Some of you are going to want to skip this one, because it reeks and drips with geekiness and dorkiness in equal measure. The rest of you should probably skip this one because it’s gonna get a little fanboyesque.

I was in my senior year physics free study period (because I had completed all the offered Physics courses, told you this was gonna get nerdy) when Joel (who was a Junior and had already completed all the offered Physics courses) introduced me to the idea of free and open source software. I mentioned that they were offering DSL in my neighborhood, in some places up to 256k up and down. He looked up from the donated 286 where he was freehand creating a graphics test program in the debugger and said, “If I had that kind of bandwidth, I’d finally be able to get Linux.”. Intrigued that someone would use that bandwidth for something other than low quality pornography, pirated commercial fonts, and newsgroup access, I asked him to explain it. He sat down and hit enter on the debugger, and while the machine squealed from the system speaker and the green phospor screen ran through a series of pixel by pixel exercises it was likely not rated for, he told me about this free operating system called Linux.

The first time I tried a free unix-like OS on my own was in 1999. The OS was FreeBSD (I had minor prior experience with it from my first computer job at the Chandler school district), and it was installed on a second hand HP Vectra 486dx 100Mhz with 64 mb of ram purchased, if I remember right, from Mindspring (my employer at the time) in an auction. It had a 300 MB hard drive. I didn’t have a CD burner (they were too fucking expensive) so I ordered FreeBSD cd’s from some now-defunct site (they used to sell pre-loaded pc’s with linux too, I can’t remember who they were anymore. Dan Irawan suggested it to me, but he’s a different story.) for about $5. They showed up, I slaved in my desktop’s cd rom, and we were off to the races.

Kinda.
Long story short, it failed magnificently.

There were issues with chipset support and issues with the amount of RAM I had, coupled with my own ignorance and the then-standard-rule that I would need to have twice as much swap as RAM. That was half the frickin’ hard drive! The machine mouldered and I waited for a new revision of FreeBSD, hoping it would be better.

Life moved pretty quick at that time, and I found myself working at a company in San Jose, surrounded by these monster Sun boxes and other unixes, so I figured (rightly) that I should get cracking on figuring out how to make the most of these OS’s. I had grown tired of my quarterly reinstalls of Windows 95 on my desktop and decided it was time for a change. I had previously helped set up a Mandrake (now Mandriva) linux system for Frank, and while it was interesting (and I did have it installed briefly), I was still convinced that FreeBSD was the way for me (this is mostly because of the kernel build process which was a very common practice to get hardware to work. BSD’s was clean and sweet. Linux’s was and remains fiddly and unpleasant). This time I had cable internet which was unbelievably fast, and access to a CD burner. I was on my K6-2 450 with 256MB of ram and a 6GB hard drive. I downloaded 4.0-current and painstakingly hemmed and hawed over how big to make partitions. Despite my best guesses based on guides I could find, this took about six reinstalls to get right, but sooner than later I had a fully working box, sound and everything! (this was a big accomplishment which took me compiling custom kernels and whatnot, in the wee hours of the night). I had telnet running on it and thanks to @Home’s “practically permanent DHCP” addressing, I now had a computer I could access from anywhere that had an internet connection.

But I missed games and I missed being able to see pictures on the internet, and I wasn’t ever able to get X working right on it, so again, it got smoked and Windows got installed for the hundredth time.

Eventually Fargo and I saved up enough money to afford a new machine (which was bitchin’. Athlon 1800+, 512 MB of RAM, 40GB hdd. Nvidia GeForce Ti300 video card.), and the K6-2 450 got ignored. Then repurposed as a FreeBSD (I still don’t really know why I had such a hard anti-linux tilt) 4.3 machine. It served files (eventually on a big Raid0 of 80GB disks) and acted as an internet gateway for our slow growing herd of machines. It was dutiful and vigilant in keeping us from paying for extra IP’s on @Home. I toyed with the idea of installing Linux at this point, but my aversion to the whole download-five-hundred-gzips-and-roll-your-own thing kept me from any of the distros, and after having seen Mandrake go from fast and great to buggy and slow, I wasn’t impressed with many of the mature all-in-one distros.

Many computers and many years passed. The K6-2 450 lost a hard drive (along with all our downloaded TV shows, this event is referred to frequently as “the fire”) and we had set up some other machines anyways, and the 1800+ which was once the toast of the town was now the utility box. Passing bits, serving up MP3s. FreeBSD 4.6 had been very good to me, but we were getting ready for a big fight. The 5.0-Current branch was open.

And I installed it.

And it was shit.

Not just regular shit either. It was slow and buggy and reminded me of nothing more than when I had first failed on that Vectra long, long ago. The magic was gone.

