Which OS You Use Can Depend On What Looks Good

You ever get behind the wheel of a car that you just didn't want to drive? Maybe the seat couldn't be moved to the right height, or wasn't adjustable at all, or there was just some strange, petty little thing that made you nuts? There may be a parallel between that experience and the reasons why some people just don't want to use Linux.It's not that they can't do the same things that they did in Windows, or do them without the distractions of security / stability issues, and so on. For some people, the deal-breaker is the simple fact that it isn't Windows. Never mind that you can often run Windows apps directly on Linux -- no, it's not Windows, it's something else, so it just won't do.

Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous -- especially to folks who have already switched and love it, or who put up with Windows and are looking for the nearest escape route. But there are people who do think like that. Call it silly if you will, but it does happen. Under it all, people are not rational creatures, and they will often use any reason to justify the prejudices they hold.

A lot of this seems to revolve around visuals, if only because the visuals for a given application or OS tend to be what we react to first and are confronted with the most. I've talked to people who call Linux's Beryl interface "ugly," and I've talked to people who call the Vista's Aero Glass interface "tacky." I've met people who won't work with OpenOffice.org's Writer because new documents open up in that program's equivalent of Word's Page View -- a feature you can work around easily enough, but some people don't hang around long enough to figure that out. And likewise, I've known people who refuse to touch Office 2007 because they think the new tab-bar interface is ugly / distracting / difficult / too much of a break from the past. (I personally like it a lot.)

Then there are people who are not thrown by first impressions, or who find visuals wholly irrelevant to working. I admit that in my case the way something looks is going to affect whether or not I use it consistently, especially if I have no choice but to stare at it all day long. I like the Beryl effects in Ubuntu, but I don't use them, mostly for the same reason I have the flying-window animation effects shut off in Vista Aero: I don't really need to make the experience more enjoyable. And I'd rather look at Firefox's simple and elegant basic skin than deal with IE 7's cluttered and difficult-to-manage look. That alone is one of the biggest reasons I barely use IE anymore on Windows: The revamped interface is not just cluttered, but actively impedes easy use of the program.

When it comes down to the look-and-feel of Linux, I've tried both Kubuntu and Ubuntu, just to see how they shake down against each other. So far, it's a toss-up: I like the stuff that's built into the KDE shell, but I also like Ubuntu's relative straightforwardness -- there's very little between me and getting actual work done. That may be because of my relative newness to the OS as a whole, but given that I'm trying to think of Linux (or any OS, really) as a tool, that to me is the approach that works best.

What (either in Windows or in Linux) has been a deal-breaker for you? Sometimes all it takes is the color of the desktop... or the feeling that, hey, this icon's really ugly... or...