Today I tried to help a Mac user save some pictures to a DVD. There were more than 1GB of photos, so it made more sense to use a DVD than two CDs. Unfortunately, Mac OS X thinks that you need to make movies when you insert a blank DVD disc -- it has no idea that you want to save data to it. What you, the user, want to do does not matter. All that matters is that you do what Apple says a computer should do. This is "the Apple way," and some people find it enjoyable.

Is a lack of customization and choice heaven or hell? In the Linux and BSD worlds, this is a frequent debate. A large part of the advantage to using a versatile operating system is that you get to choose which software you want to use. If you don't like one graphical environment, you can change the way it looks, or use one of several others that have totally different methods of operation. In this kind of software environment, you're in control of your machine.

At the other end of the argument are people who say that choice leads to confusion. While there are standards for protocols and file formats, there are few or no official standards for Linux- or BSD-based operating systems in terms of what software is to be used for any given task. There are some de-facto standards, and distribution-specific standards, but nothing that you're forced to use if you really don't want to. If a distro makes it tough for you to do things the way you want, there are more accommodating distros to switch to.

I've been using software environments like these for several years now. It wasn't difficult to use Windows or OS X for a little while when I first switched to Linux and BSD, but at this point it's a hugely frustrating experience for me. If something doesn't work as I intended, I'm used to being able to use another program that will do the same thing, or hop over to the command line and run it from there. Coming from Linux, the DVD hassle in OS X was beyond aggravating. Apple says that DVDs are for movies, and it won't hear any argument to the contrary. I did find a way to do a data backup, but some kind of program error prevented a proper ISO from being created. In the end, I took the memory stick that originally held the pictures, put it into my Linux workstation, and used K3b to create a data DVD.

OS X and Linux are essentially two extreme opposites. The Apple Way is to make all of your decisions for you so that you're not burdened by choice. Some people enjoy that -- they find simplicity in it that allows them to concentrate on other things. To me, it's computing hell.

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.