Tim O’Reilly is the latest to pick up on the migration of a few prominent geeks from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a really marvelous Linux distribution that I just adore and use on all my servers at work, and used to use on my desktop as well. However, a few months back I spent some time mulling over all the options and made the decision that the best choice for me was to go with a Mac. There are tradeoffs, to be sure, but on the whole the Mac better serves my needs.

Now, however, we have a few prominent geeks very publicly choosing Ubuntu over the Mac, and one has to wonder how this will influence others in the community. Jason Kottke (linked in the O’Reilly post) calls these switchers canaries in the coal mine, and suggests Apple should be worried about the trend. While I find it unlikely that Apple will pay this much mind, I would be thrilled if Mac OS X was improved to respond to some of the criticism being leveled.

Much of the criticism deals with proprietary file formats, which I find disingenuous. The Mac does use proprietary formats for many of their applications, such as how Address Book records are stored, how emails are catalogued, iTunes libraries, calendars, and photos in iPhoto. But all of these apps give the user the ability to export their data into a more standard format (such as vCards for Address Book and iCalendar files for iCal), and most of them also provide an XML representation of their data as well. I’m not terribly afraid of “lock in” with most of these apps, but I would be very happy if Apple were to better document its formats, make them more open, and, most importantly, allow third party developers to interface with them without having to hack other parts of the operating system.

And the reason I stick with the Mac really has to do with all of those apps, and that’s why I decided to stay away from Ubuntu. The way that Address Book is integrated into all the apps that deal with addresses, and iCal takes invitations out of Mail, and the global spell check lets me use the same dictionary for every app, and the way that third-party tools like Quicksilver and Growl work so wonderfully and feel so integrated and are so slick, and the power that Spotlight is slowly bringing to organizing information, these are the reasons I’m sticking with the Mac — for now.

I don’t consider myself a crazy Apple loyalist. I stick with the Mac because in general it works better, it is more innovative, more useful, more friendly, more polished, and makes me more productive. Yes, many of the Mac apps I use are open source or non-Apple, but that’s fine, because they work well and integrate well into the environment. On Linux there is still a mess of competing way to do things, different apps that use different frameworks and look different and have different keyboard shortcuts and use different dictionaries and behave in different ways. There are apps that are only half finished, ideas only half realized, functionality only half implemented.

I use my Mac because it gives me the power to do Unixy things and use the command line but it also gives me the power of the integration of base level stuff in ways that other OSes don’t give me. It provides the glue that links things together and then gets out of the way. And when Ubuntu surpasses the Mac, I’ll gladly switch. I don’t expect that to happen soon.