Dad wanted to review the photos on his camera's memory card. Dad's a Windows user, and I don't have an SD slot on my XP desktop. So the only option was to fire up the Ubuntu laptop, log in, and hope for the best.
Now. What you should understand about my Dad is he's Mister Fix Anything, thanks to being in medical maintenance since before I was born in the hospital that employed him. Plumbing. Electrical. Mechanical. HVAC. (Computer-controlled pneumatic tube systems seem to be his special joy. That and being privy to the more colorful antics of the staff and administration--such generally being a fringe benefit of working third shift.)
He's turned his attention on desktop and laptop computers as well, so I didn't think that the Linux thing would throw him off too much. (Heck, I've managed to pass off Mandrake as Windows...and that in 2004.) Wrong. It seems that whatever software's installed on his home computer opens the root of the SD card and ignores the folder-structure to present all photos in slide-show format. To Ubuntu, however, the card was just another drive--no different from a hard drive, CD, DVD, or USB device. (Of course, the fact that his camera apparently creates a new folder for each day--which can mean a folder containing a single .JPG file--doesn't make browsing any easier.)
We fumbled through it one way or another. But it was pretty obvious that Dad was convinced that having all photos at his fingertips was The Way It's Supposed To Work, Darnitalready. His software completely concealed the folder structure (and thus the complexity) from him.
It's anecdotes like those that make me suspect--and rejoice--that operating systems will always be a multi-party system. I know my preferences, and--I fondly hope--understand some of the values that drive them. But values in operating systems--as in politics--can be incompatible to the point where compromises, while possible, have a kludgey feel to them. I more or less type for a living, and fingerprints on my monitor, frankly, skeeve me the heck out. Which pretty much rules out any tablet that doesn't dock into a keyboard. My co-worker in the pod next door, by contrast, might not be acquitted of actually naming his iPad and sleeping with it on a pillow next to him. At least not in the court of public opinion. Much the same might be said for his Android phone. And more power to him.
Which brings us back around to the politics metaphor and the moral of the story: Knowing your core values (and the trade-offs they entail) always trumps finding justification for your allegiance to a particular system.
