You should all buy macintosh computers.

Now, for those who know me, this will sound like heresy. I personally don't like macs. The reason for this is simple: I don't have any variety. For hardware, I don't have the massive selection of the PC industry. For software, I don't have--scratch that, all the software I want to use is GPL'd and most of it is available for mac.

Now, if you're a gamer, it's a bit of a harder sell. But still, the more of an installed mac base there is, the more game developers will be willing to think of the mac user. So it's a chicken/egg problem. And by buying a mac, you help to produce more chickens.

It used to be that I wasn't a fan of macs in large part because of the OS. I found it too limiting for what I could do. Now that OSX is built on a BSD kernel, and there's a significant amount of *nix functionality exposed, that argument no longer stands.

Do I want to use a mac? Not particularly. I don't feel that you get a lot of value for the money. But I'm a techie. I can deal with weird things in windows or strange configuration problems in Linux. Most people would rather not have to deal with either of these.

On top of that, Windows is left inherently insecure. Most people use an administrator account by default because other accounts are too restrictive. On other platforms, that idea is ludicrous. You simply use super-user privileges when necessary and otherwise, you're a standard user. This is, in part, why Windows is so vulnerable to virii.

So why am I suggesting Macs if I don't want one myself? Well, it's simple. First, I think most people--excluding gamers, due to lack of games--would actually enjoy their use more than a standard PC. Second, it might just save you from the horror that is Windows Vista. Third, it will force software companies to start looking beyond the windows market.

The jump from supporting a single OS platform to supporting two platforms is huge unless the software has been written to be portable from the start. The jump from two platforms to three is minimal. Added to this is the benefit that Mac OSX is not only POSIX compliant, but a lot of the kernel, and API is pretty similar to Linux.

The end result is that the more software there is written for Macs, the more software will be available for Linux. Which is what I'll be running.