On April 1, there was a posting on the center page about usage statistics. It described the percentage of users on each browser and percentages of users on Macs and each variant of Windows. All interesting statistics. There was one statistic that jumped out at me. There were 6 users on DKos who used Linux. That’s not 6 percent. That’s only 6 individuals. Damn, I am only one of six users on this site of hundreds of thousands of people who uses Linux as their operating system!
I have been pondering that factoid for several days knowing that I, an extremely infrequent diary poster, needed to explain myself. After all, if I am that rare, I must be friggin’ crazy or weird as hell.
After Markos’s posting about the iPad, I figured that now is an opportune time to discuss tech issues. So at 10,000 feet coming out of Atlanta, I am skipping looking at stupid stuff in Sky Mall to fire up my Ubuntu laptop and open up Microsoft Word and bang out this explanation.
The decision to move to Linux was not arrived at lightly. I have been using Windows since 1990 when I departed the DOS world for Windows 3.0. I have been with Windows through its many versions: Windows 3.1, Windows 3.1 for Workgroups, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and lastly Windows XP Professional.
Working at a Wall Street company in 2001, I was struck by the fact that the IT folks had to come in every weekend to proactively reboot all of the Windows-based servers to prevent possible crashes from memory leaks during mid-week when the markets were open. At the same time, I was noticing that the Linux operating system had matured beyond a hobbyist platform to where it was working very well as a stable operating system for servers in businesses.
Linux Adolescence
Unlike Windows servers, there were Linux servers that had uptimes of 1-2 years between reboots. This stability (as well as being free) won increasing loyalty from big business. Linux was introduced to businesses by individual techie employees rabid about the stability and speed of Linux as a server platform. The acceptance was grudging at first but grew on the clear merits of the operating system. About this time, Red Hat rose to prominence with their variant of Linux. Over time, Red Hat Enterprise server became one of the most popular server operating systems internally at businesses as well as for web servers. I am not going to pay for WiFi on the plane to look up the statistics but today, a good 50% of the internet is run on Linux servers. The "LAMP" protocol stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) is a huge component of the internet.
Desktop Operating Systems <> Server Operating Systems
Little of the facts about server operating systems have much relevance to a good desktop operating system. Most folks messing with Linux servers do it all via a command shell and rarely work with the desktop. To have a good desktop operating system, you need a worthwhile user experience and a good set of desktop applications to do just about any task. Frankly, I found my interactions with the desktops of Linux pretty rudimentary almost a decade ago. If Windows was like the plush dashboard of a car, Linux was more like a tractor or at least an old pickup truck. Also, I once invested a lot of time learning the environment during a brief flirtation with IBM’s OS/2 waiting for NT to be released and had no interest in flushing more time down the toilet on a fruitless task.
From the 2001 time period to the 2009 time period, there were tremendous changes in the level of sophistication of the Linux desktop. We’re no longer dealing with the dashboard of a tractor but now a modern, sleek vehicle. There are tons of applications out there and most of them are free. So I can have a native application for just about any use I can think of in Linux. Also, with virtualization software (like Parallels or Win4Lin) I can install Windows XP Pro, Windows 7, or even the MacOS (if I wanted) and pull up Windows or MacOS inside of Linux whenever I need to run something specific to either of those operating systems. Even better, there’s something amazing called Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) that creates the needed environment to trick Windows software to think that it is running in Windows so that it runs natively in Linux. Being a fan of Microsoft Office, this is why I choose to write this in MS Word instead of the perfectly competent OpenOffice Writer word processor. It’s just as easy and fast and MS Office 2003 and more familiar to me.
But that’s a little of where I am now. What made me jump ship in the first place? There needs to be two components to a move like this: 1) a motive to switch from the status quo and 2) a viable alternative. So for the remainder of this diary, I will first discuss my motive and then my use of Linux after making the switch.
Motive to Jump Ship
Do you know how nice and fast a new computer is with a fresh installation of Windows is? It starts quickly, when you start an application, it comes up quickly, when you shut down, it closes quickly and it is generally stable. Over a period of 1-2 years, that peppy computer becomes a dog. It takes forever from the time of turning it on until the hard drive is finished churning loading all of the garbage and you can begin to get work done. My old laptop needed around 8-10 minutes from the time of turning on before I could actually start working. Then, it would inexplicably freeze for 30 seconds many times during the day. Sometimes the hard drive would just start churning away when I wasn’t even doing anything – it was as if a ghost was living in there. To top it off, the need for virus software led me to be driven crazy by McAfee VirusScan.
