Why I Use Linux: Frank’s Story

Thanks again to everyone that has submitted “Why I Use Linux” stories to me. I think I have enough to hold my site over for now but I really appreciate all of the submissions. The latest story comes from Frank Pirrone. Check out Frank’s story below:
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I got my first computer May, 1980. It was an Atari 800 with an 8-bit, 1.79MHz 6502 processor, 64KB of RAM, and initially a tape recorder for saving and loading programs. This machine had special chips for sound, graphics and I/0 – Pokey, Antic, and PIA, and you could program its 4 controller ports to either read or write data signals.

What an enormous sandbox in a virtually limitless playground!

The beauty of computing systems in those early days was that you could mess with everything. I had complete listings of the ROMs and BASIC and system code. Chris Crawford, “De Re Atari,” etc., etc. Everything was wide open, and the only limitation was your imagination, ability, and effort.

I ripped through BASIC, Pilot, LOGO that Spring and Summer, and when school started back up in September, I had written complete teacher’s grade book and plan book utilities. When the 6502 Assembly bug bit followed by Forth I was completely hooked.

From that beginning picture, I’ll skip most of the intervening stories, and they really could fill if not a book then at least a substantial pamphlet, other than to mention the joys of exploration, discovery, and fellowship of our local users groups and my early experiences of leadership, skipping ahead to Windows 3.0. That was of course followed by 3.0 with MM extensions, 3.1, 3.11, NT, the revolutionary 95 and evolutionary 98.

Needless to say, those years were not spent in anything like that original sandbox. Windows was closed. It was proprietary. It was secret…top secret. Commercial tools were used to build things, and much productivity and sharing still occurred, but like a lobster being slowly cooked alive as the pot began to get hotter and hotter, I was just not concerned by how I was being restricted and controlled by the producers of my proprietary OS and applications. I mean, I must have been aware of it, the gradual – or maybe not so gradual – loss of Freedom, but it was just the way it was.

Then…in 1998, after hearing about it and reading about it for some time, I bought a Red Had, size 5.1…and the dross fell from my eyes. I nearly succumbed to whiplash being sent reeling all the way back to 1980. Suddenly I was back in that enormous sandbox in that virtually limitless playground.

It was like someone had one day cleaned the Windows! I had almost forgotten what it was like to be able to at the drop of a Red Hat, or any other color, pursue whatever whim or curiosity struck. I could grab a copy of FigForth and be right back there in the early 80s, and could ponder and mess with the source code of applications I would then compile myself – and I certainly did.
I was there during the childhood of KDE and Gnome, and ran StarOffice from StarDivision of Germany, and wallowed in multimedia editing and authoring tools, and in programming languages and watched the birth of projects that today are the bedrock of phenomenal creativity, and the vehicle of endless explorations. I played with networking, servers, all the services that ran the Internet. As I grew in knowledge and experience, totally unimpeded by this Free and Open environment, I was able to create and share, and help.

I never realized how far and how long I was gone, but I was back home.

I also never realized the paradox represented by the design philosophy of the world of Windows I had been living in. The prime objective of Window’s design was automation and simplicity. It’s a world of Wizards and auto-execution, and administrative rights, and it is an appliance.
A toaster for your mind, and herein lies the paradox:
In order to make computing simple for beginners, Windows is a highly constrained environment, so new users can get up to speed quickly. However, all those attempts at guessing users’ intent, and automation, and all those clickety-clicks to accomplish even the simplest task would, by definition, limit the effiiciency achievable through experience.

The consequence of this is that what was a comfortable walled garden for the newbie becomes a walled prison for the eventual expert.

Contrast this with GNU/Linux and its GUIs and CLI and Freedom and Openness:

You may struggle a bit – and these days its just a little bit at worst – in the beginning, but the more you learn and the more familiar you become, the faster and more efficient you get. This is a world filled with doors instead of Windows, and they swing wide open whenever you approach.

Why do I use GNU/Linux? Are you kidding?

Frank