Linux is free and your mind is valuable
One of my favorite old Linux jokes is, “Linux is free… if your time is worthless.” This quote is possibly adapted from a jwz interview dating back to 1998. In it, he said:
I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to [major operating systems], and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. […] As we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.
That said, I’ve run Linux dating back to my earliest days studying formal operating systems, when I did it mainly so that I’d have access to vim, shells, a solid gcc toolchain, and good x86 hardware emulation and virtualization tools. Somewhere along the way, though, I made it a point to make my day-to-day computing, if not completely imbued by the open source movement, at least “keyhole accessible” to its thriving core, which continues to be Linux. So, for me, as a point of pride, it has been Linux on the desktop, Linux on my smartphones (that is, Android Linux), and Linux on my smart TVs (that is, webOS). As well as Linux in the obvious places, like my cloud VMs, my Raspberry Pi, my physical server, etc.
I’m not a purist, though. I still use plenty of proprietary software in my life. And plenty of proprietary hardware, too. To stay connected to the world of Apple, I keep an iPad running iPadOS and a Mac Mini running macOS. To stay connected to the world of Microsoft, I keep a dual-boot’able partition for Windows 11 Pro. But I’d say 90% of my computing happens on some Linux variant, and that makes me feel good about having a more direct relationship with computing, where I can always peel back some layers of the onion as needed.
