Isaac as a Pure Linux User

I use GNU/Linux as my primary operating system. The last version of Windows that I installed into my computers was Windows 3.11 for workgroups, which was done during 1996. During 1994 I decided that Windows 95 (named Chicago by then) was simply not something that I could tolerate, and I urgently needed an alternative. That was the year after the operating system course finished, and I was left with my Minix partition.

For a user, Minix is something more or less useless. Its compiler is so brain-dead that even very simple standard C programs fail to compile. On the other hand, I wanted to retain a Unix-like operating system so that I can have an environment more or less similar to what the server of the department is providing, so that I can quickly learn the secrets there. My friend told me to install Linux, and I promptly installed the Slackware distribution, which was by then the most popular Linux distribution. The experience was far from pleasant. For starter, it required one to download around 70 floppies full of packages that I have completely no idea about what they were. Getting the thing installed was reasonably straight-forward, but installing X required one to calculate the exact timing parameters to drive the monitor, something like when should the electron gun start to go back from the right edge of the screen to the left edge. To hook up with the network required one to write a simple program that talks with the terminal server to tell it to switch to the mysterious PPP mode, and debug problems like not getting the IP address correctly. Despite of those problems, for the reason that I wanted a Unix-like workstation, I continued to install and explore the new operating system that I've installed.

But such an unfamiliar environment cannot be a primary one to get work done: it's simply too inefficient having to learn a new thing to get each task done. I still had a lot of written assignments and review papers to write, which I was forced to do in Word for Windows installed in the department, then at version 6.0. It was simply painful. Adding a few equations and references and you start risking getting a hang. Just saving it can be dangerous, too. From time to time the save operation fails, and left me with a file that was simply dead.

During the summer when I'm about to be in research school, I knew things have to be changed. I spent most of that summer to learn things that would let me work efficiently in Unix. The most important addition was LaTeX, which allowed me to completely say goodbye to Words for Windows. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get could be a difficult habit to unlearn, but then the alternative to write instructions to direct the typesetter how to decorate my document was not so bad, given that I have been writing code for a long time anyway. Other important tools that I learned that summer included make, flex, bison, perf, perl, sed, awk and so on, which are more programmer's tools to allow me to complete my work as a summer intern, rather than of general desktop interest.

Since then, I've never turned back. DOS and Windows were used only for loading a few DOOM games, the classic shoot-and-run game that rocks the world; and later Duke Nukem. (Amazingly, a couple of years later a free engine, BOOM, is developed which would let me play DOOM games without booting to Windows.) The real reason for that change was that I really can do much much more in Linux, legally. In DOS, just a very primitive assembler to turns human-readable mnemonic (short operation names easy to remember) one-by-one into machine code without any intelligence whatsoever costs you around $600. That's something difficult to accept, given that my bank account is at unit digit. And, I had a lot lot more software that I want to run, all of them essential to my learning of how computer works. My copy of Slackware Linux, on the other hand, provided me with everything free, and let you see how they worked themselves! That starts me wondering, how Microsoft can get away writing so brittle software that every day a new virus appears and then charge big bucks to everybody using it?

That year is also the year when I learn about GNU and GPL, and when I read completely the GNU manifesto and the GPL license. That's one of the key things that happened to me, when I'm convinced that proprietory software is simply a way to have a fight among competitors that makes everybody hurt. Now, if something cannot be done in Linux, I only have two choices: fix it, or live with it. I no longer treat it an option to fall back to Windows.

Nowadays, I use Linux in all my own machines and in my desktop computer. Everything from the preparation of documents and lecture slides to spreadsheets to web editing and serving to peer-to-peer communications to compression and listening to songs are done in Linux.