I was a pretty heavy Mac user back in the 2000s. This was largely because my studies suited the platform, but there were other reasons. This was where I learned to master the Unix command line. Eventually, I decided that Ubuntu was a better fit for my computing needs.
Ubuntu Has Always Been Free
One reason that I favor Ubuntu over macOS today is that Ubuntu is free—as in beer, not speech, according to Richard Stallman’s famous definition.
Back when macOS was called Mac OS X, it was a paid upgrade. And, like everything else in the Apple ecosystem, there was quite a markup; an upgrade would cost at least $100. Apple was hardly unique in this era. An upgrade to Windows also cost quite a bit of money in those days, and still does if you’re building a new PC and need a license.
The major OS developers hadn’t hit on the idea of a free upgrade yet. Ubuntu, by contrast, has always been available free of charge, and this is essentially guaranteed via its open-source license.
Sure, I needed to burn a CD or extract it to a USB key if I was installing it on a physical machine, but the costs of those were nominal. This was important to someone who was out of college and couldn’t rely on Apple’s student discounts.
I sometimes wonder if the threat of users like me defecting to Ubuntu and other user-friendly distros was the reason Microsoft and Apple started to make OS upgrades free of charge.
Ubuntu Puts Me in Control of My Hardware
Don’t get me wrong. Apple is pretty good at coming out with excellent hardware. Most of the time, at least.
It’s the software that drives the decision for me. When I used macOS the most, it was for the journalism and video classes I was taking. That meant Microsoft Word and Final Cut Pro. Sure, Word was multi-platform but Final Cut Pro is Mac-only.
Out of college, video became less important in favor of the written word for me. The hardware platform was less important.
Ubuntu, because it runs on different platforms, works better for me. It runs on cheap commodity PCs without weird hacks the way “Hackintoshes” do. Apple seems to be cracking down on people who run macOS on non-Apple hardware, according toTechRadar. Ubuntu seems like a better long-term bet.
Apple is a hardware company, and their business model depends on me buying more machines. Ubuntu lets me make better use of my investment in hardware by making it possible to use it even after Apple or Microsoft stop supporting it with their OS upgrades.
Ubuntu Is More Flexible and Customizable Than macOS
While there’s plenty to love about macOS—in particular, its slick user interface on top of real Unix—it seems that Apple has never been entirely comfortable with people who want to dig below the surface.
macOS’s primary user interface is its own GUI, and you may’t replace it with another desktop easily asyou can with Ubuntu, even if you installed the server without a GUI.
With Ubuntu, when I want to try out another desktop or window manager, all I have to do is issue an APT command, log out, and pick it from the list of environments in the login menu.
There are also different “flavors” of Ubuntu already available with alternate desktop environments,like Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
I can even run Ubuntu right within Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux, something I can’t do with macOS.
Ubuntu Is More Open
While macOS does have some BSD in it andremains a favorite of developers, it’s ultimately a closed-source, proprietary system. I can examine Ubuntu’s entire source code if I want to.
Ubuntu, like the rest of Linux, is transparent in the way it lets me examine it. This is in contrast to Apple’s more closed model. That approach dates back to Steve Jobs’ original vision of the Mac as an “appliance” that people just used and didn’t tinker with.
Ubuntu is a forest rather than a walled garden, and there’s always something new to explore.