Each vendor for products like digital cameras came with an install disk that loaded not only the software that you needed to do the job but also boatloads of pure unsolicited garbage in attempts to coax some type of revenue from you. Attempts to clean up the garbage were ultimately fruitless and more and more garbage accumulated in the system to slow it down and open it up to virus invasions. The worst problem with Windows was operating system degradation from all of the unsolicited installs over time.
The end of the line with my old laptop came when I was on the road and I got a client request that would take less than 5 minutes to do. So I pulled over and turned on the laptop. (Since Windows took so long to start up, I always just hibernated it instead of completely shutting it down.) Once I had it up, I plugged in the USB Wireless modem and connected to the internet. Immediately, McAfee detected that I was on the internet and picked that time to install a major software update. This was going to paralyze the computer as well as consume most of my internet bandwidth so I attempted to shut down McAfee. This trashed my internet connection and forced me to reboot the computer. After 10 minutes of waiting for the computer to become functional after the reboot in addition to the 5-10 minutes beforehand, I had barely enough battery life to simply get online and do the 3 minute task I initially started out to do. I was done.
For my family, in addition to doing their homework, my sons used their computers to go to online gaming sites that were regularly loading the computers up with adware and other nasty things. I had to spend large amounts of time rescuing their computers so that they could also do their homework. These days, so much of the coursework has moved online in addition to the papers the need to write that the lack of a computer put them at a critical disadvantage.
Then there’s my wife. When it comes to anything mechanical or technical, my wife is a disaster. This applies doubly to computers. Thus I was always trying to get her computer to print, deal with the shitty software that came with her camera to put photos on the computer, etc.
There were days when I would get home to a kid with a trashed computer and a pissed wife because she couldn’t get something done on the computer. Not only was Windows making my workday miserable, but it was also causing my family to turn me into an IT support staff just to keep them running.
Because of our already considerable investment in laptops and desktop computers in the household, it would have been expensive to pitch them all and get Macs even though the thought crossed my mind. Also, I am philosophically troubled by the lock-in that Apple has on the hardware side even though I understand that it greatly simplifies the job for the software side to have so fewer variables and hardware drivers to work with.
Jumping Ship
So I decided to move to Linux. A word about distributions. Anyone can create their own distribution of Linux if they were so inclined. The source code is available online. You can assemble your very special elements of open source software, desktop environments and the Linux kernel and call it "Cat’s Ass Linux" et voila another Linux "distro" comes into the world. There is a webpage devoted to tracking the comings and goings of the distributions called Distrowatch. Being a fan of Red Hat on the servers, I tried out "Fedora" which is the Red Hat desktop operating system geared towards users. But after trial and error, I decided that Ubuntu, a distribution built on the Debian branch of distributions, was the most user friendly. Again, servers are not desktops.
My approach was to get a fresh laptop to replace the dying one with Windows that I was currently using and replicate the functionality of my Windows laptop before wiping it clean and installing Ubuntu on it and give it to my wife. Thus, I had a period of running in parallel with two laptops while I got everything working. This was a significant investment of time while I figured out which software applications were the best for my purposes. One of the disadvantages of Linux is that there are so many choices out there; the biggest task is to try a bunch of them until you find the one that suits your purposes the best. The good thing is that it is simple and free to download and install software to try and then uninstall it if you don’t like it. Ubuntu has an "Application Add/Remove" tool to manage available software and what is installed as well as seamlessly download them and install them as well as simply uninstall them. There is also a similar tool called "Synaptic" that does the same thing in more detail.
I do a lot of stuff on my laptop. In addition to the standard browsing and office toolkits, I do technical drawing, database stuff, manage my music libraries of FLAC and MP3 files, and occasional programming in Java and .NET/C#/ASP when I have a gun to my head. Therefore, I HATE moving into another computer because it takes so long to set everything up. That is why operating system degradation burns my bacon so much. After investing so much time moving to a new computer, it really bothers me to watch the performance go off the cliff so that I need to start over after 3 years. Obviously the move onto a Linux computer took even longer because I had to do this for a new operating system. Nevertheless, once I got everything working, I was confident that there was nothing that my wife and kids would want to do that I hadn’t already worked out. They could get subsets of what I had been through.
