WIGHT HAT BLOG

Apple is making me use Microsoft

Adam Provis, January 16, 2011

I made a New Year’s resolution last year which I never fulfilled; I wanted to be free of Microsoft by the end of the year. We use Fedora on our web servers and the plan was that I would use Linux for everything both professional and private. By avoiding Microsoft’s perpetual Windows upgrade path, losing more control over the machine with each revision, I envisioned a life of free open source tools and command line bliss.

I made a promising start. I substituted Outlook with Thunderbird and Sunbird, MS office with Open Office and used Google calendar and contacts as a central repository so that my transition between the two platforms was nice and smooth.

Then came the problem, I use an iPhone. Now I have heard all the suggestions for using an Android based phone but I love my iPhone and I am not going to switch. Apple have made what I consider the best phone on the market and I want to continue using it. The difficulty is that iPhones really need iTunes. Sure I’ve synced the contacts and calendar with the Google repository, but what about my music and video? There is no iTunes for Linux. I tried WINE (a Windows API platform for Linux which stands for “Wine is not an emulator” recursively) which attempts to run Windows programs on Linux but it would not run iTunes “out of the box” and I don’t have the time to play with it. There are other open source programs which support iPods but not iPhones so I’m stuck with an operating system that thinks an animated paper clip knows better than I do.

I am open to suggestions that anyone has to get me over this last hurdle apart from, that is, switch to using a MAC. I am trying to set myself free not lock myself into a never ending hardware upgrade path as well. Whilst still using the ageing Windows XP, the clock is ticking until I am forced to get another Microsoft upgrade.

I hope I don’t end this year clicking a “start” button to shut down my machine.

 

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