October 30th 1998, Friday
A revolution has come to my desktop, and I've been fully blown away by it. Not that it's over by now --quite on the contrary, it's in its very beginning, and I don't know how long it'll take until I can get a grasp, and breathe in. In the meantime, I'm enjoying this furious ride --very much.
What's this thing that has put my beloved routines upside down and that has made me neglect my home page? Which kind of what has made me almost forget my friends, stop my email and take my studies to a halt?
Linux's the thing. Linux's to blame.
I installed it out of curiosity, out of frustration. My friend Julito had been using it for three years, and now and then we liked making a row about Microsoft's products (he being a scatterbrained Bill Gates' fan, of course). The fact is --no matter how baseless and wrongheaded his arguments were (not a single crash in three years, not even a lost chain, all the software free and no proprietary formats, etc. etc.), they were persuasive. And the Net, as well --what a rush with Linux, lately.
(For those who don't know, Linux is an operating system, like Windows, MSDOS or UNIX. Different from them --which are proprietary software-- it's free software: this means that it can be freely copied and distributed, and it may be modified in any way, and you can even make a profit by redistributing it or selling it. The only restriction it imposes is that you can't restrict others to do the same --you can't hide the source code. It's based on the premise that software has no owners, the same way neither has science: your output is my input --that's the way scientific progress is made of. Linux was the original creation of Linus Torvalds, who as a student at the University of Helsinki wrote it from scratch in 1993, and then asked for help to the Internet community to make it a whole and valuable operating system. He got an impressive response, and thousands of programmers all over the world began to submit needed parts of the code. That's the way Linux has been made, and the way in which it goes on evolving).
Such a thing I had to try it. Furthermore, I had gone through some frustrations with the software I was using --one way or the other. I began being fed up with proprietary formats, and considered the possibility to convert all my documents (and they're a heap, believe me) from Word to HTML, my messages from RTF to plain ASCII, to expunge my web pages from any Microsoft's or Netscape's HTML's proprietary tags... In other words, to trade glamour for portability (this is easily understood with the comparison between Word format and HTML. HTML is not a proprietary format; anyone with the technical skills can make a program capable to read my document in HTML; that's not the case if my document is Word's, because Microsoft keeps the code for the Word's format as its very precious secret. I'll be forcing you to buy Word if I want you to read my document --or WordPerfect, or whatever).
But that was me, Microsoft's ever lover and admirer. What a shock! Anyway, I bought a book about Linux with an attached CD, and installed it.
And I love it. Now we are my computer and I, mutually involved. I'm learning hard --Linux is another thing, another concept of computing, so training is required. Up to the moment, only one thing I can tell you for sure: Linux is fun, Windows is boring.
Home - Storage Room - My Life as Myself - Books - Ethereal World