Specifically, I was concerned because of the implications of  the company’s huge success with the iOS family of products — the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch — and its smothering control of the ecosystem around those products. First, even though Apple has relented in small ways on its control-freakery, the fundamental nature of the ecosystem remained: You essentially need Apple’s permission to be part of it in almost every serious way.

Second, the company’s focus centers on the iOS ecosystem. Steve Jobs and his colleagues see what they call “curated” – a more polite word for control — systems as the way of the future. That inevitably leaves uncurated systems — that is, ones where people don’t need permission to build on them — in a second-class status.

The Mac OS got me off of Windows more than a decade ago, even before it was better than Windows, in part because I’d had it up to here with Microsoft’s tactics during its desktop monopoly days. I’ve owned more Mac computers than I can remember, and while I’ve never been wild about the laptop hardware, the machines have been my steady companions at home, work and on the road since then.

During my Mac years I’ve also said any number of times that I wished Apple would license its OS to IBM, which made what I consider the class of all laptop/notebook hardware: the ThinkPad. I’ve owned ThinkPads since the mid-1990s, when I was using Windows. A ThinkPad (now made by Lenovo) with the MacOS would be pretty close to the ultimate portable system for serious computing, but it was never to be.

In departing from the Mac OS at this juncture, I considered moving back to Windows. By any measure, Windows 7 is the best operating system from Microsoft in years — as big a leap above its most recent version as Windows 95 was over Windows 3.1. But Microsoft has its own control-freakish instincts and behavior, too, so that idea was a nonstarter.

Which, essentially, left Linux. Foolishly, however, I’d purchased a new ThinkPad X201 model, which combined portability, ruggedness and other features in ways that struck me as ideal. I was foolish because I’d bought it without knowing whether Linux — at least the version of Linux I wanted to use, Ubuntu — would run properly on it. It didn’t, because some of the hardware components were so new that the Ubuntu community hadn’t yet gotten around to writing the software to support them.

A word about Ubuntu: The open-source project aims to bring Linux to the masses, and it’s a remarkable collection of people who’ve coalesced around a team spearheaded by South African software entrepreneur named Mark Shuttleworth, who’s put millions of dollars of his own money into the effort.

Ubuntu Linux, from the start, has been a free operating system that’s one of many so-called distributions of the GNU/Linux platform that emerged in the 1990s as the free-software movement decided that Microsoft’s monopoly and proprietary control were unacceptable. The open nature of Linux has many competing versions, with the best ones aimed at corporate use and financially supported through fees that enterprises gladly pay for technical support and consistent upgrades and updates.

But behind all versions of Linux is a global community of people who contribute in small and large ways to the overall system, and give back improvements to the wider community. It’s messy, and wonderful.

Ubuntu 10.04, released in the spring, was nicknamed “Lucid Lynx” and was a major upgrade. But it didn’t install correctly on my x201; all I got was a black screen when I started the computer. I tried some of the tricks people suggested online but had no luck.

In September, my friend Cory Doctorow, who has been one of the people encouraging this switch and knew about my troubles, connected me with an American programmer, Robert Douglass, who lives in Germany. Douglass had found a way to make his own x201 work, and he was happy to help me do the same.

We spent part of a Saturday morning (California time) on Skype, during which time he helped me upgrade a critical part of the ThinkPad’s hardware — special software, called the BIOS, that’s embedded inside the hardware — and then try to install a beta, or prerelease, version of Ubuntu 10.10, nicknamed “Maverick Meerkat” in the offbeat naming system the Ubuntu-ites enjoy.

It worked immediately. After the installation and restart of the computer, I was greeted with a typical log-in screen. I was overjoyed, and Douglass was happy if somewhat bemused that all of his tinkering had been — as such things tend to go — rendered moot by the Ubuntu team. He was a classic member of the open-source software community: willing to help out a relative newbie because he believed so much in what he was helping to support.

But because I was now using beta software, I suspected something would still be problematic in a showstopping way. I suspected correctly: The Virgin Mobile USB modem I use for wireless broadband didn’t work right, and my hunting around for help online didn’t bring any useful tips.

Ubuntu 10.10 was released on (naturally) 10/10/10. The update could not have gone any easier. One of Ubuntu’s greatest achievements has been in the ease-of-use arena; installing and updating most software is now a breeze. And, as I’d expected from the comments I’d seen online about my modem, a fix had been added. I wrote this piece and uploaded it using my new setup.

