Why Linux-Based Brands Are So Desirable

I'll start off by dating myself... it was the year 2000. I was in college and the brand new Mini Disk MP3 player had just come out. Superior audio to CD's and the ability to hold hundreds of songs on 1 little disk. Being a broke college kid, it took me about 6 months to make the purchase. Just when I got used to looking sweet walking around in the East Village with my MD player, a wild flash of cool came across the analog airways via a commercial from a company that had only recently re-caught our attention with a crappy multicolor one-piece desktop PC called the iMac.

Of course, I'm talking about Apple. The music product was the iPod. I was defeated and nearly threw away my MD player on the spot. The line of "cool" had been moved exponentially into the future.

This was clearly when the Apple revolution had begun. Steve Jobs was back at the helm and ready to unleash a world of creativity upon an unsuspecting audience. Back in the year 2000 or so, all tech sucked. The internet sucked. There was no or little broadband T1 internet access. The internet Pets.com bubble of the year 2000 was a joke.

By 2003 all that had changed. The internet got fast, the stock market bottomed and computers started becoming sexy, dependable and robust (well, Apple computers, anyway).

Apple took the opposite track of Microsoft, building a closed ecosystem on top of a suite of crappy apps mimicking Microsoft Office (which, to this day, still sorta suck in my opinion). But, that didn't matter to Steve Jobs and co. He knew "sex sells" and made a product so desirable that it didn't matter that it couldn't do as much as pc's running Windows.

PC's running Windows became "work computers" and people began buying Apple computers as their "personal computers", much to Bill Gates' dismay as he coined the term "personal computer" or "PC".

You see, progress has happened so quickly and Apple has done an incredible amount of work to define the personal computing experience. The problem is that Apple is still a closed ecosystem and new, open source apps are starting to achieve the same or higher levels of functionality as some of Apple's native apps.

Further, they're more private, more secure, don't tie-in all of your credit cards and entire personal life into one company.

Why is this bad? Well, one personal quip as an example. I have all my monthly subscriptions come out of a separate bank account. One day, the balance got too low before my Apple subscriptions were debited, causing the transaction to decline. All of my Apple devices were basically unusable immediately, because I owed them $15.

Gee, that sure did make me feel warm and fuzzy. Glad I've dropped $20k on Apple equipment over the years just to get a big middle-finger over owing them a cheeseburger and fries.

Cut to today. Apps like Signal are private cross-platform communication tools that make apps like FaceTime and iMessage seem as dorky as Skype. Pretty much anything you can think of app-wise has an open source alternative that is mature, or will be reaching maturity in the next 5 years. Yep, Adobe, I'm looking at you.

GIMP has come a long way, baby. I'm pretty sure 3D Imagining Software "Blender" named themselves that because that's where they see your market share going. Not to mention DaVinci Resolve working flawlessly on Linux... a platform you guys are still too scared to develop for. What is your editing app called? I forget.

This is a call for the next group of budding lifestyle brand geniuses to get to work. Everything you need to build the next trillion dollar computing lifestyle brand is at your fingertips. Fork a Linux distro and create your own (foss) user experience. Make knowing how to use the command line cool, again. Celebrate it. Design a sexy laptop.

Make an advertisement with people dancing. Work with the good people at Pine to create new hardware. The big boys of tech got out in front, but the open source community is catching up while the biggies are lighting cigars with $100 bills. There's just not that much more big tech can come up with that open source isn't already on top of. Except, of course, selling-out your personal information.

Privacy is the future. Linux is the future. Open source is everything. All that's missing is a group of smart visionaries to package it for a young, techno-progressive demographic (without turning into back-patting techno-tyrants). Gotta say, KDE is already looking smart with their Slimbook line. Shout-out to Librem for bringing sexy back, too.

FireFox keeps getting better and when paired with DuckDuckGo, Cloudfare DNS and ExpressVPN -- we're already well on our way. Steve Jobs built it all from scratch; all you have to do is make the foss sexy and show people how to live the way Jobs' did. Maybe build a couple watch apps. Design some ugly $600 headphones. Sell a pair of gas-station earbuds for $150. You got this.

But in the meantime, could one of you show me how to import a track from iTunes into GarageBand? 🙄