Thankfully, Linux was still around. And it had apparently just gotten better and better, everyone was raging about it. I thought about the hard to read fonts in Enlightenment and the piss poor web browsers that were available (Netscape f-ing communicator? Seriously? That’s all you have?) and I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I installed Debian (and later Mandriva, Suse, and RedHat) and noted that everything was better. X was better, there were better browsers available. But after countless reinstalls and xfree86 reconfigures and no sound and bad sound and no network and tweaking and searching and freaking out, I came out convinced: they all beat Windows 95/98 (even SE) hands down. Unfortunately, it was 2003 and not one of the half a dozen distros I tried beat XP. I came out of it convinced, once again, that you had to just assume Linux was for utility (I now had a separate gateway box running Smoothwall, which is just a web-frontended linux, and eventually IPCop when Smoothwall stopped updating), and that Windows was for day to day use.

More time passed, and more people yammered about Linux. I came to realize that it was really just more people getting fed up with Windows. XP was good, but not great. I wasn’t reinstalling it every month or two anymore, but XP did get kind of icky after about a year, and needed constant mucking out (AdAware, Spybot, RegCleaner). My laptop came with Vista and it was such shit that I had to immediately backtrack to XP. I was in a desktop OS rut.

I now had a Fedora Core 6 box serving my files (on a real raid, not just a bunch of disks taped together), and was impressed whenever I went to the console and didn’t scream at how obtuse it was. I had a dual boot setup with Fedora Core, but frustration getting my wireless card working left me in Windows 100% of the time. I longed for an option though, as obvioused by my dual boot Ubuntu install on my laptop (some minor issues, but nothing big, like it wouldn’t recover from sleep mode, and I couldn’t get bluetooth DUN working through my phone), Ubuntu had come a long fucking way towards full time usability. I blew away the Fedora partition, installed Ubuntu, and spent Labor day weekend really trying to fix problems with it instead of giving up and going back to XP. With Fargo’s help, I got everything working (still not super happy that I can specify some lines in the /etc/network/interfaces and get WPA working, but NetworkManager won’t do it) acceptably. I spent the week getting more comfortable with it, and tried to force myself to explore options instead of retreat, and boy have I been rewarded. I am finally happy with my computer again. It does what I want it to, and there are very few things that I can’t do on it that I would want to. I resized my partitions so that Linux would have the lion’s share of the space and left Windows up for work related functions (I can’t use the linux Cisco VPN client, because my employer enforces stateful firewall, which is a Windows Only thing). I installed Beryl and now have all the pretty effects I could wish for. I got WINE installed and ran some old games through it to see if it worked (Fallout and Deus Ex), which it ran without breaking a sweat. Then I heard a rumor you could get HL2 working under it, and tried it. It might be 10% slower than under windows, but it’s just barely at my threshold of noticing, which just blew me away. There are some games which won’t run (Emperor:Battle for Dune for one, but it only barely runs under XP anymore), and there are some glitches in Beryl (running games means turning Beryl off. No if’s ands or buts), but I was pretty satisfied. I looked around and got some insight into the problems with my laptop (sdptool is the fucking best, and ATI drivers don’t handle warm starts after sleep) and started hammering out my other minor issues. When searching for some information about how to set my cpu frequency to full (otherwise Deus Ex runs funny, same in Windows and Linux), I ran across Ubuntu Unleashed, which I started perusing, because it offered solutions to a couple of my problems. And I found Virtualbox, which was an easy install, and let me set up a virtual machine in a couple clicks. I decided to see if it was fast enough to handle my vpn and terminal services sessions for work. Whoa was I surprised.

To say the least, I have now converted 100% to linux. I wiped the Windows partition on both boxes, and just use Virtualbox for anything I can’t get going in Wine. It’s a revelation.

My vague gripes:

• Software updates come down fairly frequently, but they install innocuously, and they don’t bitch at me to reboot
• I don’t like that control-q quits a bunch of programs but not all
• I don’t like that I have to use shift-control-c and shift-control-v in the terminal
• Getting the extra buttons on my MX1000 to work was fiddly – Easy, but fiddly
• I can’t use LiveWriter in Wine and I don’t want to use it in Virtualbox
• Both Azureus and Ktorrent crash without error after an hour or so of running, on both my laptop and desktop
• NetworkManager won’t handle my dialup networking on the laptop, nor my wireless card on the desktop with WPA

In all, I’m really happy with everything. I use Deluge for my bittorrenting, which is surprisingly full featured given that I’ve never heard of it. Everything else was either easy to work around or just required some searching. I’ve got to say, I’m shocked. Given the number of non-starter issues I’ve had with Linux, various BSDs, various window managers, Open Solaris, and any number of other projects, I am blown away that Linux has finally become viable as my desktop OS. I still wouldn’t necessarily install it for my dad, since he doesn’t have a lot of patience for fiddling and some of the stuff I put up with he wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t necessarily install it for my mom, because she likes to download games and I don’t think she’s up to Wine, but for me, Linux has arrived.