Almost a Year of GNU+Linux

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.