Kablingy

Humour me please.

OS X

Take a look at the feature list for Apple’s OS X Leopard:

• Time Machine – See how your system looked on a given day and restore files with a click.
• Mail – Email personalized stationery, take notes, and write to-dos that appear in iCal.
• iChat – Video chat with effects and backdrops, present remotely, and get more from text.
• Quick Look – Browse, play, view, and page through your files. Without opening them.
• Boot Camp – Run Windows on your Mac.

Windows

Take a  look at the feature list for Microsoft’s Window Vista:

• Find, fix, and share photos – Organize, edit, and share your favorite photos with family and friends using Windows Photo Gallery.
• Find almost anything -Find documents, e-mail, photos, and more in a snap through Instant Search.
• Turn any room into a media room – Manage and enjoy digital photos, music, TV shows, and movies in your living room with Windows Media Center.M
• Make movie magic – Retain high-definition quality as you capture, edit, and publish movies from a video camcorder with Windows Movie Maker.2

Both feature lists look relatively good on the box. I’ll omit how well each lives up to its advertised features, except to say I like OS X and I detest Vista. But at least I detest it. There’s something to work with there. One could argue Windows is opinionated. Hell, at least they tried!

GNU/Linux

Let’s take a look at the different variants of Desktop Linux and the features they advertise. Starting with:

Fedora Linux

After scrolling down through paragraphs of missions, core values, community, method, I got to what looks like the distinguishing feature list:

• NetworkManager
• D-Bus
• PolicyKit
• PackageKit
• HAL
• FreeIPA
• SELinux
• PulseAudio

Oooooh, excited yet? Take a look at some screenshots from the new Fedora Beta coming out in May. From this arstechnia article.

This is about as exciting as an episode of Friends, unless you are stimulated at the sight of sound preference pop ups of course. Read the arstechnia article in case you think I’m taking this out of context.

[Update 6/4/09: A commenter informs me that Fedora 11 is more intended for IT technicians rather than regular users - its more comparable with Windows Server]

Let’s take a look at another popular flavour:

Ubuntu Linux

Here’s the blurb:

With Ubuntu Desktop Edition you can surf the web, read email, create documents and spreadsheets, edit images and much more. Ubuntu has a fast and easy graphical installer right on the Desktop CD. On a typical computer the installation should take you less than 25 minutes.

I could do all that in Ubuntu in 2004. The feature list for the current release is more of the same. I can browse, chat, email, type a document, and plugin my music player.

Great.

When can I put together a great home movie, record a song, or make a DVD on Ubuntu, out of the box?

When can I waste a precious hour of my Saturday taking a hundred daft photographs like this, using just the camera in my computer?

Can anyone rescue GNU/Linux from a world where features like ‘Ext4 support’ and ‘X.Org server 1.6′ are seen as the latest features to be advertised?

Maybe it's happy to stay in that world.