Corporations are not your friends. You are a number to them, with potential dollar signs. And I don’t personally care that we no longer walk to the bakery and talk to Bertha and ask how the kids are doing – I often prefer the cold system of exchange we have, because I usually just want to buy my stuff and go home – but big companies have turned their lust toward your data, which is a completely separate revenue stream fueling the world of marketing, and they hate your privacy, since your privacy is the only thing between them and bigger dollar signs.
I’m not here to hate up on any particular operating system. The whole Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux “debate” is as old as time. It’s unproductive because these three operating systems are characterized by trade-offs that even 5 year olds can understand. However, as a long-time Windows user who spends a lot of time laughing at Apple prices, I’m slightly appalled at the distopian extent Microsoft has gone to harvest our data and invade our privacy. Windows is glorified spyware these days.
Which brings me back to Linux.
Many years ago, I tried to be a Linux bro, and even used Ubuntu as a daily driver for 2 or 3 years. But after a particularly botched upgrade, which left me unable to play music on my own computer, I gave up and returned to the lukewarm embrace of Windows, which worked well-enough.
[Rumor has it that your skill as a l33t haxor is directly proportional to the number of anime references you can recognize]
The worst part of this, though, was missing out on a crucial opportunity to invest in my career. At the time, I figured my job didn’t require me to learn Linux, so why bother?, but now that I’m actively engaging my interest in low-level programming and the underlying behavior of operating systems, I’m realizing that I lost years of greater familiarity with the OS, which could have helped fuel such interests in things like embedded programming, driver development, and assembly. It’s not that you can’t do these things for Windows or even Mac, it’s just that very few people will pay you to do it, and even if you take that route you will always be working with a black box because of the propietary nature of those code bases.
Seeing the direction I would like to take my career, seeing how unbelievably invasive Microsoft has become, I feel like the solution is fairly obvious.
Of course, on the privacy front, your operating system only has so much impact. But it’s still a good thing to consider. And it’s not that your privacy can’t be invaded on Linux, too, it’s just that the code is completely transparent and some very nerdy people would find out if anything fishy was being added (although companies like Canonical do offer the option to send anonymous usage feedback). On Microsoft, for example, simply searching for a program on your own computer immediately sends a network call out to a Microsoft server. They are almost tracking everything at this point. It’s incredibly disturbing.
I’m also intrigued by Free BSD, which apparently is a great, no-nonsense Unix-like operating system many people use for servers. It’s not something you’re probably use as a daily driver, but it too has a close tie to driver development and the like, even though it’s actually a separate code base from Linux. I’d love to be able to spin up servers on the fly with it, but that’s something I’d probably learn on a virtual machine.
Anyway, I bought a new (used) computer to install a Linux distro onto, that should arrive in the mail soon. After doing some hardware upgrades, I expect it to cost me all of $250 or so (becaues I’m a cheapass and 6 year old computers are literally that cheap, even after you put a new harddrive in). Hell, I love my current laptop, I just don’t want to wipe Windows out yet in case I need it for my next job. This has needed to happen for awhile.