Apple

My 7 year old desktop computer has finally died. After having replaced 2 disks, 3 power supplies, a VGA card, the USB ports, several fans and a monitor, its about time for this machine to retire. With its innards spilled onto floor and hooked up to multiple power supplies, its being kept alive long enough for me to copy all the important data over to my NAS.

I already looked around a bit and will probably reuse the case, power supply and some disks for the new machine. With a new gigabyte motherboard, core i7 CPU, plenty of RAM and an SSD for the operating system, it will probably be insanely fast compared to this one. But that brings me to the final choice, which operating system to use?

I have experience with most operating systems. My desktop has always been linux (first debian and later ubuntu), but I also own a macbook pro and use Windows at work. None of them are perfect, so choosing between them is pretty hard. Note that I can't really run OSX on the new hardware I plan to order, but I'll include it in the comparison as I could buy an iMac instead.

The most important functions for this machine are:

• Running virtual machines (development environments & tests).
• Surfing the interwebs.
• Communication tools (IM/twitter/email/..).
• Access shared data stored on the NAS via CIFS.
• Connecting and disconnecting monitors while its running so that I can use one of them to watch TV.

So here is how I see the advantages and disadvantages of the different operating systems at this time:

Linux

Windows

Apple OSX

Conclusion

At the moment I'm leaning towards using Windows 7 as my primary operating system with a Linux virtual machine to run my collection of scripts. I'll still give Linux a try when the new hardware arrives, but I don't really expect anything amazing from it. Getting it to work has always been a struggle, especially when it comes to multiple monitors. I don't expect this to work properly, especially attaching and disconnecting the monitors while its running.
OSX has already been ruled out because of its price and lack of hardware flexibility. I'll simply keep running all the cool OSX stuff and image editing on my macbook as I already do nowadays. If I could run OSX on my own hardware, that would probably have won.

I have mixed feelings moving away from Linux on the desktop. It's still running on my servers of course, but now that a lot more has shifted to the web and the few other applications that I use have become cross-platform, many of the reasons that I was using it on the desktop have vanished. Quite the irony as most of these applications are open source.
On the other hand, as I look at all the Linux server admins, 90% of them are using macbooks. So I don't seem to be the first to admit that Linux has lost the battle for the desktop.

I have had an iPhone 3G for a while now and it is a pretty nice and fun gadget. Its not as serious as a crackberry, but it does most things I want and there are many interesting apps available for it. Believe it or not, you can even use it as a phone.

There are however, many things about the iPhone that annoy me a lot. Most of them are related to the stupid artificial limitations enforced by Apple, or limitations of their software.

1. It vibrates when new mail is received, which is pretty normal. But it also does this while you are on a call, not a pleasant feeling.
2. It has no scheduling for email. Apple likes to say the iPhone is ready for enterprise use, but it misses a lot of the most basic features. As someone who is on-call a lot, my phone needs to be on at night, but I don't want to be woken every time I get an email. They could even save a lot of battery power and roaming costs this way.
3. The iPhone supports 3G but unlike other phones, no tethering. I want to be able to connect it to my laptop when i'm on the road. It is technically possible, apple just doesn't allow it.
4. Applications aren't allowed to run in the background. The phone has such huge potential - but this silly rule limits the usefulness of many applications a lot.
5. The keyboard is difficult to use. In some places you can turn the phone to get a larger keyboard, in others you can't. The dictionary is worthless. In true American style, they completely forgot about countries where people speak multiple languages.
6. No search functionality. Ever tried looking for an email if you get a hundreds a day? Surprising, for the people who created spotlight.
7. The touchscreen sometimes registers clicks twice. I kept losing emails until I eventually figured out this was because the last character of my PIN was in the exact same place as the delete button. When I unlocked the phone, it would simply delete the message I had open at the time.
8. You can't use it as an USB storage device. So you have a phone with multiple GB of storage, that connects to your computer via an USB cable. Then why can't it be used to store files on?
9. No indication of missed calls. On most phones there is a little led that lights up when you have a missed call, or the screen backlight lights up a little.
10. Battery life of course. With all functionality enabled, iPhones are usually found in their natural habitat, connected to the USB port of a computer.

Of course I could jailbreak the device to get around many of these limitations, but as I don't really own the device, that is not an option.

All in all, I still like the iPhone, but it is far from perfect. What I dislike most, is the company behind it. Apple fanboys like bashing Windows users, while – as an owner of several Apple products – I believe that Apple is a lot worse than Microsoft. They simply hide it behind a pretty design.