YJL

This date is the fifth anniversary of being a full-time Linux user. Five years ago, I made a decision to switch to Linux, it was a great call. During the years, I have learned a lot with Linux. Before Linux, that’s 15 years with MS-DOS and Windows series. Do I miss Windows? No, but odd enough, I like the time with MS-DOS.

Because of this post, I finally finished the timeline chart I posted two years ago. Actually, it didn’t need much editing, only to mark that I was no longer using Arch Linux and Mac OS X.

To me, Linux is the best Operating System and Gentoo is the best distribution, which I have been using for three years. All because Linux has lots of choices and transparency.

I chuckled when I said choices, if you know me in person, I am terribly awful in making decision from choices. I could stand in front of store shelves for ten minutes, just to think which drink I want. Before I check out, I might run back to switch. Strangely, I seem to know what I want from Linux.

On Linux, there are plenty for alternatives just for almost anything. Not to mention dozen of actively developed Desktop Environments and Window Managers. It is full of options, if you don’t like one, you always can find another to try until you are tired.

As for transparency, it means in many aspects. On Linux, you most likely to have a lot of open source projects. The code lies in public, there is no secret, no hassles no BS. When something is broken, you know where to look at if that’s possible to fix on your own, or you can report a bug.

For me, Linux is all good, but possibly not for other computer users. I would say you need to invest some time with, nonetheless what doesn’t need if you want to be good at it? If you are someone who can code and is willing to read, Linux can save a lot of time. It’s been lots of times that I type in a one-liner script in shell and leave it to work. The most valuable part in Linux, I say that would be common command-line programs.

20+ years with computers, that’s more than two thirds of my life. It’s amazing, now come to think about it. Before this post, I never really calculated how long I have been using computers. At the beginning, to put it in a funny way, before I actually was told about and had seen a computer through my eyes, a television and a washer probably were the most advanced machine I had touched.

Over these years, computer gets smaller, faster, cheaper, and sadly fancier. I always have a feeling that computer does exactly the same thing except some fancy stuff are added for fooling user to think they are doing more powerful things, only the energy is wasted in processing the fancy stuff. It’s funny to hear people talk about green and emphasize the awareness of any good intentions, how they try to make a change, but what they actually do is wasting more.

As most people go after pleasure, I went opposite direction, looking for things actually get job done without beautiful gift wrappers. However, this is just personal preference, there is nothing absolutely right or wrong in my opinion. The only problem is my life is quite boring since the scripts and codes I wrote have taken care most of tasks for me, the only thing I need to do is to read generated reports in plain text format mostly.

Computer is one of the most important invention in modern world and it will always be in human history. The importance of it is undeniable, sometimes, I wonder if I could live without it and Linux.