Maybe if in 2024 you have never considered installing Linux, have never knowingly spoken to anyone who uses Linux, never read a single essay or watc

linux, year one

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2024-09-03 16:30:02

Maybe if in 2024 you have never considered installing Linux, have never knowingly spoken to anyone who uses Linux, never read a single essay or watched a single video about Linux, never read that xkcd comic about Randall Munroe's cousin who installed Linux and didn't know he made a comic about it because she broke her wifi going down a distro-hopping rabbithole, you might be able to talk about Linux with indifference – like, "oh yes, that exists, I don't know anything about it" … but if you know about Linux, you either know the jokes people make about Linux, are angry about the ways it doesn't work for you, are angry about the deck being stacked so hard against Linux, are angry that so many people's computers are designed to betray them to make the rich richer, or (often) all four.

A year ago today, after a bit more struggle than we were planning on, we installed Linux for the first time on our brand new desktop computer, and by brand new we mean our cheap surplus desktop computer from 2015. It was US$35, and supposedly didn't come with a hard drive, but accidentally came with a hard drive, so we got our friends to help us set it up so the OS was on that drive and our home directory was on the bigger drive we bought when we thought it didn't have a hard drive.