Thus there came the day when I gave my wife my laptop with Ubuntu installed, and both of my kids got their operating systems replaced with Ubuntu. The quick answer is that my days of playing IT support to my family have been over since last October when I made this switch. My wife no longer breaks shit on her computer. My kids can’t get viruses and other garbage to threaten their computers and their schools use online homework websites that are perfectly compatible with Linux and the Firefox browser. My sons can get all of their work accomplished via the excellent OpenOffice software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations (like PowerPoint). OpenOffice works seamlessly with the standards file formats of DOC, XLS and PPT (as well as the DOCX etc files).
Computing These Days/Linux as a Viable Alternative
My experiences with Ubuntu Linux have been quite positive. When I start my laptop in the morning, I am at the login screen in 45 seconds. Once I log in, I have the full desktop up with connections established to the file server on my home network 20 seconds after entering my login information. There are two primary desktops available for Linux and I have chosen to use the Gnome desktop instead of the KDE desktop. Both are extremely good choices but again I mention the primary disadvantage of Linux is having to choose between alternatives. I use a native program called Evolution to check my mail across different email accounts, manage my calendar, contacts, to do list and notes to myself. It can integrate with Microsoft Exchange mail if required. It is pretty good software. As a regular user, I could suggest improvements but in general I am happy. An alternative choice is the Mozilla Thunderbird application for mail and contacts. There is now a separate calendar application for it as well. I am extremely happy with Firefox but also have other ones like Epiphany available that work just as well.
The OpenOffice suite of applications is excellent. On my Windows laptop two years ago, I accidentally destroyed my Microsoft Office installation and couldn’t find my installation disks so I used OpenOffice for 4-5 months. I can say that it was a great alternative. I would say that there were no discernable differences between the presentation package and PowerPoint – both worked perfectly. I would say that most things in Writer worked as well as MS Word but the envelope tool and Equation Editor were not as polished. Being a heavy Excel user, I found the Calc alternative not quite as good but it got me through those few months. It was ultimately my need for Excel that drove me to search harder to find the install disks for MS Office. Usually I run the MS Office 2003 applications native in Linux via the Wine environment (like now). If I have to do fancy stuff like a highly formatted document like a resume, I will start up Windows in a separate desktop (via Win4Lin) and run MS Word inside of Windows to get more accurate spacing when printing. Also, macros in Excel and the Equation Editor need to run inside of Windows instead of Wine. (On an unrelated note, I remain mystified over Microsoft’s rearrangement of Office in 2007 and up. If you are going to sell more cars by moving the accelerator to where the turn signal used to be and the steering wheel to where the gearshift once was, etc. I just don’t see it. I think that it’s stupid. Why mess with established standards?)
Apart from normal stuff, I have a need to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to get into a secure area to run database queries. I have found the VPN supplied with Ubuntu far superior to what came on a disk from Cisco for Windows. In one click, I am on the VPN. I use a great toolset called RazorSQL to replace the functionality of Quest’s TOAD or Embarcadero’s DB Artisan and RazorSQL cost a fraction of these other toolsets. RazorSQL runs natively in Linux to do all of the database tasks that I was doing previously.
I have found WebEx to work natively in Linux for sessions with prospective and current clients. For those who need to use Go2Meeting, that works just fine in the virtual Windows session.
Whenever I need to do stuff in Microsoft Visual Studio, it runs fine in virtual Windows.
When I am on the road and need to get on the internet, I discovered that Linux came with the drivers for my USB Wireless modem already resident. Thus I just plugged it in and it was immediately recognized first time and every time. I can be on the internet in 15 seconds with a single click.
I had my CD collection digitized a few years ago to prevent my kids from trashing it. Now, when I get a CD, I put it in and convert it onto my file server to FLAC files via the Rhythmbox music player. The SoundConverter included with the Gnome desktop then converts this to MP3 files in a blindingly fast manner compared to my use of MediaMonkey previously in Windows. I then have a choice between Banshee and Songbird to organize my libraries. I prefer Songbird because it allows you to switch between multiple libraries as I have FLAC, MP3 and travel libraries. Songbird allows me to synchronize between my MP3 library and my iPod (as does Banshee). Returning to vendors pulling proprietary shit, I can work with my iPod classic but my son, with the iPod Touch, cannot because Apple encrypted the Touch to only work with iTunes which has not been released for Linux. I have a dim view of proprietary moves such as this. I have banned my boys from purchases from iTunes because the resultant files (of lower fidelity quality than a CD) usually have digital rights management that restricts it to their libraries as opposed to purchasing a CD from Amazon. Used CDs on Amazon are often sold for what a single song costs on iTunes and you have a physical asset that exists if your hard drive dies. Thus, there is a nice Coldplay album that my son paid for (meaning I paid for) that I cannot listen to except in his room.
