A rainstorm is coming in, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m thinking that I should get the dishes clean. Instead I have sat down in front of the TV and putzed around the Interwebs whilst drinking red kool-aid (I’m sure the flavor has a name, but it tastes like what red should taste like). I checked the usual haunts (slashdot, reddit, digg, etc) looking for a bit of news dealing in the lands of Linux. Of course, hitting these grottos of geekhood usually results in getting lost in commentary by elitist pricks, and tonight was no different.
If you have no idea what Linux is, let me start by saying that it occupies most of my time at home, second only to my girlfriend (she’s sleeping quietly in the bedroom right now) and maybe my dog (sleeping in his crate). Outside of using copious amounts of my time, Linux is many other things. For starters Linux, in and of itself, is a kernel. If you are uncertain about what a kernel is, it is one of the abstraction layer between between the applications you run, and the hardware you run it on. This is to say that Linux is not an operating system, but something a bit more under the hood. On top of Linux sits a number (I won’t say it’s a small number, but it’s definitely a finite value) of services, applications, and libraries that perform tasks ranging from writing a blog (like I am now) and calculating whatever the folks at NASA calculate; this number of applications is largely referred to as “GNU”.
My problem, of course, is nothing to do with Linux, or it’s users in general; actually I have a creepy kind of obsession with Linux (its users are nice enough, but they are less obsession worthy in my eyes). In my daily routine, I find that all of my tasks can be done easily within the userland provided by GNU, and it’s backbone of the Linux kernel. The users of GNU/Linux tend to be, in my experience, a cut above the rest. This is not to say that they are better, but in large part they tend to be a bit smarter.
The reasons for this are simple really: Linux is, in no way possible, Windows. Support for “critical” applications such as Office or Photoshop is considered non-existent. Of course, there are alternatives, OpenOffice has made major inroads in ensuring compatibility with Microsoft Office, as well as support the Open Document Format standard that should probably be embraced by every vendor interested in making software, Gimp on the other hand provides a pretty robust tool to manipulate photographs and images. In the grand scheme of things however, the support provided by these applications is not the support provided by their Windows/Mac only alternatives.
It is important to understand that these applications are in use because they actually happen to be really well-refined. They perform their functions exceptionally, they run well in their supported environments, and they support most of what you can throw at them. Anyone who has used these applications (and trust me, a lot of people have), and getting them to use another tool to get the job done is, like asking a carpenter to abandon his nail gun for a ball-peen hammer.
Personally, I think that Linux, and all of the tools it provides, is just another way of getting my work done. I find that the tasks I have to get done are easier to do under Linux, enough so that I’m willing to be incompatible with most of the people I work with. That said, I don’t think that Linux is better, I just think it is better for me.
