Linux, Mac, Google, Apps: What Is Wrong With Me?

Why do I have this need to change everything about my technological environment and change it back again? I’ve spoken of the futzmonkey, but seriously.

Over the past couple weeks I made two big moves in my technological life: the move from primarily desktop-application-based mail and news reading to primarily web-based the same, and the move from using my mac to using my linux-based laptop. Both were fun. I was pleased to see how very functional I could make my ubuntu laptop (working better than it ever has before for me on that hardware, seriously).

I really enjoyed the Google mail paradigm. As web-based mail goes, it’s probably the best. I found a way to import all of my old mail into gmail, which I hadn’t been able to do successfully before (there’s a lot of it). I set up forwarding from my regular email address to gmail, and changed my “from” address in gmail to my regular address so there would be no need to mess with changing email addresses.

I also moved all my subscriptions from NetNewsWire to Google Reader, which is a pretty outstanding mail reader.

It was all nice and pleasant.

Maybe it was hubris… I tried to run Google Earth on Linux, and got a black screen where the graphics should be. That kinda bummed me out. Then I realized I probably couldn’t run Second Life either, and while I’ve hardly ever logged on to Second Life, the thought that now I couldn’t bothered me for some reason.

Then… I drifted back.

First I got on my mac. It took mere minutes for me to get the keyboard finger memory back.

Once I was on the mac, I found it distasteful to use web-based applications. They worked the same, yes, but there are better options on a mac. I’ve paid money for some of those better options (I have licenses for ecto and netnewswire).

And it gnawed at me that although I was keeping a mirror of all my incoming gmail in my fastmail.fm account, my outgoing gmail was stuck in gmail somewhere, not mirrored anywhere. I had to change that. Had to mirror that stuff. Set up a pop account in OS X Mail, pulling it all down…

I forgot to mention that within the midst of all this flirtation with ubuntu and google, I also flirted with using vim as my main text editor instead of emacs. I have returned to the church of emacs, having done my penance.

So now I’m spiraling back to my default OS X state. What have we learned today? Ubuntu is great. Google apps are great. Just kicking back and using my mac is better.

And I wish I knew what is wrong with me that I waste so much time on this sort of thing.