The Year of Linux on the Desktop - Part 3: It just (doesn't) work

Nobody buys a computer; they buy into an ecosystem.

This has been true for (basically) forever. A computer has only ever been as useful as the software you could run on it, and as only a small fraction of the people who have ever owned computers can program them, this mostly means the software you can buy (or otherwise obtain) for it.¹

Computer ecosystems have always evolved. Defender of the Crown and Delux Paint were excellent reasons to buy into the Amiga ecosystem, but WordPerfect was a solid reason for abandoning it.

Computer ecosystems have become more complex, and more sticky, over time. Or some of them have, anyway.

There are two main long-term trends that influence a lot of the computer world right now. The first is “everything is a web page”, which once upon a time we called AJAX, and now we just call “a day that ends in a Y”.

Web applications can not just do pretty much everything that traditional offline applications can do, in a lot of cases the traditional offline applications are just thinly wrapped web applications anyway. It doesn’t matter whether you’re accessing GMail on your connected toaster or a tablet or a supercomputer, it’s still the same GMail. And it’s still mostly awful.

The second is “your phone is the computer”. This one doesn’t even need an explanation. I have no idea how many people only access the Internet via a phone, but I’d bet it’s a lot.

These two trends are not mutually exclusive, though they’re not always compatible.

From one side of things, it doesn’t matter what platform you use. As long as you have a web browser, you’re essentially using the same thing. Your data is in the Cloud² and you can access it with any web browser, or with apps that basically talk to your data using the same APIs as the web browser. Your platform choice isn’t sticky because at some level the only platform you’re using is a web browser.

From the other side of things, what’s sticky now is the web platform, not the computer platform. But that can still be its own insidious kind of sticky.

Apple has done a particularly thorough job of integrating its computing platform and its web platform.³ When you’re all-in on the Apple ecosystem, everything Just Works(tm). Actually, things break randomly in unfixable ways and it’s either Apple’s way or the highway, but in general Apple things works best with other Apple things, and in some important ways, only with other Apple things. iMessage is probably the canonical example of this, but in reality it’s probably the one that is easiest to work around because there are so many other good, free options. If I needed to, I could probably get the important people in my life to talk to me using WhatsApp, or Signal, or (god help us) Messenger. If you’re anything other than an American, you’re probably already doing that.

But how do I migrate away from Apple Home (née HomeKit) for my smart home stuff without infuriating all of my family members? What’s the replacement for Apple Photos that will keep a copy of all my photos in a safe and accessible place and still allow them to be shared with my in-laws? What other service is going to let me easily see when my partner is on their way home so I can start cooking dinner, or easily let me copy a URL between my phone and desktop, or even get my mp3 collection onto my iPhone, or any one of the million other things an integrated system affords.

“Well actually,” you begin, wiping the cheetos off your hands onto your stained hoodie, “if you download these projects from GitHub and run these 16 Docker containers and set up eight Raspberry Pis and everything works and nothing breaks you can get a whole 13 per cent of that functionality almost 50 per cent of the time and it mostly only looks like the interface was designed by someone who actively hates humans but loves obscure derivatives of the LISP programming language.”

Surprise, I can use Google. And I actually know this.⁴ The point is that these hacked together alternatives are difficult and delicate and mostly, frankly, a bit shit.

One of the reasons that I originally migrated away from Linux in the first place was I was a bit sick of everything holding together with bubble gum and gaffer tape; being user, systems administrator and sometimes developer.

There are some solutions to some of these issues which don’t look actively awful – or maybe which are useful enough to overlook some of the awfulness. Home Assistant, for example, looks like it might be a reasonable drop-in replacement for Apple Home. There are lots of services that claim to back-up your photos from your iPhone onto the cloud, but we know Apple locks down access to its devices pretty thoroughly, so how well do these actually work? But that’s the thing: each little feature requires some completely new and disconnected piece of software you need to research and understand and install and maintain.

The hardcore position is that buying into the ecosystem at any level is too much. You don’t need to worry about how Apple locks down photos on the iPhone if you don’t have an iPhone [tapping_head_meme.gif]. This is both true, and maybe a step too far for me at the moment. And it’s not something that I’m keen to impose on the rest of the household. But I do feel that the main alternative to an iPhone is an Android phone, and you’re mostly trading one set of shackles for another.

Also, while I don’t have much experience with Android, there are plenty of people out there (Apple users, basically) who argue that the app situation on Android is just a step removed from Linux, with awful UIs and little care for user experience, or even just good taste. And then there are Linux phones (it’s okay, I’ll wait here while you finish laughing).

The “half pregnant” solution could be to go Linux on the desktop and have that as an island of non-Appleness in the broader Apple ecosystem of the household. That loses some obvious benefits of the ecosystem – like the ability to edit phone photos on the big screen easily, or being able to turn off a smart light from the desktop. It also loses some non-obvious advantages. For example, I have my desktop Mac automatically download and store all of the iCloud photos, and then back that up so we can be less reliant on the loving mercy of the Cloud. However there may be solutions to that particular problem that are worth exploring anyway.

Still, copying something on my phone and immediately pasting it on my desktop is a feature I’m likely to quickly miss, if nothing else.