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Linux Epiphany
Jul. 4th, 2005 12:54 amI can't get any sleep thinking about it so I might as well express it. At least I don't have to go to work tomorrow.
I had a huge epiphany today about Linux. I sat there and said "what the hell am I even doing this for?" Remind me again (I asked myself), what is the benefit in this, to me? When is the last time Windows crashed? I can't remember. What do I want to run on Linux that I can't run on Windows? I have Firefox, Open Office and The Gimp on Windows. This week I've been using free, open source desktop publishing, video and audio editing software on Windows and it's been a wonderful experience. Not to mention the countless free and open source web services. My support for free and open source software is as high as ever.
Except I no longer want to run Linux. What finally broke me on it was not the problems. All operating systems have problems. It was the horror of the solution. It was presented as normal, accepted, and even a positive. That was when I realized: "The promised land is never going to come. I am already here. This is it and I don't like it. This is normality. This would be happening if I bought a new computer with Ubuntu preinstalled and bought a year's worth of tech support. I cannot get around using the command line interface."
I am only lazy in a good way, the way that keeps you from chopping down a tree with a herring. It occurred to me, why should I learn command line? What do I gain? I thought I was getting a free operating system, but there are financial costs and there are work costs. From my perspective the cost to benefit ratio makes no sense! I would spend a lot of unpleasant time learning something I don't find interesting, in order to accomplish... well... I honestly have no idea. I have to take people's word for it what vague and nebulous benefits there are to this command line. I haven't needed it since DOS, and DOS is not something I want to go back to. Ever.
As those who know me are aware, I react very strongly to disillusionment. I should not have said in the comments to my last entry that Linux "broke" the computer. The most exquisite tool is just as good as broken when I apply it to the wrong problem. When I have a step down from my happy and content Windows experience, rather than a step up, then from a very context-dependent point of view it's kind of like I broke my experience. Linux doesn't "work" in the sense of not needing you to hold its hand. You know? The earth, the sun, my hearbeat, Palm OS, Firefox, these work. When your heartbeat needs you to "hold it's hand" with a pacemaker, it's broken. When your heart keeps asking you to tell it to beat with a command line interface you could sort of say it's working, in that you're not dead, but it seems your standards have shifted weirdly. "You know how important it is to be in the driver's seat of your hardware; we can't have autonomous heartbeats because you never know when you might need to hide your presence from the supernatural hearing of ninjas." I don't want to lose CD autoplay, or associating file types with actions, or lists of clickable options. I don't want to lose prompts and actions attached to every point in the interface, from which I can learn what to do next.
Well, it didn't take long to realize what had been motivating me in the first place-- rhetoric. All the coolest people were, and still are, in open source software. What I was gaining (in my mind) was solidarity with an idealistic social movement. Viva la teçhnōliberáčion. I don't want anticompetitive corporations to own the whole world with intellectual property, which in the future will be just about the only kind of property there is. Justice, freedom, monopoly-busting, equality, democracy, global brotherhood, access for the little guy-- it might as well have been goddamn control of the goddamn means of goddamn production, if you can believe that. Anything but what I could actually do with a tool! How embarrasing. Oh well. Lesson learned, and not for the first time. Now I have to make sure not to be a fool and have to learn it again.
I had a huge epiphany today about Linux. I sat there and said "what the hell am I even doing this for?" Remind me again (I asked myself), what is the benefit in this, to me? When is the last time Windows crashed? I can't remember. What do I want to run on Linux that I can't run on Windows? I have Firefox, Open Office and The Gimp on Windows. This week I've been using free, open source desktop publishing, video and audio editing software on Windows and it's been a wonderful experience. Not to mention the countless free and open source web services. My support for free and open source software is as high as ever.
Except I no longer want to run Linux. What finally broke me on it was not the problems. All operating systems have problems. It was the horror of the solution. It was presented as normal, accepted, and even a positive. That was when I realized: "The promised land is never going to come. I am already here. This is it and I don't like it. This is normality. This would be happening if I bought a new computer with Ubuntu preinstalled and bought a year's worth of tech support. I cannot get around using the command line interface."
I am only lazy in a good way, the way that keeps you from chopping down a tree with a herring. It occurred to me, why should I learn command line? What do I gain? I thought I was getting a free operating system, but there are financial costs and there are work costs. From my perspective the cost to benefit ratio makes no sense! I would spend a lot of unpleasant time learning something I don't find interesting, in order to accomplish... well... I honestly have no idea. I have to take people's word for it what vague and nebulous benefits there are to this command line. I haven't needed it since DOS, and DOS is not something I want to go back to. Ever.
As those who know me are aware, I react very strongly to disillusionment. I should not have said in the comments to my last entry that Linux "broke" the computer. The most exquisite tool is just as good as broken when I apply it to the wrong problem. When I have a step down from my happy and content Windows experience, rather than a step up, then from a very context-dependent point of view it's kind of like I broke my experience. Linux doesn't "work" in the sense of not needing you to hold its hand. You know? The earth, the sun, my hearbeat, Palm OS, Firefox, these work. When your heartbeat needs you to "hold it's hand" with a pacemaker, it's broken. When your heart keeps asking you to tell it to beat with a command line interface you could sort of say it's working, in that you're not dead, but it seems your standards have shifted weirdly. "You know how important it is to be in the driver's seat of your hardware; we can't have autonomous heartbeats because you never know when you might need to hide your presence from the supernatural hearing of ninjas." I don't want to lose CD autoplay, or associating file types with actions, or lists of clickable options. I don't want to lose prompts and actions attached to every point in the interface, from which I can learn what to do next.
Well, it didn't take long to realize what had been motivating me in the first place-- rhetoric. All the coolest people were, and still are, in open source software. What I was gaining (in my mind) was solidarity with an idealistic social movement. Viva la teçhnōliberáčion. I don't want anticompetitive corporations to own the whole world with intellectual property, which in the future will be just about the only kind of property there is. Justice, freedom, monopoly-busting, equality, democracy, global brotherhood, access for the little guy-- it might as well have been goddamn control of the goddamn means of goddamn production, if you can believe that. Anything but what I could actually do with a tool! How embarrasing. Oh well. Lesson learned, and not for the first time. Now I have to make sure not to be a fool and have to learn it again.
