Once again I met someone who had never heard of Linux. Once again they ranted about their computer at work. “It’s so slow and I can’t get anything productive done on it! It’s always freezing or crashing and the IT guys just scan it for viruses. They never fix anything.”, they remarked in a frustrated tone.
“Your company uses Windows doesn’t it?”, I asked.
“Yes, of course. There’s nothing else besides Apple.”
“What about Linux?”
“What’s Linux?”
“It runs the world’s most powerful supercomputer and the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Wow! My company could never afford something like that!”
“It’s free.”
“It’s free?”
At this point in the conversation most Linux users will roll their eyes because now comes the time in explaining what, exactly, does “free” actually mean. So I continued …
“Yes. You have the freedom to modify it for your own needs.”
“And can you get it for free?”
“Yes. You can download it.”
“Where from?”
“It depends what you want it for.”
Now I start explaining all the various distributions and I give a brief history on each one. I also mention Linus Torvalds and how he wrote Linux as an operating system based on his professor’s MINIX system, but crafted it to be POSIX compliant so it could, technically, be recognized as a UNIX system even though, strictly, it isn’t.
“Wait. What’s UNIX?”
I gave up. The bus arrived at the terminal and I didn’t have time to go into the origins of UNIX, what it is, and why Linux is related to it. Sometimes it’s just easier to let people go on complaining about their Windows systems because you know they will never try anything different and they will never appreciate the politics or the philosophy behind free software, open source, and GNU/Linux.
I walked into the office, took a deep breath, and booted up my Windows workstation. After 15 minutes of waiting for it to finally load everything I opened Visual Studio and started work. Within half an hour it had already crashed and Windows Explorer froze for ten seconds. I sighed.
psyphen