This isn’t the first Linux I’ve used. I’ve installed various distributions on other hardware in the past, from various providers. But this is the first Linux that strikes me as truly ready for prime time for a large segment of the computing population. I don’t believe for a second that a large percentage will do what I’ve done, because the standard alternatives are compellingly easy to use and come pre-installed on the most widely purchased computers. Yet I’d bet serious money that any normal computer user could adapt quickly to Ubuntu, and that people who do only a few things with their computers — browsing, writing documents and the like — would be entirely satisfied.

I do all kinds of different things on my laptop machines, and migrating entirely to Linux is going to be a chore. I am 85 percent of the way, by my estimates, to a system that runs everything  I need to get my work done. In coming months I’ll periodically let you know how the migration is going. So far, so very, very good. 

Apple is pushing computer users as fast as it can toward a centrally controlled computing ecosystem where it makes all the decisions about what native applications may be used on the devices it sells — and takes a cut of every dollar that is spent inside that ecosystem. This is a direct repudiation of its own history, and more broadly that of the larger personal-computing ecosystem, where no one can stop anyone else from writing and distributing software that other people might want to use.

Steve Jobs says Apple is a curator, nothing more. This grossly understates the control. Jobs says Apple has “made mistakes” in being the police, judge, jury and executioner in its Disney-style world, and is working hard to perfect the system.

But this is a disconnect with reality. Central control, no matter how well-intentioned, is itself the problem, not the solution. The “enlightened dictator” is fiction. And dangerous.

I realize that I won’t persuade the many people who prefer to live in gated communities, believing they can leave any time they wish. But switching costs will only get higher over time for those who choose to live in the Apple ecosystem.

As noted, I’ve been happy in the relatively free Mac world. But given the slowing pace of Mac OS development, there’s reason to believe Apple is mostly milking Mac OS users. Will it phase out serious PC development? Or will it eventually move its command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac? Apple says it’s committed to the Mac’s future. I’m not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player. (I’m a believer in tablets, and am planning to put my money there on the Android OS when tablet manufacturers adopt it in tablet-sized formats.)

So I’m looking for options in the personal-computing part of my life. Windows is one, of course, and Windows 7 is a truly fine piece of work by Microsoft’s recent operating-system standards, leagues better than Vista. But it’s impossible to fully trust Microsoft given its own history, not least its long and ever-deepening alliance with the control freaks of the Copyright Cartel, the commercial music, video, software and publishing industries.

That leaves, for practical purposes, Linux, which is freely available and not controlled by any one company. Volunteers around the world, who value freedom of choice and the ability to modify what they use, have created an ecosystem of their own — software based on the concept that you, not Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, should have control over what you own.

Linux is anything but a walled garden. It’s almost nothing but choice, with all the good and bad that comes with it. Linux comes in all kinds of flavors. For now, I’ve settled on Ubuntu as the OS most likely to be in my own future. The Ubuntu project, founded by Mark Shuttleworth, appeals to me for many reasons, not least the project team’s devotion to making the software easy to use.

Linux runs on many kinds of PCs. The Mac may be a wonderful combination of hardware and software, but the hardware is definitely lagging these days. I’ve purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad X201, a laptop that strikes me as the ideal balance of portability and power. It’s much lighter than my MacBook Pro, yet has a great set of hardware features that Apple can’t seem to provide in its own laptops despite their high prices. (Example: The ThinkPad has a reader for flash-memory cards.)

Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s latest version, called “Lucid Lynx,” won’t run properly yet on the X201. The machine is just too new, and has some hardware Ubuntu doesn’t yet support. I’m assured this will change in the relatively near future, but Ubuntu’s lack of support for such a popular computer is an example of how much progress the project, for all its immense value, needs to make.

Meanwhile, Lucid Lynx is running nicely in a “virtual machine” on my MacBook Pro. I’ve been testing a variety of applications that could replace the Mac software I’ve come to rely on, though in some cases I can’t easily find adequate replacements (such as the blog-posting software I’m using to create this post).

I’m planning to make this transition slow and systematic. And I’ll be blogging periodically about the process. These postings won’t be aimed at geeky folks, but rather at others like me who believe in true freedom of choice in a world where powerful institutions are trying to lure us — or force us — into their walled gardens.

