Stop the presses! – sane talk about a normally flame-war topic (I recommend reading both articles in full):

• Mark Pilgrim talks about his disenchantment with Mac (and ultimately moving to Linux). And Pilgrim is a long-time Mac user. Yet he is not dinging the product as much as he is questioning Apple’s less-than-open architecture/DRM etc. Perfectly legit complaint.
• Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber – another Mac hardcore – analyzes Pilgrim’s switch and comes out so logical that it’s scary. There’s no room for anything but blind support of the OS of your choice.

Gruber’s main point is telling, basically, anyone upset with Pilgrim’s decision to stick a sock in it.

Gruber says people value things differently; Pilgrim likes openness so much he’s willing to take a UI hit to get that. That’s his (Pilgrim’s) choice, not a blow against the empire. It doesn’t make a Mac worse or Linux better or marginalize Windows.

However, my favorite part of Gruber’s article was the following, which spells out a hard truth:

I’m deeply suspicious of Mac users who claim to be perfectly happy with MacOS X. Real Mac users, to me, are people with much higher standards, impossibly high standards, and who use Macs not because they’re great, but because they suck less than everything else. Pilgrim, to me, is a quintessential Mac user in that regard; and what he’s doing is wondering if maybe things might suck less somewhere else.

— John Gruber, And Oranges

Yes, all OSs have deep flaws depending on their use: Linux’s UI is still weak; Windows is a security nightmare, Macs are not open (and the PowerPC to Intel port is still messy).

Operating Systems are hard; they are incredibly complicated. Witness Microsoft – the world’s largest software company – struggling with their new Vista OS.

Gruber then adds the following, which – again – is a no-no for an OS fan:

“Better” for Mark Pilgrim doesn’t mean better for you, and nowhere has Pilgrim implied that it does.

An OS choice is – as Gruber mentions – like a vehicle choice. There are trade-offs: Do you want high MPG or the ability to haul a lot of crap? Can’t – currently – have both.

Calm, logical and rational talk. Very impressive; very well written.

Note: Pigrim respond’s to Gruber’s article here.