A Linux Story

I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn't really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

My dad brought a copy of BSD home with him, and we sat down together. The installation process wasn't easy, and he didn't want me to try it alone. It ran! I had a window! There were little games on it! I had this new modem thing, and I could talk to people! It was amazing.

I was on a BBS in 1995 and I saw this post about Linux. I had heard about Linux before. I had seen it on other BBSs. I even heard about it from a distant cousin. It was really popular. My 8 year old brain didn't really realize the importance until I was informed that in Linux, only the kernel is maintained and controlled by Linux developers, and that I could play with everything else to my heart's content. I was intrigued as I enjoyed (and still do) tinkering with things. That was that. I downloaded Slackware and installed it (and unfortunately forgot to back up my journal that I had kept for 3 years [though going from 5 to 8 it wasn't too intriguing, but it was the first thing I ever did on a computer]).

In 1999, my aunt gave me her old Macintosh. It was a Performa running System 7, and while I didn't use it for my personal needs, it did come with ClarisWorks and saw heavy use for school work. I used my trusty 486 and Slackware for everything else. At Wal-Mart, I had seen Red Hat and Mandrake for sale. I asked my dad if he'd get me copies, and he obliged me. He figured it couldn't hurt, but he thought I was being silly. This Linux stuff was never going to make anyone money. I enjoyed some of the ease of use of both, and I thought RPMs were interesting, but I still preferred Slackware. I continued this way until 2003, when I received an Emachine for my birthday. It was a Celeron machine with all the bells and whistles normal for the time, and it blew everything I had used previously out of the water. I was so happy. I was used to being behind the times, but using Linux it had never seemed to matter. I took the Macintosh and the 486 to Goodwill, and within a week they'd been bought.

The Emachine had XP and Slackware on it, naturally. I needed XP for school work, but I really didn't like it all. I had a friend of mine set it up so that XP would load Office right away, and I only allocated about 2GB to it anyway (FAT32 so I could read the partition from Slackware).

The following year this thing called Ubuntu came out. I was a Junior in High School at that point, and I was really getting into the OpenSource movement. Ubuntu seemed like just the thing to grab "converts". No one had heard of Ubuntu then, and no one seemed to care. They thought that Ubuntu would be just another Linux distribution. After all, how many had their been? Red Hat, Debian, Slackware. Those are the "real" distributions. What's all this junk? Just spin offs. Were they ever wrong. Love it or hate it, Ubuntu is synonymous with Linux to many people. I tried it, hated it, but gave to everyone. I preferred Slackware.

In 2005, I graduated High School, got myself a 64bit machine, installed Slackware on it, and joined the Marine Corps. I was injured and discharged '07. I came home went to college, graduated, and built a new machine. Guess what. I still use Slackware. Everyone tells me that I'm stuck in the past, but at least I installed the 64bit version ;)

As far as I know, I am the only person who has used OpenSource operating systems nearly exclusively his whole life. The only time that the "OpenSource" nature of it really mattered to me was in High School. Otherwise, I just used what I was used to, and what I felt was technically superior. Today, while I know that Linux is gaining ground, I still feel like an outsider. People always talk about the year of the Linux desktop, and I just have to laugh. I'm still young (22), and never have money. Naturally, I will continue to use Linux (as it's kostenlos). For the majority of people, they may use it on their cell phones. They may use it on tablet computers in the near future. Until those devices replace laptops and desktops, they will still use Windows on their primary computing devices (or OSX as Apple seems to be regaining popularity). Why? You cannot go to a store, buy some software, take it home, and install it on a Linux/BSD/Solaris machine. As soon as people figure that out, they get turned off to Linux/BSD/Solaris. It's also hard to sell someone a product that renders their thousands of dollars in software investment useless, even if that product is kostenlos. But, hey, have you heard? Slackware was ported to ARM. I may have to get one of those EEEs now. I just wish I could still use KDE1.x ...