How I started using Linux (and why I keep using it)

Linux

Before talking about myself, I want to make sure you know what Linux is, what it's for, and what it does. Linux is an operating system, which is software in charge of managing the various operations on your computer (loading apps, managing memory and cpu access, and so on). All modern computers (including smart phones and game consoles) require some operating system, and so the vast majority of consumer computers come loaded with one. On most desktop and laptop computers, this is either Windows or macOS.

Linux fills the same role as Windows and macOS, but unlike these operating systems, Linux aims to be free and open source. Open source means that the code used to produce the operating system may be freely edited and redistributed. Free can have several meanings here: Many varieties of Linux (known as distributions) cost nothing and can be downloaded from the internet freely. But free here also means that the operating system can be modified, studied, copied, and distributed without restriction. The degree that distributions adhere to this kind of freedom varies quite a bit. Some distributions historically made it hard to install, for example, support for playing mp3 files due to licensing restrictions on the mp3 format.Some Linux distributions, therefore, do not include any proprietary or licensed software, allowing users to do anything they want with the distribution.

Linux is widely used outside the home PC market. It is perhaps best known for its use as a cheap and stable operating system on web servers (the computers that host web pages and the cloud). It is also often used by professional and amateur programmers, since it provides a good platform for many of the tools coders use (though macOS fills this role, too). Despite the fact it is much cheaper than Windows, Linux is also the basis of Android, Google's mobile operating system.use of Linux by casual users (the bin I probably best fit into) is otherwise very low, though some people do use it to rejuvenate old computers that no longer support modern versions of Windows.

There are a few reasons for the lack of uptake by home users. One is that Linux, being developed largely by volunteer coders, has historically been difficult to install and use (though I would argue that this has not really been the case for five to ten years). Another issue is the lack of popular mainstream software titles (Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are standout examples). There isn't much incentive for companies to invest in creating software for an operating system with very little market share, which contributes to a feedback loop where people who want or need to use that software are prevented from adopting Linux, keeping its market share small. Similarly, hardware support has also historically been lacking, since companies are also reluctant to develop drivers for an operating system with so few users.

So why would anybody choose to use an obscure and occasionally hard-to-use operating system, especially when Windows and macOS come pre-installed on most hardware? Everybody's case is different, but here's how I got there.

The 90s

I grew up in the 90s when home computer technology was really taking off. Despite this, I don't think my parents actually bought a computer until 1997. Up until that point, my main interaction with computers was limited to Apple products in my school's computer classes: old Apple IIs and Macintosh LC IIs. However, when my dad finally bought a computer off of his friend, it was an ibm Aptiva running Windows 95. This was my first experience with a computer where I wasn't limited to 30 minutes at a time. There were a few games on it that worked in dos (some of which required restarting the computer in dos mode! Remember that?). It was a completely different experience from what I was used to, and I took a real shine to it. dos was fascinating to me, and I started editing batch files that came with some of the programs and games I had to make them do other things, getting me used to a command line interface from early on. I even joined my school's short-lived computer club. I begged my dad to get the internet, and after a few false starts we got aol.

I was a lucky kid, since once my love of computers became more broadly known, family and family friends started donating their old ones to me. It boasted ms-dos 5.0 and 640 kb of ram.My grandfather had an old dos machine he bought in the 80s and had barely used, and that made its way to our home. It came with an interpreter for the basicSpecifically, this was Microsoft's gw-basic, and this is probably why I still forget to include parentheses when I use the Python3 print() command. programming language, and so I spent a lot of my time learning how to make the computer do goofy things that a 11-year-old would want to make an old computer do.

I got a couple of newer computers from people too. One that stands out was an old PC tower my uncle Paul gave me. It was nothing special, but it gave me a more modern computer of my own that I could experiment with without having to worry about wrecking the family machine. And it was the platform that first got me into Linux.

Linux from a box

I first learned about Linux from my sixth grade science teacher, who was in charge of our computer club before he left the school. When he learned I had started teaching myself basic, he took the time to support and encourage these interests, even suggesting to me – an 11-year old – that I learn the C programming language.Seriously, he gave me an old copy of C Primer Plus. (I'm...still working on that). He was the first one to tell me about Linux and told me he thought I'd be interested in it, thus sowing the seeds of curiosity.

