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Mac moves to Intel as the Windows tax grows heavier

This is terrible to write, since I’ve mocked friends who’ve moved to Mac as shiny-object-with-a-price-premium-loving poseurs, but I’m starting to consider it.

In the last two weeks I’ve moved to Open Office which is barely adequate, had spam-virii invasive enough in Thunderbird to trigger Norton alarms continually (but ineffectually), and, as the kicker, just now updated Norton which changed my firewall settings sufficiently to knock me off our home wifi.

Since I had to reclone to get back to native WinXP SP2 Bluetooth support, the trial clock on Norton was reset; they will inevitably ask for money to support the Windows tax, and I will refuse and go to Grisoft. So even this rant is about a temporary problem, but it still rankles.

Where, oh where, is my Linux desktop alternative? That dream of running a highly configurable system on commodity hardware?

The newly converted and devout preach alike of the benefits of the BSD infrastructure underlying OSX, but even with Apple’s announcement of a move to the Intel chipset, industry bets seem to be that Apple will keep the system closed. Where does that really get us?

That’s always what’s consoled me about staying on Windows - at least you have a wide range of kit on which to run your bloated, insecure OS. I can go super light with Japanese notebooks, or I could go beefy with a casemodded gaming machine. Just about every peripheral works. Yeah, it’s worse with Linux, but that’s where the world was headed before all the alpha hackers moved to Mac.

With Apple kit, choice is simulated with a coat of paint and dismissed as not being nearly as cool as thinking different (yet so monolithically). Think different, yes, oh yes - different from commodity pricing pressure of the rest of the industry (but not too different). Best a kind of vertical different that accepts the requirement of a matching set of Mac-dedicated components. I admire it as a marketer, but revile it as a consumer; they free as much as they control.

I’ll post this and reboot (as was requested by Norton), hoping that my wifi settings will be restored automagically. I hardly expect success if I have to play with the settings in their tool. Of course I could always disable it and go for the Windows Firewall.