But in a CNET article taking a look at the obstacles hindering the growth of the technology market in Brazil, reporter Ina Fried suggests that many of those computers don’t stick with their Linux-based operating systems for very long.

…Some estimates show as many as 18 or 19 out of every 20 machines sold with Linux ultimately are converted to some form of Windows.

“There was a retailer in one of the countries that sold their systems with Linux,” said Gartner analyst Luis Anavitarte. “They made a survey of clients within the first 30 days; 95 percent were already on Windows.”

One can wonder just how much to trust a source citing an unnamed retailer in an unnamed country, but there is also some anecdotal supporting evidence from within the free software community. Which reminds me of the famous line from one of William Gibson’s earliest stories, “Burning Chrome” — “the street finds its own uses for things.”

Got that? Doesn’t matter either way, because Friday’s ruling shuts it down. In SCO v. Novell, a case running alongside SCO’s claim against IBM, the judge said that Novell never transferred Unix ownership over to SCO: “Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights,” the ruling states.

What does this mean for SCO’s claim to own Linux? The judge called a hearing for Aug. 31 to sort out what might happen to the IBM suit, but observers see the writing on the wall.

Since SCO’s claims to Linux rest on its claim to own Unix, a ruling that Novell — and not SCO — actually owns Unix is like a drive crash on SCO’s legal aims: Perhaps the company can try to restart the effort, but it would take a miracle to actually prevail.

SCO, though, has little other choice than to keep going; the company, now, is basically an intellectual-property hoarding firm, a company that exists solely to extract from others a legal bounty on allegations of copyright violation.

This is its business, and naturally, the company says it will continue: “Although the district judge ruled in Novell’s favor on important issues, the case has not yet been fully vetted by the legal system and we will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here.”

Good luck with that, SCO.

See the court’s ruling here (PDF); for more commentary on the case, check out the indispensable Groklaw.

– Farhad Manjoo

I’ve been using the Zonbu for about a week, and were it not for some annoying kinks (more about those soon), this is a computer I might be moved to love. As it is, I can say that I’m in love with how it looks on paper. Though companies have attempted to create lightweight, network-dependent “thin clients” in the past — and subscription-based PCs are also nothing new — the Zonbu represents the best implementation I’ve seen of a new kind of machine, one whose functionality rides upon a foundation of robust network access and free and easily available Web software. More than that, it’s very friendly to the environment. The Zonbu is the first consumer computer that meets the EPEAT “Gold” standard, the highest rating given out by the nonprofit group the Green Electronics Council.

Just about every aspect of the Zonbu is innovative. Its creators, entrepreneurs Grégoire Gentil and Alain Rossmann, developed the system for less than a million dollars in investment, using a bevy of open-source software and a crew of developers flung across various parts of Europe and South America. At its heart is a low-power Intel-compatible processor made by the Taiwanese firm VIA, as well as a very slick version of the Linux operating system (the flavor is Gentoo, for those of you who care about such things).

Though you can use it to do just about the same things you’d do on an ordinary Mac or a PC — surf the Web, do e-mail, play music and movies, chat over IM, and tangle with office productivity tasks like a word processor and a spreadsheet — the Zonbu contains no hard drive. Instead, it has a small 4 GB CompactFlash card for local storage (the sort of card digital cameras use to store pictures), but it keeps most of your stuff online. Zonbu contracts space from Amazon.com — the retailer leases its servers out to Web developers — and this explains the monthly fee. You pay Zonbu $12.95 a month to get 25 GB of online space, $14.95 for 50 GB, and $19.95 for 100 GB.

Grégoire Gentil is a loud, gregarious Frenchman, a computer engineer by training, and a true geek at heart. A few weeks ago he came over to Salon’s offices to talk about Zonbu. His inspiration for the machine, he says, was his father’s Windows PC. “I would go over to Paris for the week and spend the whole time getting the spyware off his computer,” Gentil said.

The Zonbu is a computer meant for people like Gentil’s father — for non-geeks, for people who want to run just a few programs without any hassle. Because it’s silent (it contains no cooling fan) Gentil believes the Zonbu would be ideal as a second computer that you can keep in the kitchen or the living room. Maybe you use a Mac to edit your HD movies and a Windows machine to play games, but the Zonbu’s cheap enough that you could consider buying it as well.