But Linux is a whole separate operating system. Software written for Windows does not run on Linux without some work. I'd have to do tricky things like add a new hard drive partitionParitioning is a way of dividing up a hard disk into different regions for different uses; see Wikipedia. and learn a new interface. In addition to being a lucky kid, I was a weird kid, and I soon decided I wanted to know what a completely different operating system was like.

Getting Linux at that time was not as straightforward as it is today. Nowadays anyone can just go to DistroWatch or google 'linux download' and download any of hundreds of distributions over their broadband connection. At the end of the 90s, though, almost nobody I knew had even dsl. While I'm sure downloading it was possible, it wasn't yet common, and it would have required tying up my family's phone line for a very long time. So while the OS itself was technically free, the only way for me to get it was to buy it in a box – or have somebody buy it for me.

My grandfather's wife, after buying it, remarked to my mom that it didn't look like a game.So I asked my grandfather and his wife for Red Hat Linux for Christmas. And then I took it home and set up my first dual-boot linux installation, running Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux 6.1 on the computer my uncle had given me.

Getting it in a box was good, because I had no idea what I was doing. I would never have gotten the damn thing working if not for the manual (the part that you were supposedly paying for) that came with the software. The online comunity at the time was not what it is now. There was no StackExchange or Reddit to save you, and I don't know if I would ever have found useful forums or discussion groups.

The manual was, nonetheless, and excellent resource. It had a fairly good list of software that came with the operating system, which was one of the most interesting aspects of the experience. Windows at the time came with practically nothing, and all the software you used with it was either something you bought at a store or some half-broken shareware you downloaded from the internet. Modern distributions, of course, dispense with the physical media; modern repositories are online.The Red Hat CD, however, came with repositories of free, fully functional software that you could install on your system and try. I mostly tried some games and a few other things, but I mostly remember thinking that it was neat.

My use at this time was pretty limited, though. I had no understanding of how a Unix file system worked, and the command line was mysterious to me because it wasn't dos. A year or two later, with the help of my friend Erik who had similar interests, I managed to get a home network set up for some file sharing, allowing me to transfer files I downloaded from the internet to my computer, and I think I even managed to get xmms working. However, my parents had aol well past when I left for college, and there was no way to dial into aol at the time, so the computer could never go on the internet.

College

I was in College when Linux really took off for me. My parents couldn't buy me a computer for school, and the hand-me-downs I had in middle school and high school were a little worse for wear. I ended up borrowing a computer from my friend Erik. He had Windows 98 on it (which by 2004 was showing its age). He told me I could do basically whatever I wanted with it, but with the stipulation that I couldn't put Windows XP on it. But that's when he told me that I should try using Linux again, that it had come a long way from when we were in high school. When I said I didn't know where I could buy it in Santa Cruz, where I had just moved, he told me something surprising: I could just download it.

Ubuntu had only just come out. I did send away for one of their free CDs, though.I went to the Fedora Core website (now just branded Fedora) at his suggestion to gather more information. Looking at screenshots, I could tell things had advanced since my last attempts at using Linux. The interface looked more polished. With a dedicated broadband ethernet connection, I could easily download new software and updates. It had been some time since I last tried to use Linux, but what I had just found seemed much more encouraging.

And so I began using Linux in earnest. At first I set up the computer to boot both Windows 98 and Fedora Core in case something didn't work right or if I needed some software that I couldn't replace under Linux. The system basically worked right away, but it wasn't always smooth sailing. Under most Linux distributions, software comes in packages which the operating system installs for you, but at the time a lot of interesting software (or at least, software I was interested in) didn't come in packages yet. So it was not uncommon to have to download source code and compile it on your own system. This took time (especially when one had to chase down hard-to-find dependencies) and often didn't work.

