chrispoole.com

I’ve just read this article, which is of slight interest. The author compares Vista to the next version of SUSE GNU/Linux. But I’m left wondering why he’s comparing Vista and SUSE, when he should be comparing Vista and OS X (Tiger even, nevermind Leopard). Much of his reasoning for going for SUSE over Vista can be directly applied to OS X too — in fact, about the only point that can’t be applied is the fact that SUSE can get by capably with 256MB of RAM.

The author thinks that SUSE may come out tops. This is rediculous frankly, given the number of PCs that will be sold with Vista installed. Plus, I still believe the free software operating systems to be fatally flawed. I advocate the free software philosophy, but I do not believe it will truly work in the big wide world until proprietary software vastly loses its ground. Until then you’ll have companies like Novell selling ‘enterprise’ versions of their free software with the proprietary stuff stuck on, which kind of goes against the whole point, in my opinion. And while drivers for graphics cards etc. are proprietary, you’ll always have trouble competing.

I make a prediction here too: once Vista is released, Redmond will switch to using a unix variant as part of the Windows core. Perhaps not the Linux kernel, but they need to sort some of the main security problems. And unix is a fast way to do it. OS X and the GNU system wouldn’t be where they are now — in terms of number of inherent security problems, at least — without their inherited permissions model.