In my tests I found much to love about the Zonbu’s hassle-free philosophy. First of all, it looks great. The Linux OS has been beautifully crafted to resemble the familiar setting of a Windows or a Mac, mimicking much of the “look and feel” of computing environments you’re used to. There is no learning curve to Zonbu.

Within a minute of loading up the system, I was on the Web. The Zonbu comes installed with Firefox, and every Web site or add-on to the browser that you’ve used on other systems works well here: Gmail, Google Reader, YouTube and other sites I use all the time were the same on Zonbu as on any other machine. Zonbu also comes with the Open Office word processor, spreadsheet program and presentation manager — these are open-source, free alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They take some getting used to, and I wouldn’t want to write a book on the word processor here, but for little tasks, they work well enough.

Other apps already loaded on Zonbu include Skype; an IM program; an e-mail and calendar manager; a graphics and Web page editor; and several small games. (See the full list here.) But that’s all. Zonbu has locked down the system from other programs — that is, you can’t download something from the Web and install it on your Zonbu. I’ve criticized this setup on the iPhone, and I think it’s a strike against the Zonbu too. In the company’s defense, though, Gentil says that locking the machine is the only way to ensure that the system does not get bogged down with spyware. Moreover, he notes, the Zonbu is not meant to be a do-everything PC — if you need an obscure program, download it on your Mac or your PC.

The programs that do come with it work quite well, and the machine excelled at several everyday computing tasks. It easily found other computers on my home network, and I transferred several large movie and music files from my Windows machine without any trouble. Despite its low-speed processor, the computer played most of the media files without skipping or halting (it could not decipher some of the video files and played only the audio; often this is a problem people fix by downloading special “codecs,” but you can’t do that on Zonbu).

I then tried to transfer the music to my iPod Shuffle. The machine recognized my iPod and loaded up a music library program called Banshee. (There is no iTunes for Linux, and thus Zonbu cannot play most songs you purchase from the iTunes Store.) The music slipped easily from the Zonbu to the Shuffle.

Other tasks weren’t so flawless. The Zonbu recognized my Olympus digital camera, but only as an external hard drive — its photo organizing program could not automatically import photos from my camera. I also couldn’t figure out how to connect the Zonbu to my network printer. The machine located the printer, but seemed not to have the necessary drivers to use it.

Zonbu’s lack of local storage also bothered me. In theory, the system is supposed to upload all of your data online and download it just when you need it. There are clear benefits to such a plan; because your house is much more likely to get robbed or burn down than Amazon’s servers, keeping your files online is safer than keeping them at your house (the data is encrypted to hide it from prying eyes). Online storage also lets you access your files from the road. Anything you do on your Zonbu becomes quickly available to you anywhere else — I’m typing this review at home, but were I to go into the office later, I’d be able to get to it there through Zonbu’s Web interface.

Files are supposed to fly between your Zonbu and the Internet transparently, without your noticing. The trouble is, they don’t. When I tried to play a music file that my Zonbu had shipped off to the Internet, I often had to wait 20 or more seconds for the machine to download the full file. Only then did the music begin to play. Perhaps as a result of some kind of bug, the Zonbu often tried to download the same file several times; that is, a song would stop midway through, fly back over the Internet to my machine, and then it would start playing over again.

Though the Zonbu is on sale now, it is still officially in an unfinished “public beta” mode, and engineers are hard at work fixing many of the problems I’ve highlighted. I hope they pull it off — it’ll be good not only for the computer-addled public, but for the planet, too.

In order to meet the EPEAT gold standard, the Zonbu uses very little energy — 131 killowat-hours per year compared to 1,534 killowat-hours per year for a standard PC, according to Zonbu. To put it another way, an ordinary PC uses energy equivalent to 107 gallons of gasoline a year, producing 2,071 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. The Zonbu uses less than one gallon of gas and produces less than a pound of global-warming emissions. (This does not count, though, the power Amazon uses to store your data.) The Zonbu was also built in a way that eliminates the use of cadmium, chromium, certain plastics and other unsavory materials found in other computers.

Considering the environmental benefits, then, if Gentil and his team perfect their system, maybe you can shut off your main machine and turn to Zonbu full time.