14 DAY TRIAL // Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the GNOME and Mono projects, has taken a rather harsh stand against the Linux-based operating systems.
It might seem weird that such a prominent figure in the open source community would make such powerful statements against Linux, but he has compelling reasons to do so. He explained some of his reasoning on his personal blog.
“To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl.
“Without noticing, I stopped turning on the screen for my Linux machine during 2012. By the time I moved to a new apartment in October of 2012, I did not even bother plugging the machine back and to this date, I have yet to turn it on,” said Miguel in his blog.
Long story short, he got tired of constantly working to get his Linux machine the way he wanted to, and has fallen into the Mac OS trap, where things just work.
It would be a good argument, but he switched positions, going from a developer to a simple user. In order for Mac OS to just work, it needs developers who go through the exact same experiences to deliver a seamless experience.
“Even during all of my dogfooding and Linux advocacy days, whenever I had to recommend recommended a computer to a single new user, I recommended a Mac. And whenever I gave away computer gifts to friends and family, it was always a Mac. Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm,” he ends his argument.
This is just the case with Linux and it's no different from the perspective of a Mac OS user. If you get a stable distribution, such as Ubuntu for example, it will just work and you won't have to worry, but it's a different story when you're a developer.