A little geekiness

I’ve been using Linux since it was a toy for geeks. At first, I spent time (a lot of time) playing around with it and starting to get a handle on how it worked. This was really my first experience really digging into how an operating system did what it does. My interest at the time was mostly programming and the idea of a completely opensource OS thrilled me. I actually had a chance to really look at complete working source code for all kinds of different programs and applications. I’d never been exposed to “real” computers so the extent of my experience was DOS and Windows.

Then, around 12 years ago, I bought and installed my first fully working desktop Linux.

I suspect maybe one or two of you just had a flashback. Most of you have probably never seen that and maybe have never even heard of Red Hat but back then Red Hat was one of (if not the) biggest players in the Linux world. Really, they still are, just not so much at the consumer/hobbiest level.

Anyway, back then running Linux was like owning a car back when they were new. They were amazing machines but they required an awful lot of tweaking, fixing, babying to get them working and to keep them working.

I guess the actual point of this post is to say how surprised I am at how many of you are running Linux these days. Non-geeks, just regular folks, some of who don’t know the first thing about how these machines work are running Linux desktops or laptops. Of course these days there are probably a lot of you running Linux in one form or another without actually being aware of it. A great many of your gadgets have penguins* in them. Your DVRs and your streaming media boxes and your phones and your routers.

The website you’re reading now is running on a Linux box. Yours very likely is too.

The distros I run sometimes change from one day to the next. Right now, I’m on Fedora 15. Years ago Red Hat got out of the “free” business and got into the business business. What was once the free Red Hat is now Fedora. I still switch back occasionally to Ubuntu 11.04. On my servers, which run this website (and others) and my email and the H&B chat are running Debian 6.

Those of you running Linux, what distro are you running and how did you get started with it? What are your thoughts on it? To those not running Linux, what are you running? Is this the first you’re hearing of this “Linux” thing? Don’t be shy. We won’t make fun of you (much).

* that would be a reference to Tux, the Linux mascot. The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Tux was created by Larry Ewing in 1996.