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It's been nearly a year since I began using Linux Mint on a
spare laptop that my sister stopped using after 'upgrading' to a
Macbook with very similar hardware specifications. The most I had
done on computers before that was web browsing and playing video
games. My father tried many a time to interest me in the inner
workings of the machine, the processes happening under the hood, but
it was all in vain, since I largely abhorred the digitalization of the
world around me. My schoolwork up till that point was also
fortunately independent of the web.
University physics forced a break in my Luddite ways, as after
a semester of producing lab reports by hand, complete with diagrams
and graphs on millimeter paper it began to dawn on me how remarkable
computers were. Reproducing lengthy calculations to correct small
errors is tedious without a computer. This was by design at the
university, so as to teach us pesky undergrads the power of Python,
which would be used thereafter for the analysis. I was thrust into
unfamiliar territory, but I learnt the necessary commands, with
considerable struggle.
It is now meet to mention how the university's public
computers, all of them, not just the ones in the physics department,
run some form of GNU+Linux. As an entrenched, yet reluctant Window's
user, this provided many frustrating experiences when trying to use
them for anything more than browsing the web. Getting familiar with
'Linux' was encouraged since the beginning, and I finally, halfway
through my program, decided to take the advice.
Linux Mint was touted as the most beginner friendly for the
Windows user, which is why I decided to install it. Creating a
bootable USB stick and partitioning a hard drive for a dual-boot was
incredibly stressful the first time I did so, as guides are
accompanied by a warning about the terrifying prospect of producing an
unbootable system, should something during installation or
partitioning go wrong. Not that I really knew what that meant, just
that it was very bad. Fortunately, all went smoothly and Mint's
welcome screen provided a good overview of how to get started.
There's nothing terribly exciting to talk about regarding my
experiences in the months thereafter with Mint. It just worked.
I picked up the excellent book by William Shotts, "The Linux
Command Line", and read my father's 1993 edition of Ron Howard's "How
Computers Work", both of which are excellent books. Boy, what a world
I was missing out on! I'm still kicking myself over my earlier
distinctly anti-computer stances and reluctance to let my dad guide me
through the wonders of computing. And my studies in physics gave me
an appreciation for the miracle of microcomputers.
Along the way, I noticed the word GNU popping up
semi-regularly around my supposed 'Linux' system, so I looked into the
matter and landed on the FSF. Free and open source software had never
entered my mind beforehand. The whole GNU and FOSS philosophy offers
a lot of food for thought and I'm an appreciator of the ridiculous
Stallman copypasta ("What you're referring to as Linux is in fact
GNU/Linux, or as I've recently begun calling it, GNU+Linux...")
Importantly, this lead me to think about how I use my "smart" phone as
well. I might describe some of the challenges associated with that
switch in another posting.