Almost a Year of GNU/Linux

It's been nearly a year since I began using Linux Mint on a spare laptop that my sister stopped using after 'upgrading' to a Macbook with very similar hardware specifications.  The most I had done on computers before that was web browsing and playing video games.  My father tried many a time to interest me in the inner workings of the machine, the processes happening under the hood, but it was all in vain, since I largely abhorred the digitalization of the world around me.  My schoolwork up till that point was also fortunately independent of the web.

University physics forced a break in my Luddite ways, as after a semester of producing lab reports by hand, complete with diagrams and graphs on millimeter paper it began to dawn on me how remarkable computers were.  Reproducing lengthy calculations to correct small errors is tedious without a computer.  This was by design at the university, so as to teach us pesky undergrads the power of Python, which would be used thereafter for the analysis.  I was thrust into unfamiliar territory, but I learnt the necessary commands--with considerable struggle.

It is now meet to mention how the university's public computers, all of them, not just the ones in the physics department, run some form of GNU/Linux.  As an entrenched, yet reluctant Window's user, this provided many frustrating experiences when trying to use them for anything more than browsing the web.  Getting familiar with 'Linux' was encouraged since the beginning of the program, and I finally decided to take the advice.

Linux Mint was touted as the most beginner friendly for the Windows user, which is why I decided to install it.  Creating a bootable USB stick and partitioning a hard drive for a dual-boot was incredibly stressful the first time I did so, as guides are accompanied by a warning about the terrifying prospect of producing an unbootable system, should something during installation or partitioning go wrong.  Not that I really knew what that meant, just that it was very bad.  Fortunately, all went smoothly and Mint's welcome screen provided a good overview of how to get started.  There's nothing terribly exciting to talk about regarding my experiences in the months thereafter with Mint.  It just worked.

I picked up an excellent book by William Shotts, "The Linux Command Line", and read my father's 1993 edition of Ron Howard's "How Computers Work", both of which are excellent.  Boy, what a world I was missing out on!  I'm still kicking myself over my earlier distinctly anti-computer stances and reluctance to let my dad guide me through the wonders of computing.

Along the way, I noticed the word GNU popping up semi-regularly around my supposed 'Linux' system, so I looked into the matter and landed on the FSF.  Free and open source software had never entered my mind beforehand.  The whole GNU and FOSS philosophy offers a lot of food for thought and I'm an appreciator of the ridiculous Stallman copypasta ("What you're referring to as Linux is in fact GNU/Linux, or as I've recently begun calling it, GNU+Linux...")

Importantly, this lead me to think about how I use my "smart" phone as well. I might describe some of the challenges associated with that switch in another posting.