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Why I Use Linux
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-IAN! idallen@idallen.ca   July 2003

I teach GNU/Linux at a Canadian community college.  I've been using
Unix/Linux for about 27 years.  I'll summarize my background and give
my thoughts on using Linux from that perspective.

I started using Bell Labs Unix V7 (the O/S after which GNU/Linux was
ultimately modelled) while taking Computer Science courses at the
University of Waterloo in 1976.  It was all command-line (like DOS);
no graphical user interface (GUI).  In the 1980's we started using the X
Window system - a graphical system that ran on top of Unix.  Mostly I used
the GUI to let me run multiple command-line text consoles on one display.
At home, I would use a plain ASCII terminal to dial into the Unix machine
at school - no graphics.  Unix was my only O/S until I bought my first
personal computer in 1996.

My first personal computer was a P166/64MB that ran Windows 95.  (No,
I never used DOS or WIndows 3.x.)  I played with Windows 95 for a year or
two, customized all kinds of things, peeked and poked and generally had a
good time, except for all the unexplained crashes.  I mostly ran a program
that allowed my home Unix machine (a DEC workstation) to open windows
on my Windows machine, so I was typing into Unix on my Windows desktop.
I bought Microsoft Office; I used Power Point and Excel in my teaching.

In 1998 I picked up a free copy of SuSE GNU/Linux (a European
distribution) at a local Linux Users Group.  I had an ever better time
poking and prodding than I had with Windows, and there were almost
no crashes.  Shortly after that, I tried and stayed with a Mandrake
distribution (from France).  I'm currently upgrading my machines from
Mandrake 8.2 to Mandrake 9.1.

With Microsoft's conviction for illegal and monopolistic trade practices
in the late 1990's, I made a moral choice to avoid the company as
much as possible.  "Does not play well with others" is something of
an understatement.  My best work has always been in cooperative and
collaborative projects, such as the Ottawa FreeNet and teaching in
general.  GNU/Linux and the open-source movement fit this well.

As a concession to the illegal monopoly, I bought "Win4Lin", a program
that lets me boot Windows inside a window on my Linux desktop and run many
Windows programs.  (It boots Win98 inside Linux in less than 10 seconds.)
I haven't had a machine that boots Windows natively in a year or two.

I think non-mainstram companies (and non-mainstream Linux distributions)
try harder to satisfy their customers than companies with larger market
share.  Linux and Apple have user-fests where people get together to say
how much they love their computers and share their work.  You'll find
discussion threads like this one about Linux and how neat it is - it's
rare to find a similar one about any Microsoft product.  When you pay
big money for all your software, you aren't so keen about freely sharing
the work you do with others.  GNU/Linux is a very sharing community.

I'm a power user of computers.  I grew up without menus.  I learned the
power (and fun!) that comes from knowing how to write little programs to
make the computer do what *I* wanted it to do.  When the graphical user
interfaces arrived, the things I wanted to do often weren't on any menus.
No problem - I just wrote little programs to do them, and typed their
names on the command line or stuck the little programs into the menus.

Under Linux, the open-source philosophy gives me the source to the
programs that do everything I see on my desktop.  I can copy, learn,
and modify anything to work the way I want it to.  In another forum,
you'll see that I went to the Apache source code to track down the exact
meaning of an error a user was seeing.  Windows users can't do this;
all the software is secret.  Sharing isn't allowed.  That's not the kind
of environment in which I like to work.

It's difficult for users of commercial software to click on anything that
isn't there to make the parent company more money.  Commercial success
isn't measured by whether you *like* the product; it's measured by whether
you *buy* the product (and buy the endless series of upgrades).

Things are in Linux because people *like* them there.  We *wanted*
them there.  It's not because they make profit for someone.  If I think
something else should be there, I have access to the code; I can write
it and give it to you.  Linux is a software suite that gives us real
freedom and power.  We can share, we can learn, and it's all free.

-IAN! idallen@idallen.ca   http://www.idallen.com/