Paul Stenquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asked:
> Interesting. I'm not a computer guy, so pardon my ignorance. But I
> can't help but wonder why people choose to run linux. Is it a form of
> self flagellation? Or is it a way of protesting Microsoft's
> domination of the world outside of apple? Or just a cult of sorts?
> Educate me.
For some minority of Linux users, it's a protest against
Microsoft. Those folks exist and are vocal, but it's not
the best reason to use Linux. Nor, AFAICT, anywhere near
being the most common reason. (And a bunch of them run
BSD instead of Linux anyhow.)
And it's certainly not self flagellation.
In some ways, this is like asking, "Why would anyone care
how easy it is to use manual mode on their camera when
modern exposure automation is so good?" Or, "Why would
anyone choose to drive a Land Rover instead of a Lexus?"
I'm going to be deliberately careless about distinguishing
between Linux and Unix here, because for the purposes of
answering this question, they may as well be interchangeable.
That's not something one can get away with in every context,
but "reasons for choosing Linux" mostly ovelap "reasons for
choosing Unix" at the level I'm going to get into here.
For certain kinds of things, Linux -- well, Unix and other
Unix-like operating systems -- is just _better_. Really.
And for a larger number of things it's about as good or not
significantly worse. For some things, it's not so great
(or it's not bad but Windows beats it there). But there's
a saying among us computer geeks: "All operating systems
suck. They just suck in different ways." So you pick the
OS to fit a) the task, and b) the operator's style.
Actually, for many tasks you satisfy the operator's mental
style first, and then ask whether the task parameters are
important enough to override that. Because folks tend to
work better when their tools fit their hands ... or their
brains, as the case may be.
Now admittedly, Mac OS X changes the equation here. A lot.
Because beneath its very well crafted GUI facade, it's Unix
underneath, and exposing that for the Unix-geeks is trivial
(just call up the application called ... uh, I think it's
called 'terminal'). But some folks still like Linux for
various reasons (or NetBSD or FreeBSD or ...), and some of
us can't afford Macs, or don't see the point to using a Mac
as a server when something cheaper could do that job and the
Mac can be saved for use as a workstation, or like the greater
freedom to _tinker_ that comes with using an open source OS.
And a few are Apple-haters, avoiding what they know is a good
OS out of principle, just like the Microsoft-haters, but most
people have less 'activist' reasons for picking their OS.
Have you ever explored the Command.COM interface under Windows?
(In some versions it's labelled "MS-DOS Prompt".) I bet it feels
kinda clunky. Well, it is, but it doesn't have to be ... under
Unix/Linux you have a choice of 'shells' -- programs that do the
kind of thing Command.COM does, but more more powerfully and
cleanly.
"But why, when everything is so much easier with a GUI?"
Because not everything is ... and some of us find a command-line
interface easier to work with even for tasks that a GUI
doesn't inherently suck at. With Linux, whether you're
using the CLI or the GUI at the moment, more control, more
power is at your fingertips than under Windows. And if
you're the sort who knows what he wants to do with that
power, _not_ having it makes using Windows feel like you're
wearing handcuffs. Me, I'd much rather spend a minute and
a half thinking and then type one long command that tells
the computer exactly how I want all the files in this
directory renamed, than to spend however long it takes
to right-click->rename->type the new name for a few hundred
files one after the other.
So what's to stop me from turning this around and asking
why everybody doesn't switch to Linux?
Because for some people, Windows really does fit their
brains better. Choose a tool to fit the hand/brain.
And even for people who aren't that strongly wired for
Windows, there's an issue of allocation of mental resources:
"with great power comes great responsibility" -- one of
the consequences of having so much more control using
Linux is that the user is _expected_ to control more
instead of just letting the OS guess. If you need (or just
want) that control, this isn't a big price. If you're
not bumping into Windows' limitations, then the question
becomes, "is learning how to wield this power I'm not going
to use often, just to be able to drive this thing the rest
of the time, worth it?" And sometimes, however much it makes
us geeks want to shout, "You don't know what you're missing!",
it really _isn't_ worth it for a number of people -- they can
better spend that time learning something else.
There's another old saying: "Unix _is_ user-friendly. It's
just choosy about who its friends are." (This saying dates
back to before graphical interfaces became common in Unix.
Or anywhere else except a Mac, for that matter.)
For me, the ideal tool is one that I don't even notice. I stop
being aware of the tool and how I have to control it, and the
tool simply becomes an Extension Of My Will, just like my own
fingers are. And the various tools available under Linux (and
to some extent, Linux itself) come closest to that for me.
Some of these tools take some serious learning up front (nobody
should expect the vi text editor to seem obvious right from
day one, for example), but when learning such a tool means
reaping the benefits of it for another couple decades (so far),
and it's the kind of tool that Just Does What I Want It To
once I _have_ learned it, well every time I get into the
"I think it and it just happens; my fingers may have wiggled
a bit while it was happening" zone at the computer, I'm getting
paid back for that effort.
It's also worth noting that Unix is coming up on its 40th
birthday soon. Can you name another operating system that's
stayed useful that long? Can you name one that isn't limited
to one brand of mainframes? Nostalgia can keep a small user
community dedicated to a beloved platform, but nostalgia doesn't
keep an OS vibrant and relevant and growing. What keeps Unix
and its descendants (Linux is an intellectual descendant though
not a 'genetic' one) alive and kicking, and good enough that
Mac switched _to_ Unix as the underpinning of their new OS
as recently as it did, is not nostalgia, not self-flagellation,
not protest, but _power_.
What Linux does well, it does very well.
-- Glenn
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