Why I chose GNU/Linux
This is a guest blog by Christian. You can read more of his work at his website, www.senshikaze.net
Many people will give you many reasons why GNU\Linux is better than Windows, Mac, or any other Operating System out there. I will not, I am just going to give the reasons I feel GNU/Linux is a better OS.
First, a little about me. I work in the Information Technology sector. Currently I am employed at a gastrointestinal clinic in Jackson, Ms, USA. I got into technology only about six years ago, when I built my first PC. It had an AMD 64 single core processor and 1gb of memory and an nVidia 7800GT. It was a nice computer and I had fun troubleshooting (and bleeding on) it. Back then, I only had Windows XP as my OS, but I did play with Knoppix here and there. Fast forward about a year and I am now dropped out of high school and in college working on my Associates in Applied Science in Networking support Technology. We were required to take a GNU/Linux course for the degree, so that gave me some insight into the server side of things.
By the time I finished my AAS, I had started working at G.I. Associates as a jack of all trades IT tech. I had enough money now to build a brand new computer, and I went with Windows Vista for my gaming habit. Had some trouble with it, so I dropped back down to Windows XP and worked with that for about 6 months. About this time I had been able to upgrade our one GNU/Linux server at work to Debian Etch from Fedora Core 2 so I could make a working LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) server. That really got me started on the ball with GNU/Linux and ended up adding a Debian hard drive to my home computer as well as a Linux web server, hosting www.senshikaze.net. By April of 2009 I had decided to switch to Archlinux on my workstation and Acer Aspire One netbook. Now I only ever boot into windows at home when there is a new game I really want to play.
The reason GNU/Linux makes sense to me is that I am a big fan of the “Free software†ideal. I like the fact that I can take my software and change it to work for me and that is completely legal. I like that I can freely distribute the code to anyone I want. I also like knowing that there are people who see things the same way are there to protect my rights (FSF). I use GNU/Linux out of a desire to live free and without the threat of someone installing a rootkit or a spy program to make sure I am using it the way the company who made it want me to.
While many people give different reason for why they use GNU/Linux, I have one simple one: freedom. The freedom to use, share, copy, change, and redistribute is an important thing to me.
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Oh, not again, that’s the wrong way to promote Linux, if that’s your goal. We’ve been hearing this “I choose freedom” for ages (yeah, now we have 1% of desktop market share thanks to this freedom, 1% for the very best OS, just think about this injustice). I use Ubuntu all the time but don’t actually see any freedom besides the freedom to delete default programs and share the OS with others. That’s good, but not enough for an average user.
The right way to promote Linux is to emphasize the usability (the NEW usability that it finally has), ease of use, hardware support, its “Web 2.0″ feel, speed, no viruses, wonderful “out of the box” experience. I hope to add “beauty out of the box” to this list one day. We need to fight old myths about “everything in command line”, “lack of hardware support”, “system developed by developers for developers” and thousands of others to prove people that old times have gone and now Linux is simple.
Let’s forget about freedom, it’s good, but it results just 1%. Let’s remember other reasons and get a big market share much faster.
You missed the point, my friend. I am not promoting GNU/Linux, and frankly, I don’t care that we have only 1% market share. The freedom is something like free speech. You may never have to use it in a court, but you can rest easy knowing it is there (in USA). I agree that the usability is there, but you also seemed to have skipped the fact that I use Archlinux, which is not a usability distro. Maybe once you get it running, but that takes many days and lots of patience.
And freedom is the freedom of choice as well. You picked Ubuntu, I picked Arch. If we were on something without freedom, we wouldn’t have those choices.
If all GNU/Linux wanted or need was market share, what would make us better than Windows?
I love the feedback, though.
Senshikaze, nice article and well pointed the reply to Dim.
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I agree 100% It’s the same reason why i choose GNU/Linux
Dan said:
> Let’s forget about freedom, it’s good, but it
> results just 1%. Let’s remember other reasons
> and get a big market share much faster.
Wow, without that Freedom, there wouldn’t be any GNU/Linux or any Free Software at all. And you (Dan) promote forgetting about that, in order to get market share??
