Linux - how few know of it
Jul. 19th, 2010 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eWhen I meet people and discussion falls to computers, as it often does, I've often been surprised at how few people know of Linux. They generally think that putting up with Microsoft Windows is their only option. When told that Linux is a free operating system that can either replace, or co-exist with Microsoft Windows they tend to be either surprised or skeptical. This astounds me. How did Microsoft manage to so impoverish the computing world? Not only have they retarded computing technology by a decade or more, but they have blinded many people to even the possibility of advancement -- a very sad state of affairs.
Thank heavens it is slowly changing. Years ago Linux was something only computer geeks used. Now I know a broad range (but still a tiny minority) of people who have dropped Microsoft Windows, preferring the safety and lower cost of Linux... and in the case of Puppy Linux, the ease of use, speed, tiny size, and ability to revive old computers making them usable again. I think part of the change is coming simply from word of mouth, but also from live CDs, where people can try Linux before installing it on their machines.
On that last point, I've noticed an annoying number of computers recently that have their BIOS set up to prevent booting from a CD. It is easy to change, but most people don't even know what a BIOS is, let alone how to go into their SETUP to change the boot-device order. [sigh]
A ray of hope: lately Linux users seem to outnumber Apple Mac users on the net. (Thank heavens Apple didn't win the war for the desktop -- computer use would be even further retarded than with Microsoft. Apple are masters of propaganda.)
Thank heavens it is slowly changing. Years ago Linux was something only computer geeks used. Now I know a broad range (but still a tiny minority) of people who have dropped Microsoft Windows, preferring the safety and lower cost of Linux... and in the case of Puppy Linux, the ease of use, speed, tiny size, and ability to revive old computers making them usable again. I think part of the change is coming simply from word of mouth, but also from live CDs, where people can try Linux before installing it on their machines.
On that last point, I've noticed an annoying number of computers recently that have their BIOS set up to prevent booting from a CD. It is easy to change, but most people don't even know what a BIOS is, let alone how to go into their SETUP to change the boot-device order. [sigh]
A ray of hope: lately Linux users seem to outnumber Apple Mac users on the net. (Thank heavens Apple didn't win the war for the desktop -- computer use would be even further retarded than with Microsoft. Apple are masters of propaganda.)
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Date: 2010-07-19 05:52 am (UTC)Puppy is mostly compatible with Slackware and Debian. I've often installed Debian and Slackware packages in Puppy... and occasionally Fedora packages. The first Puppy was built from Fedora, but later used a Slackware kernel. Now it is really its own beast, compiled from scratch.
Ubuntu is built upon Debian, but I think they've relaxed the rules about open vs closed source. A pity.
I used to enjoy using Mandrake, but lost track of it since it became Mandriva.
Red Hat/Fedora was always too corporate for my liking.
Years ago I bought and installed a full disk-set of SuSE, but they're being lured into Microsoft's poisonous embrace, so I steer clear of them now.
Gentoo, Corel Linux, Caldera, Vector, Knoppix, DamnSmallLinux, and many, many more... Heavens, there are oodles of them now! And that's before you consider all the one-off specials, like 64Studio -- a multimedia variant of Debian specifically for artists, and NaNoWriMo Puppy just for writers (lots of Puppy variants here (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Puppy_Linux/Puplets)). And then there are devices that are devoted to Linux, like the Zaurus handheld, and the Nokia n900, and to some extent Google's Nexus 1 (built on a combination of Linux and BSD).
You can download an amazing, enormous diagram of the history of Linux distributions at http://futurist.se/gldt/ where they record 270 different distros!!! Wow! It really becomes clear from that diagram just how incredibly important Debian is. It has parented much of the scene.
The times are a-changing (slowly).