Somehow, though, this appealed to me. Getting obscure software to work could become something of an adventure. Trying to get random apps to work taught me a lot about how to use the operating system (especially the command line), and knowing that I was free to tinker with it in ways that Windows would never allow kept me intrigued. Most the time the things I was trying to get to work were not mission critical in any sense, so if I couldn't get something to work it usually didn't matter. And unlike Windows XP, there was no activation code or customer support to deal with.If worse came to absolute worst and I broke the system, I could simply reinstall it with the only penalty being having to reinstall all my apps again.

Slowly but surely, I found myself using Windows less and less. Since the university assigned us IP addresses that rarely changed, These were in the days before the cloud, before Dropbox and Google Docs. I could have carried around a pen drive, but where's the fun in that?I started using my computer as an sftp server so I could download assignments from my computer and print them anywhere on campus. I remember calling the uptime command in the terminal to see how many weeks I had left the computer on without turning it off.

The following year (2005), my dad and I found a cheap computer at the local electronics store that came with Lindows, a Linux distribution designed to look like windows. We went and bought it, and when I got it home, I wiped the hard disk and installed Fedora Core 4. In the five years I had it, I never once installed Windows on that computer. It ran Fedora, OpenSUSE, and a few flavors of Ubuntu, but it never ran Windows.

In the years since I've owned five other computers. 1. ibm ThinkPad T20
2. Acer Aspire One
3. Lenovo ThinkCentre
4. Lenovo ThinkPad T440s
5. Lenovo ThinkPad 25 They have all run Linux (sometimes dual booting multiple distributions), but I have not used Windows on one of my personal computers since 2005.

Today

Using Linux in 2019 (soon to be 2020) is pretty simple, especially compared to where it was fifteen years ago when I first really committed. It's been years since I last had a piece of hardware that just didn't work. Significantly more popular software is available for the platform than in 2004.

I haven't been a big distro-hopper in the last fifteen years (which is to say that I tend to stick to a single Linux distributions rather than trying several). My computers ran Fedora for about ten years (though I dual booted with openSUSE for a while there). I switched to Ubuntu a few years ago in order to try to get around some hardware support problems I was having with my previous laptop,The wireless drivers for my laptop that were available for Fedora were not super great, and the solutions I could find on the internet only worked with Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu. and now my main computer runs Ubuntu lts releases. I tried out Manjaro on some old systems recently, but my old laptop has Ubuntu on it again, and my home server is running Fedora now runs for old times' sake.

I haven't ever felt any real pressure to switch back to Windows. All of my needs are met by modern Linux distributions. While in academia, most of my papers were written in LaTeX, and the amount of word-processing I needed to do outside of that environment could be handled either by open-source solutions (such as LibreOffice) or else by Office365. I'm not a big gamer, but most of the titles I've wanted to play are available on Steam for Linux. Spotify and Skype are available for Linux and run without a problem. Dropbox works great. vlc is easily had on most distributions. I can access and edit literally all the files and documents I created a decade ago (that I still have), and I haven't had to buy an upgrade of any office software to do so.

Part of what has made using Linux easier is the increasing movement of services onto the web that were once on the machine itself: Rather than amassing a collection of videos on your hard disk, Netflix and YouTube serve content now, and cloud services are typically browser-neutral. But the simple fact is that for most activities (certainly the vast majority of what most people do), Linux can be just as easy to use as Windows or MacOS.

Linux is also very customizable. At the highest level, users can choose between different desktop environments, which handle where menus and panels go, what the default applications for a sytem are, how windows are drawn, and the like. kde and Gnome are each different desktop environments, and you can see from the screenshots above that they are each fairly different from each other. Different desktop environments vary with regard to how customizable they are. Gnome is more rigid, while kde can be set up in countless ways (I've seen it made to look exactly like Windows, and almost indistinguishable from MacOS). And of course, some of these choices include which distribution to use.Giving users choices like these also gives them the ability to tweak an interface to make it as comfortable as possible.

And then, of course, are the much lauded stability and security. In my experience, programs rarely crash, let alone the entire system. Software updates come regularly (not just for the operating system itself, but for any software installed by the operating system's package manager), and unlike under Windows, these updates are only installed when the user assents to it (no more 'Windows is updating' screens when you have work to do). Because of the relatively low market share, there are few viruses and little malware, and since most software is provided by the distribution you choose, the chances of installing malicious software are relatively low.