I would like to see market share increase for GNU/Linux users, but not at my expense (i.e., at the cost of losing these Freedoms).
Besides, it is exactly those Freedoms that make the system so usable and increasingly better. If you didn’t like the HP installed version of Vista, do you expect the Dell version to be different? On a GNU/Linux system, I absolutely expect these to be different (although produced by software projects/groups, not hardware retailers).
[...] Why I chose GNU/Linux The reason GNU/Linux makes sense to me is that I am a big fan of the “Free software†ideal. I like the fact that I can take my software and change it to work for me and that is completely legal. I like that I can freely distribute the code to anyone I want. I also like knowing that there are people who see things the same way are there to protect my rights (FSF). I use GNU/Linux out of a desire to live free and without the threat of someone installing a rootkit or a spy program to make sure I am using it the way the company who made it want me to. [...]
[...] Why I chose GNU/Linux The reason GNU/Linux makes sense to me is that I am a big fan of the “Free software†ideal. I like the fact that I can take my software and change it to work for me and that is completely legal. I like that I can freely distribute the code to anyone I want. I also like knowing that there are people who see things the same way are there to protect my rights (FSF). I use GNU/Linux out of a desire to live free and without the threat of someone installing a rootkit or a spy program to make sure I am using it the way the company who made it want me to. [...]
Nice article, although I _still_ don’t think that people realise why freedom must be emphasised. Here’s a reminder:
An everyday computer user by the name of “Daniel K” fixed the Soundblaster X-Fi drivers for Vista and made the cards almost completely functional. He got in trouble with Creative Labs for doing so.
http://www.msfn.org/comments.php?shownews=22213
Also, the 1% GNU/Linux marketshare is completely misleading. It was gathered by a researcher who primarily used the useragent string in browsers. Why? Because I, for one, mask my GNU Icecat browser as IE7 on XP to make sites like eBay work. So to anyone who sees by browser on the internet, I’m not GNU/Linux.
I have the same feeling that linux gave me freedom over the iron that my OS runs on.
As for the market share, does anyone count the servers which are powering the internet for us? I bet there are almost as many as user PCs. So market share is likely around 50% by my taking. Bite me! ^_^
So, you dropped out of high school, but later went to college? No doubt a community college. They’ll take anybody in the community.
By the way, this post is promoting GNU/Linux. You can put your own “Fox News” style spin on it, but the rest of us with a real education can see beneath that.
Nice to see there are still people who can see beyond market share. I really don’t care if other people want to use Windows or Mac OSX, just as long as I can use my preferred operating system and hardware vendors actually provide drivers/specifications.
Yonah: I’m not sure what you mean. I did not intentionally put any “spin” on it, but I guess since I have a “fake” education I will just have to take your word for it.
Matt: Yea, market share is pointless. It is not a pissing contest. I do wish more manufactures would release drivers for hardware as well.
Others: Thank you for your replies.
There is one point you are missing about market share… The greater the market share for Linux then the greater the possible investment including paid programmers, QA and documentation. That means that Linux gets better, not to beat Windows or OS X, but better so that it can be used day to day and in a productive manner and yet remains with the freedom intact.
I could release a rubbish piece of software tomorrow and nobody would care if it has a commercial license or uses the GPL. The reason that the freedoms of Linux are important is that it is useable and productive.
I could list 10 GPL projects off the top of my head that are great but suffer from a lack of investment (including time as well as money).
To be more useful and productive you need market share.
Just my 2c. Gary.
Market share is all well and good if you’re selling something. If we start believing the %1 hype you’ll never get past the fact that GNU/Linux has a much higher percentage of installed user base than proprietary software. GNU/Linux dominates Super computing, dominates web servers. If Microsoft didn’t step in with OEM blackmailing and software dumping it would’ve dominated the Netbook. The %1 comes from Microsoft funded “independent studies” conducted by similarly funded orgs such as Gartner, IDG/IDC, Ziff/Gates, Waggener Edstrom, etc.
“Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux…â€
–Steve Ballmer (September 2008)
Also we can forget and be apathetic to microsoft “evangelism” (disingenuousWaggener Edstrom information)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/
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