Why Linux?

October 5, 2025

A friend posted on Facebook, proud that he’d gotten his girlfriend to switch to Linux. This is part of the commentary (“lightly edited” for typos and flow) under it.

Me: I’ve been playing with Arch lately and I’ve decided that there are three distinct audiences for Linux:

people who think that Windows and Mac are being created by and for people who think they can put whatever they want in it and you’ll just bend over and take it, but still don’t want to fiddle with everything. Ubuntu, Mint and the like are for these people. given some of the videos i’m seeing, this group is growing since there are now embedded AI overlords watching everything you do and for some reason, people don’t like that.

Thanks to Valve and Steam, being able to play games and lots of other windows only stuff on Linux is a lot easier than it used to be.

people who like to fiddle with their computers to get them the way they like it. Arch, Gentoo and others are for these folks. I am in this group. I’ve been pretty much Linux-only on my home network for years. I think being able to say that was the clincher that got my current job. I just learned of a cool media player called Glide which I think will be my go to for playing things on my computer while I’m trying to figure out how to customize the cursor.
The third group are folks who use Linux for servers. These tend to be the employed who work with it every day.

Warren: “Putting in whatever they want” isn’t even close to the point. The only reason they added anything to these massive operating systems is for security to keep them from being sued and selling YOU s***.

Only problem with any Linux is you need to know more than the GUI. That means LEARN SOMETHING THAT LOOKS HARD. I’d try to hire Linux experience and got ppl who had used Gnome and thought that was Linux.

Me: Warren is not wrong. Over about 30 years (that’s an entire generation!) folks have been conditioned to be afraid of command lines. Goes back further than that, before Windows and Macintosh, people used nothing but the command line, with the occasional text GUI. Probably many of the command line people, even, relied on Midnight Commander. There’s even one for Linux!

I feel it’s relevant to insert here how much it took, years ago, to get our mutual friend Doug to learn vi. When he finally did, he was effusive (yeah, that guy!) about how useful it was.

Being comfortable at the command line is crucial, but it’s not an easy slog. I’m curious if Pat is doing anything to deal with that with his gf. Here’s the thing: being able to get over that can be the difference between getting the job and not. TBH, I believe that the moment I got my current job was the when I told them (truthfully, at the time) that I have nothing but linux on my network. “That’s a powerful statement” was the response.

I’m using Omarchy, which is described as “an opinionated take” by DHH (aka David Hannemeier Hansson), the guy who created Ruby on Rails. I hadn’t really heard of him before a few weeks ago, and I’ve listened to a bunch of interviews with him. One of his design criteria with creating Omarchy was to give people a working start, where they can get started and add things from there. There are a bunch of customizations he made that I’m not entirely thrilled with, like he replaced things like ls and cat with workalikes. The bash on this thing actually has a “help” command!

Omarchy is aimed at devs, but there is another take on it called CalOS little less dev-ish, DHH has even gotten a little bit of crap from the commenterati who feel that people are supposed to earn using Arch. This attitude amongst the faithful doesn’t help.

Old school linux had man pages which are notorious for being like the joke about the pilot talking to someone for directions who turned out to be in Microsoft headquarters - answers the question but not terribly helpful. If you add apropos, tldr and help, you can overcome most of that. The horse has to be willing to drink. Sounds simple to us, but it’s what stops people. The modern bashen even have some mouse integration!

I don’t know the answer: even in people who state they want to learn, I don’t see it happening. I had a young man recently who had all the time in the world, I sent him the old school Unix Programming Environment (50 years old and still useful) along with another modern book on using shells, and every time I checked in with him, he hadn’t even started. Horse, water, drink? nah.

Reply via email