this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I read The Jargon File before I touched much of anything aside from DOS, and I was hooked. My first starry-eyed actual experience with Unix was at my first programming job: On a Unix system writing C (neither of which I had ever used). They gave me and my coworker a single copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's book and told us to get up to speed. The people assigned to us as mentors were more or less useless as far as figuring out how to do anything, so we struggled a lot. In the end we did okay.
We also an excellent computer science teacher who gave us an old SGI system to play with, which she said "fell off a truck." It couldn't really do much of anything interesting because we didn't have any internet to connect it to and we already had compilers on our own more-capable computers by that point, but it was a super cool little artifact to have.
My first actual Linux experience was when downloading Mandrake when it came out, and starting to use it for my everyday personal computing. Multiple people saw that I had this super-weird science fiction computer and heard how I talked about it, tried to install Linux for themselves even when I told them they probably didn't want to, and then suffered as a result because it wasn't super capable (for normal computer tasks) or easy to use at that time in history.
For a while I lived in a big rented house with other young layabouts with my computer (Debian by that point) being totally inscrutable. E.g. it would bring up just a grub command line when booted, which you had to type the right super-cryptic commands into in order to boot the actual system. It was effectively alien technology to everyone else. It was also permanently hooked to an always-on boom box's headphone jack and had a cron job to record Howard Stern every morning to a low-bitrate MP3, which was shared via Samba to the rest of the network, by request of my housemate so he could listen to Stern any time he wanted to.
It was great days. There were kings on the land, there was magic in the world. Aside from work environments, I used Linux pretty much exclusively from that point forward, up until the modern day when Chromebook+crostini and MacOS have become civilized environments to operate in.