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by Ben Last.
Original Post: Cue The Fat Lady
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
There wasn't one final straw that made me flip back to Windows from Linux for my day-to-day work (that's desktop, not server), it was more an accumulation of straws, like being slowly smothered by a haystack. Call it the Death Of A Thousand Annoying Little Incompatibilities. The world (which, as we all know, is a den of wickedness in many respects) insists on remaining Microsoft-centric and for someone who makes a living through a computer connected to the Internet the friction, caused by the mismatch between my Linux/StarOffice/MultipleBrowsers/KDE/Gnome environment and the assumptions that tended to be made, got too much. I gave in. You don't know the Power of the Dark Side.
But actually, it's ok. I like Linux; the day that I convert the various servers under my control to a proprietary OS that costs money and needs actual stupid per-client licenses will be the day that I do it for a huge fee as a consultant because I will have resigned, baby. But in my extremely humble opinion it's just not there on the desktop for me, as yet. The effort required to keep a Windows XP setup secure and comfortable is probably about the same as required to overcome the friction between Linux and an MS-oriented world - different tasks, but same effort. But the homogeneity of the environment is much better; key combinations work across programs, copy and paste don't fail in odd ways, embedding just... works. I never liked being a pawn in the Linux game of my-solution-is-better-and-compatibility-sucks.
On the other hand, there are times when Redmond's unique combination of arrogance and misplaced self-belief gets to me. Like with the latest IE flaw, as yet unpatched. So after reading yet one more review of FireFox and Opera, I thought it might be time to give another browser a try. So I installed Opera and, as a test, pointed it at the Zope API reference.
The Zope site has a comment system that combines minimum usefulness with maximum annoyance. Make a comment (via the partially fixed comment pages whose help texts refer to invisible or not-yet-implented features) and it gets added to the page. Permanently. No way to edit. No way to retract. And nobody involved in running the site who has authority to edit comments ever seems to read and prune the un-necessary ones.... anyway, to hide or reveal comments, you click a button, whereupon a huge and hidden Javascript engine creaks into action and rewrites the page, bigtime. On IE, this can take ten seconds (on deeply commented pages). On Opera it just happened. Click.
But the last thing the world needs is another "I Saw The Light And Changed" review, whether blogged, magazined or posted on a forum. It's not useful; the sort of people who'd read it can make up their own mind. But what it made me think about is how much is involved in taking a step away from the mainstream.
Firstly, there's perception of the need to change. In my case, it was sparked by a recent security flaw; yet none of the non-techies in my family were aware of that (and yes, I asked a sample), or even of flaws in IE in general. To them, nasty stuff on their PCs is just something that happens. It's life, and when Ben comes round, ask him to take a look at it. Thus they see no need to change. Many geeks do. Secondly, there's awareness of the existence of alternatives. One or two have heard of Netscape, but think it's long dead. Nobody's heard of Opera. Geeks have. Thirdly, there's the ability to make the decision, not in some philosophical sense of adopting-an-intentional-stance or the like - just the level of control over the computing environment that'd let them do it. If it's a work PC, then chances are that no change will be allowed. If it's a home PC - well, changing the browser might affect more than just one person. Fourthly, there's the technical ability needed to make the change. I kept a record of the configuration changes I've made to get Opera to where it is now - default browser with imported bookmarks, etc. There are a lot of them; in some cases I had to go digging into preferences. Not everything is obvious. Finally, and here's the most interesting one to me, there's the courage to make the change. You're shifting something deep in the way you look at the online world. IE isn't just an application to most people, it's an environment in which cool stuff happens. When you make a change of that magnitude and move to something that doesn't come with the computer, you risk being out on a limb, you risk failing to get it to work, you risk having odd incomptibilities with things that "work fine for everybody else".
Think of it like limiting friction; the pull of gravity is not enough to get the stone to roll. It also needs a heck of an initial push.
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