Operating systems are like governments; they serve functions that individual citizens/users could not realistically accomplish on their own. Governments often raise armies, bail out natural disaster victims, and lay roads. Many go beyond this and offer additional services, such as emergency first responders, education, healthcare, and subsidies for certain privileged businesses.
Operating systems are just the same. They all offer basic functionality such as the ability to draw windows and trace cursor movement, and come with a few built-in applications for text editing and web browsing. Some, however offer far richer built-in software libraries and functionality in exchange for flexibility or speed–just like governments offering more services in exchange for higher taxes, a more bloated bureaucracy, or financially irresponsible spending habits.
There are certain qualities of both governments and operating systems that can be identified as “liberal” and “conservative” based on the philosophical origins of their ideas. But first of all, what the hell do “liberal” and “conservative” really mean, anyway? These days, it’s pretty much up for grabs, so I’ll add my own personal definitions to the already muddy political puddle of re-framing.
“Liberal” describes a focus on helping the less fortunate by utilizing the superior knowledge and abilities of experts to care for them. Liberal systems tend to generate organized collections of such experts, and are often marked by safety nets that benefit the many at the expense of the few. In a liberal system, the beggar is pitied and given minimal funds to live on. He uses them to buy beer.
“Conservative” is any system that preserves individual liberty, sacrificing for community support. The more self-reliant and informed you are, the better you’ll fare in a conservative system, and any centralized authority the purports to know what’s good for others is mistrusted and shunned. In a conservative system, the beggar is encouraged to get a job, go back to school, take up a hobby, and is given nothing to send him on his way. He remains penniless.
That out of the way, and given that I’ve claimed that operating systems are akin to computer governments, what are their characters and political orientations? Here goes:
Windows XP
Windows XP is a solidly conservative operating system. XP ships with no DVD playback, no PDF viewer, poor screenshot support, and few drivers for third-party hardware, and little effort is put into aiding the user to solve these holes. Windows is saying, “If you want these features, get them yourself! If you don’t need them, you’ll have a lighter, faster OS!” This is a very conservative ideology. That each XP user is forced to make individual choices about what features he does or does not need is a given, and one that nobody ever questions.
As a result, a lucrative aftermarket in what would ordinarily seem to be necessities exists for Windows XP. 3rd party archive managers, terminal emulators, PDF viewers, disc burning utilities, screenshot utilities, file copy utilities, junk cleaner utilities, and more, simply to fill the holes Windows assumes its users would enjoy filling on their own.
Mac OS X Leopard
Leopard, on the other hand, is a very liberal operating system. It ships chock-full of features you may or may not need, such as virtual desktops (Spaces, in Apple marketing-speak), a personal backup system (Time Machine), a reference dictionary and thesaurus, dozens of professional fonts (such as the well-regarded Helvetica) and many others. Whether or not you want or will use these features doesn’t matter; you get them anyway, and many of them, like Spaces or Time Machine, aren’t easily removable. Your configuration options are also quite limited, as if Apple has decided what is or isn’t acceptable usage patterns regarding its software. You also pay a premium for the operating system since the only way to get it is by using a Mac made by Apple. Macs are priced less competitively at the low end, and you have nowhere near the degree of choice in your hardware than if you bought a PC.
In spite of these liberal traits, though, Leopard is conservative in one very obvious way: it’s sleek and fast. Leopard is appreciably faster than its predecessor and doesn’t get pokey under a heavy load. It seems almost devoid of the bloat that typically accompanies expansive liberal systems.
Windows Vista
Vista is a conservative operating system that is desperately trying to be liberal. Perhaps in response to criticisms of Windows XP being too bare-bones, Vista attempts to do more out of the box, while maintaining the 3rd-party extensibility that makes Windows so beloved of hobbyists and geeks. To that end, Vista includes photo management software, DVD playback capabilities, more robust disc burning, instant file searching, and many liberal built-in features. Microsoft has even gotten in trouble for its attitude change! Google has charged that a built-in search feature represents monopoly bundling; Microsoft has agreed to open the architecture of the feature to third parties (such as Google). If that isn’t technologically a conservative backlash against liberality, I don’t know what it.
At the same time, Vista is still extensible and open to third parties to arbitrarily replace most of its core functionality, and it tries to maintain compatibility with software written for older versions of Windows. However, all these compromises have taken a heavy toll; Vista was released several years late, has been roundly criticized for its sluggish performance, and requires far more memory and hard drive space than any other release of Windows. The liberality Vista has attempted has cost it dearly, because it hasn’t managed to offset it with any sort of streamlining; it just piles on features irrespective of how they will be received or whether they really solve problems, and has become bloated and lethargic in the process.
Linux
Like Windows Vista, Linux is a conservative operating system trying on a liberal coat. However, the depths of its conservatism run far deeper, and its recent fling with liberal ideals are far shallower. Linux itself was created by a frustrated hacker who wrote its kernel in his spare time; its primary audience was the technically adept programmer crowd–the digital equivalent of a bunch of libertarian gun nuts. They know what window manager they wanted and what programming toolkit they were going to use, and you can’t take it away from then, dammit! These users reject the mollycoddling attempts of more consumer-oriented operating systems to make decisions for them since they already know their positions on everything and hate it when they can’t do what they want–that’s why Linux is so extensible.
In fact, a great debate rages about whether Linux is becoming “dumbed down” in the service of increasing its user base beyond these tech fanatics. As more graphical tools arrive and the less technically inclined Windows refugees start pouring in, the Linux community becomes split down the middle between the altruists who welcome the technically shaky newcomers and the old-school purists who feel their operating system is being diluted by those who don’t “walk the walk.”
