The Macintosh is 27 years old. It's not a round number, so I'm confused (and I end up writing mostly about Unix anyway)

We can all look back and laugh at how crashy the "classic" Mac OS was in those days. I still have a PowerBook 1400 running System 7.6.1, so I can re-experience the joy whenever I damn well wish.

I found an early Mac (I think it was a 512K) in a hospital's castoff-computer pile a few years ago (don't ask; my dumpster-diving days are over — I've been shedding machines for more than a year). It looked great. I even had the mouse and keyboard. Remember those early Mac keyboards? They were solid. Hard plastic, with a satisfying thunk when you hit the keys. The original IBM-PC keyboards were similarly (yet differently) sweet. Remember that mechanical, audible key click?

Anyway, I got the 512K home, booted it up. No, I didn't have any Macintosh system floppies of that vintage. But I couldn't even get the video to work. It was just a small band of light in the middle of the screen. I let the city have it in a hazardous/e-waste pickup event.

I still have my PB 1400, and I remember cracking open a Macintosh SE/30 to add memory (that was a major endeavor, only eclipsed by replacing the hard drive in our Macintosh iBook G4, for which I continue to curse Steve Jobs till this day). I marveled at how well a G4 tower ran OS X (even though the 1999/2000-era machine was very much of the OS era).

But just as I turned from Macintosh to Unix in the 1980s (and I thank Scott Brookie's impossible-to-find, sub-$2 Xeroxed manual "Unix for Luddites" for the entirety of my Unix education at the time), I do as much of my computing as I can these days in Linux (and I've spent considerable time running OpenBSD, my favorite OS of the BSD offshoots that sprang from Unix back in the '70s/'80s/'90s).

Yep, Linux and BSD were easier for me out of the box because I spent my last couple of years or so in college wrestling with Unix via dumb terminals, hacking together essays in vi with tagging that allowed it to be formatted with nroff and eventually output either to the clackity line printers at every computer lab or the hallowed laser printer at the computer center.

We can debate all day what Bill Gates appropriated from Unix to create his first DOS, what Apple pinched from Xerox (a company that could never seem to capitalize on the geniuses within), what Microsoft copied from Apple, and whether or not the many desktop environments in Linux/Unix are leaders, followers or mavericky space cadets (it depends on who you ask, and how drunk they are at the time).

About the only thing I don't have in Linux that would be "good to have" (and don't absolutely need, to tell the truth) is the expensive, dreaded Adobe Creative Suite.

Would I pay for it? Probably not. I get tons of photo editing done in gThumb and the GIMP. I don't need a Dreamweaver-type interface to create HTML and CSS, and if I could block off a couple weeks, I'd love to get up to speed in Inkscape, a vector-drawing program that, like the GIMP, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Blender and other open-source powerhouses, is available not only in Linux but also in Windows and Mac OS X.

I don't steal OS or application softare from Microsoft and Apple because a) I don't want to and b) I don't have to — even though I'm sure Microsoft would rather I ripped them off than not use their software at all and c) purchased software is usually a bad deal that requires endless financial investment for upgrades that are designed in large part to encourage ... endless financial investment.

In a way, I'm at the mercy of the thousands of developers/hackers who work on the Linux kernel and the many thousands of packages that go into the average Linux distribution, including Debian Squeeze, which I'm using right now. It's free, open-source, runs on just about anything out there, and is both from and for the community of users. And more often than not, it all works very well from a technical (and getting-work-done) standpoint.

I'll take that over the lock-in/profit-before-all motivated, disposable-minded, binary-only, it'll-run-on-what-we'll-tell-you-it'll-run line of both Microsoft and Apple (they're not all that different despite one being run by a now ailing mock-turtleneck-wearing, all-controlling/knowing CEO, the other by a scary intense, often-sweaty, famous-for-chair-throwing CEO).

I still run an OS X 10.4 laptop (Apple orphaned this version of the software long ago), I have a Windows 7 partition living on this dual-boot laptop (I need to test Windows-only software and, unfortunately, even hardware every once in a while) and my work box runs Windows XP (though I do manage to do a majority of my work in Linux), so I'll manage to get a taste of all of these operating environments.

Microsoft is pushing Windows 7 pretty hard. What's Apple doing? It's all iPhone and iPad. Nothing's happening in the OS X space.

We've all got tons of machines lying around (even though I've dumped all of my desktops and parted out a couple of laptops to reduce the size of my herd). Set one up, grab a live CD or three and see how the other 1 to 3 percent computes (is the open-source user base that small? Or big? I guess it depends on how you look at it and whose numbers you use). It's a great time to give Linux a try. Do it. I'd say start with Linux Mint, Ubuntu, look for new OS releases on Distrowatch, keep up with the news at LXer (where I'm a frequent contributor), watch fanboys rant at Slashdot, listen to Linux Outlaws, Lotta Linux Links, Frostcast, the Linux Link Tech Show, Linux Action Show, the Ubuntu UK Podcast and more that I've forgotten to mention.

And if you like blog posts that start out one way and creep up on a point, feel free to return to the scene of this particular crime.

I'm OK with Macintosh (OK, not so much, but what can I say?), I can make Windows work for me (watch for my "open-source apps on top of Windows mega-post," coming soon to a blog index near you), but open-source — it fits what I do and what I'm about.