an awful lot of the developers I see. If I were a little more financially capable, I'd get one too.

The desktop fiascos of the last few years have not helped. The "Linux is Ubuntu but Ubuntu has decided it doesn't care about being Linux" hasn't helped.

It's nice to have stuff that just works when you are trying to make a living.

I am doing some work at the moment with a really lovely small company in London. They all use Macs there, mostly Macbooks. Purely coincidently, I have one too, but I run Open SuSE (and previously Mageia) on it. Linux is hands-down faster and more reliable than OS X I am surprised to find. Their machines are frighteningly slow (they are modern machines) at times and amazingly often have to be rebooted. On this evidence, a computer that "just works" is far more Linux than OS X.

Not only that, there's an awful lot more development tools for things like programming embedded systems on Linux. They have to boot into virtual machines to run Windows for some things whereas I just use open source equivalents on my Linux machine. I really think Linux is a top class system to run on your computer these days. KDE4 since mid 2010 has been really good and continues to get better and better.

Apple do make nice hardware I have to say, but they stink as an entity; if anyone made similar hardware with the same spec for the same price as my 17" Macbook Pro I would quite happily change. No-one does though.

@db --

Apple does stink as an entity, but try running Photoshop on your Linux box without virtualization. If you do ruby and rails development, as I do, Macs are the de facto standard.

I don't like it -- and I am always out of step -- but that's the way it is these days.

The odd thing here is that a bunch of people are saying things like, "Goodbye," and, "Good riddance," but I haven't seen any reason to believe that Miguel de Icaza is abandoning development for Linux, only that he's stopped using it as his desktop. Since he's developing software that's supposed to be cross-platform, there's little reason to believe that he'll now forget Linux altogether.

I'm certainly not a de Icaza fan, though I think pretty well of Gnumeric and Midnight Commander. He seems to love Microsoft and Apple both a lot more than I do. He also seems much more dissatisfied with Linux than I am (I am much more satisfied with Linux than with Windows or OS X). What I really haven't appreciated about Miguel, though, is his supposed advocacy for Linux and open source software, while all the while saying how much better Windows is and how great Bill Gates is. He seems to admire business success and profit a lot more than freedom, which is an odd thing for a supposed Free Software advocate. I have nothing against business success and profit, but at what cost? I don't believe in putting these things above principles, ethics, and morals.

What is this with FOSS leaders moving around? Linus moves back to GNOME and de Icaza moves to Macs. What is the big deal? I still use Kubuntu with KDE 4.x and will continue using it. It is the one I prefer and best for me. End of story.

@CFWhitman

On target, even-handed, and succinct! Bravo!