North Korea switched from Windows to OS X — should you?

North Korea, now in its third generation of murderous leadership, may be a bellwether for personal computing — or perhaps a confirmation of what is happening elsewhere, given its rulers’ fascination with Western status symbols, from alcohol to basketball. A year ago, a photo of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un showed an iMac on his desk, despite export bans of such technology to North Korea. Now, we’ve learned that the official Linux-based Red Star OS has been upgraded from being a Windows lookalike (via a customized version of KDE) to an OS X lookalike in the 3.0 version.

Yes, the Hermit Kingdom has dumped Windows for OS X, a sign of the passing of the torch in the PC market. Don’t laugh — last year, North Korea also created an Android lookalike, reflecting that platform’s dominance in mobile.

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It’s clear that the Windows PC market is in crisis. Users loathe Windows 8, and enterprises are shunning it. Asian PC makers publicly and loudly criticized it. Every major PC maker is now offering Android PCs and/or Chrome OS PCs, ending the slavish Microsoft relationship they’ve endured for decades. Hewlett-Packard once again began marketing Windows 7 PCs, as buyers continued to avoid Windows 8 models. Even longtime Windows fans like Paul Thurrott have turned on it.

Android and iOS are ascendant. OS X had been on a big upward trajectory — though mainly in the United States — ever since Windows Vista’s unwelcome debut in 2007, but that seemed to reverse course last summer. (Holiday sales were strong, so it’s not clear yet if its momentum has shifted.)

Could the Mac become the primary PC in a world where the PC is secondary to tablets and other mobile devices? Apple CEO Tim Cook believes so, as he said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview claiming that his company was making big investments in future Macs. Then again, you’d expect Apple’s CEO to believe that.

I’ve seen most people in my extended family switch to the Mac over the last few years, mainly because their technical support networks had done so and, thus, were less and less able to support Windows. None has regretted the change. For some like me, Vista was the negative reason to switch, but even after the good Windows 7 came on the scene, the defections continued. The iPad and iPhone started becoming the positive reason to change, and Windows 8’s debut added a negative reason on top of that.

A very recent example is Phil Redman, a former Gartner analyst now working at Citrix Systems. He recently tweeted that he had switched to OS X six months ago. “So it’s been about 6 months since I’ve been using a MacBook full-time for work. It’s great.”

In the conversation that ensued, the question came up as to what would cause a person to make the switch. I suggested it required either a leap of faith or a big push, such as the reaction against Windows 8 or the desire to join a cohesive, multidevice ecosystem such as Apple’s. Redman noted that the leap-of-faith argument is a hard one because “I don’t think a person really gets it, until they use it regularly.” That’s the “no regrets” reaction I typically see in those who make the switch, for whatever reason.

To be clear, Redman also noted the big negative of switching to the Mac: “[Microsoft] apps on it don’t work well at all.” I can vouch for that. Fortunately, you can skip using the clunky, slow Outlook in favor of Apple’s own Mail, Calendar, and Contacts apps, which work well with Exchange. (You lose some capabilities, such as mail account delegation, and odd bugs pop up from time to time in enterprise deployments. No one’s quite sure what caused them or how to fix them, and Microsoft and Apple point fingers at each other.)

Internet Explorer has no Mac version, but given IE’s idiosyncracies and HTML5 ignorance, that’s no loss. The newest version of Safari finally comes up to IE and Firefox levels in terms of bookmark management, and of course Chrome and Firefox are available on the Mac in versions equal to their Windows ones.

But the big kahuna is not as easy to bypass. By that, I mean Office. The Windows version of Office is much faster and has a cleaner user interface — many people I know run a desktop virtualzation program such as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion simply to keep using the Windows version of Office. That’s a sad indictment of Mac Office. I’ve kept Office 2008 as my go-to productivity suite, because its UI is more straightforward than Office 2011’s, but as a result, I deal with Word’s compatibility-based crashes too often when I get DOCX files, and both DOC and DOCX files with many rounds of tracked changes can crash Word. Excel doesn’t suffer from these file issues, and I don’t use PowerPoint enough to know it does.

Apple’s iWork suite — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — are pretty good, but the iWork UI (also used in iBooks Author, for example) tends to make common actions such as style creation and management more work than they should be. I sometimes use Pages instead of Word when Word starts crashing; I always use Keynote instead of PowerPoint because Keynote produced much cooler slideshows; and I almost never use Numbers because it’s not up to Excel’s capabilities in key features like linked workbooks. In addition, iWork has the huge advantage of working on the iPad and iPhone, as well as the advantage of instant syncing via iCloud. But it still can’t fully replace Office.

You may use some apps that have no Mac version (such as Microsoft Access) or have a poor Mac version (Intuit’s QuickBooks, for example). If you really need them and there’s no good substitute, you always have the desktop vrtualization option.

Has North Korea recognized a seminal shift under way in the PC market? I think so. But the scope of that shift may not be huge, if most people decide to run their current Windows as is and invest their new technology dollars and learning into mobile devices instead. Macs may become a larger piece of the shrinking PC pie, but the real action may reside elsewhere.

This article, “North Korea switched from Windows to OS X — should you?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.