For photos, again we had a pleasant surprise. My wife plugged in our digital Canon camera and Ubuntu immediately recognized it and opened F-Spot Photo Manager to download the photos from the camera to the computer at a location of our choosing. There was no need to install any crappy vendor software that would bring along unwelcome "shovelware" poor quality applications. The GIMP software is one of the best image manipulation software applications available anywhere that we use to size photos or reduce red-eye. The GIMP is analogous to Adobe Photoshop so it is a little like shooting butterflies with a bazooka but it gets the job done.
Since we have a central file server on our home network that we use for all media files as well as our home directories, the biggest initial task was to figure out Network File Service (NFS) so that connections to the home network would be done automatically. Here is where I would say that Linux still needs work as I had to manually edit a file called "fstab". Fortunately, Google got me through this. I have suggested to the Ubuntu folks that a graphical interface should exist for this and hopefully this will come soon. This is one of the last vestiges of the desktop operating system where you have to get down to the bare metal without a dashboard if you want to work on a network. Maturity in any operating system shields the user from being forced to deal with the bare metal.
Otherwise, I found the setup pretty darn easy. One can tinker to customize the desktop all you want. I replaced all desktop fonts with URW Gothic instead of the default fonts and that transformed my desktop to look so much better in my opinion.
The ability to have multiple desktops is a major plus. The paradigm is a rotating cube where each cube surface is a separate desktop. Thus, in a workday, I will have one face of the cube as a Windows XP desktop and others for different groups of tasks. Another note about running Windows: I run my virtual Windows sessions in "snapshot mode" whereby it is locked down from unsolicited changes. Any unsolicited changes made during the time of running it are discarded at shutdown of Windows. This prevents operating system degradation and thus my Windows sessions are as peppy as they were at the beginning. Ultimately I switched to Linux to avoid operating system degradation over time because I hate to move into new computers as stated before. I am ultimately a lazy person. Maybe I am unique on DKos due to my level of laziness.
Here are some random videos I pulled off the intertubes that show basic stuff. Here is a good video that demonstrates the multiple desktops and the cube paradigm.
Here is a good one (a bit old though) that shows someone running Windows inside of Ubuntu
Here’s someone really showing off by running Ubuntu Linux and then BOTH a Windows XP session and a MacOS session inside of it on separate desktops.
So I will conclude by saying that I have included plenty of links to Linux distributions where you can download the operating system for free, burn it to a disk and install it or just order a CD for under $20 where they will send it to you. Give it a whirl. Ubuntu is pretty easy. Those with the Gnome desktop have a more MacOS feel and those with the KDE desktop have a more Windows feel. You can even install it where you have a dual boot situation where you leave your original computer undisturbed and just an additional portion is used to install Linux and you choose which operating system to use when turning it on. Go have fun.
Random Additional Thoughts
In regards to the iPad, I am glad that some find the device helpful but I remain troubled by the closed system approach to create a walled garden for the users and a guaranteed revenue stream for what was once a hardware vendor and is now also a censor and toll taker. I fear that this is a Faustian bargain that will not end well. Harkening back to my high school reading of Watership Down, I would prefer to be a free rabbit and have fewer creature comforts than one in a pen at the mercy of a vendor’s decisions.
Like the Android answer to the iPhone, I expect that a slew of less proprietary answers will soon arrive to the iPad running the Android software. They will probably have USB ports, removable batteries and run Flash applications. I have a son with a Motorola Droid phone and another son with an iPod Touch. The interface of the Droid is as good as the iPod Touch and has a reasonable availability of applications. (BTW, Android as well as the WebOS in the Palm Pre are variants of the Linux software.)
Again, this is my opinion but I am old enough to remember the early 1990’s where the PC platform broke loose from the grasp of IBM to unleash a storm of innovation. To read more on this, see Accidental Empires for a great and entertaining book to read. Why we would willingly surrender choice to go back into a proprietary box is just beyond me.