Old Fart

I look forward to Grumpy Old Geeks Podcast every week. Two old timers from the tech industry. tagline for the show is “What went wrong on the internet and whose to blame.”

They have a sync that actually works pretty well. As the product is still beta you can donate and get access to the sync service.

I first installed Linux on a 486 computer back in 1999. Can still remember staring at the screen thinking “Now what the hell do I do? Oh right ‘root’ was the username. Password entered. Now what?” Since then I’ve built many servers running Linux. Some for corporate environments. Antispam solutions. Web servers. Email Systems. File servers. I started using Linux as my primary desktop in 2000 and will never look back.

As for which is better? Windows? Linux? Mac? It really doesn’t matter to most people and there’s not one thats objectively better than another. Most people use Windows because thats what is installed on their PC when they bought it and 99% of the population would have no clue or even think of installing anything different. Once the PC is too old or so full of kludge they usually either get their ‘nephew’ to wipe it clean and start over again or they just buy another PC. Thats the main reason the Linux Desktop will never become mainstream or even start to compete with Windows. Unless somebody makes the kickbacks Microsoft gives to the big manufacturers illegal it won’t change.

Sorry…that was a bit of a tangent there…

The OS is simply a tool. It really depends on what you are trying to do and what you want to accomplish. I’m a geek. I love fiddling with stuff and I find Mac and Windows operating systems irritating as hell and so locked down that I can’t ever be as productive on Windows as I am on Linux. I use a tiling window manager. I’ve created all sorts of customizations that that I use every day. Things I could never do on Windows. Hell, with Windows 11 you can’t even move the freaking taskbar without a registry hack. What is with that?

I also run Linux on several small PCs that I use to host all sorts of home services built on Docker and some machines using XCP-NG to virtualize various OSs.

I still run Windows on one laptop for my consulting gig as its all being run in Microsoft world.

Now there’s also the whole “free” as in free speech aspect of the Linux OS vs the proprietary OS. It is definitely a consideration for me and does make me feel somewhat self righteous in running Linux everywhere I can. I also love not paying the “Microsoft tax”.

Another aspect is the connection to developers and providing feedback into Open Source tools. I’ll never forget when I bought a new Lenovo laptop a few years ago. It had some new Intel wireless NIC in it that wasn’t really fully supported by Linux yet. When I used it the connection would stay up for a few seconds and then drop. I posted something on the kernel mailing list. Within a few hours I had the developer who wrote the code to support the Intel NICs messaging me. We sent several messages back and forth and he got me to test various versions until it worked correctly. Can you ever imagine getting to communicate directly with a Windows developer? Would never happen in a million years.

What I’d recommend is find an old machine. Install an easy to use Linux Distro. Play. Try different things. See what you like. Then nuke it and try another distro. Then do it again. Play with the different software packages. Desktop environments. Get involved in some of the communities on Reddit Lemmy, Discord, etc. See what others are doing its a fascinating world and I love every minute of it. Even when sh*t breaks. I treat it as a learning experience and I learn something new every day.