Jeff Clough

Why I Use Linux

Written:

I've used various flavors of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems more or less continuously since the early nineties. For most of this time, those operating systems have been Linux distributions. Whether it was a server or a desktop, I think there have been very few periods where I haven't had to touch a Linux machine at least once a week.

This page is about my experience with desktop Linux. It describes my past reasons for using it, my past reasons for not using it, and my current reasons for using it exclusively for the foreseable future.

Maybe this page will convince you to try it out, if you're not running it already. Maybe it will convince you to stay far, far away from it. I don't know, nor is convincing you of anything the purpose of this page.

I wrote this to have a convenient URL to point people to when they inevitably ask me: "Why Linux?" I wanted to explain my motivations, share my experiences, and offer my thoughts in a vaguely-coherent way.

You'll have to let me know if I've succeeded or not.

Oh, and one last thing. This is a long rant, partly because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't go into the "nitty gritty" without providing some historical context. You can probably skim over the first section and not lose out on much. Then again, maybe you like wierd nerds waxing nostalgic about VMS and Quake.

Ancient History

Throughout most of the nineties, I earned a paycheck by working on computers. To varying extents, and for various employers, I fixed them, maintained them, wrote software for them, provided desktop support, and even taught basic computer science in an elementary school program.

The range of computers and operating systems I used during this decade is kind of unheard of by most people in an "IT" field today. It ranged from IBM286's running DOS 3.x, to MicroVAX minicomputers running VMS. In between, there were all the then-current flavors of Windows, MacOS, and more UNIX systems than I can comfortably count. AIX, SCO, BSD---those are the highlights.

At one organization where I spent the better part of the decade, I was primarly responsible for keeping a BSDI server up and running, and making it do things. This was right around the time Windows 95 was forced on an unsuspecting public, and every right-thinking, edgy, teenaged computer geek hated it.

So, when I'd finally cobbled together the money to purchase my own PC which I didn't need to share with my parents, I decided to evict Windows 95 from it and install FreeBSD.

Thus began a long history of hacking inscrutable config files, recompiling basic necessities from source, and wondering why X Windows wouldn't drive my monitor at a resolution greater than 640x480.

I tried a few early distributions of Linux at about this time (I want to say circa 1994?) and found them to be faster than FreeBSD, but even more opaque and less featureful. Not a fair comparison, to be sure. Linux was only three years old at that point.

Anyway, some things I enjoyed about running *NIX on my desktop...

The shell

The UNIX shell was hands-down the best command line interface I'd ever used up to that point. This makes sense given I'd only ever used DOS before, but after years of dealing with it and pre-OSX Mac systems which didn't even have a command line, things like sh and csh were an absolute dream.

To this day, I think and type in ls, cat, and grep. It's muscle memory, fully ingrained in my central nervous system.

The programming environment

Like most nerds in the '80s and '90s, I learned to program with BASIC. The first "real" programming language I learned was C. And since UNIX and C walk hand-in-hand, I used the language for absolutely everything I could from about 1994 until about 2002, and loved every minute of it---even when I was chasing pointer errors around the world.

It made me cool

I was an annoying, teenaged edge-lord. Hack the planet! Down with Microsoft! "What? Your Mom buy you a 'puter for Christmas?"

It wasn't all bunnies and kittens though. Some things I emphatically did not enjoy about running UNIX...

Why can't I hear anything?

I never, ever, successfully got a sound card to work with FreeBSD, and my success rate with Linux was very mediocre prior to, like, 2010. Other hardware was also hit or miss, but the lack of sound still haunts me.

Hard drive? Of what are you speaking?

Whenever I needed to purchase a new drive or replace an existing one, I had to care deeply about the manufacturer and model number. This is because early, free UNIX-like systems had pathetic support for any drive not produced by Western Digital. I could sometimes get a non-WD drive to be recognized, and I might even be able to use all of the storage space it had, but this was far from a sure thing.

Games? Games? Bueller?

If I wanted to play games, I had to dual boot into DOS. Period. There was no other choice. If you were a clove-smoking, teenaged, hacker edge-lord in the '90s, pwning your friends in Quake was kind of a big deal.

Never Again

I left the computer industry in 2002. I'd gotten bored, and I'd gotten tired of being surrounded by terrible people asking me to do terrible things. ("Is there some way we can track who clicks on this email link and add them to a list of 'likely responders' so we can send them more email?")

I didn't want to be building "cookie cutter" "e-commerce" websites and inventory-control/point-of-sale software just so other people could make money. And I didn't want to be a part of the corporate cancer eating the Internet. Sure, the cancer went and metastasized just fine without me, but at least my hands were clean.

Around this time, I also decided that I didn't like spending half of my personal time sysadmining my home computer just so I could play no games and enjoy dodgy sound.

I resolved to just bite the bullet, run Windows like a normal person, and get on with my life. I would never again spend an afternoon staring at an XFree86 config file, or digging through man pages because I couldn't remember what line noise to throw at the command line to get my machine working again because I had the audacity to update my printer drivers.

Seriously? Again? And again!?!

The next twenty years went something like this...

  1. Huh. I wonder if I could [Do Thing] by [Writing Thing] in [Programming Language]?
  2. Boy, this [Windows Development Tool] sure sucks.
  3. Wow, all of these [Windows Development Tools] suck!
  4. I guess I'll use Emacs.
  5. Holy hell, how can Emacs be this terrible on Windows?
  6. Everything is terrible on Windows!
  7. Fuck this. Fuck EVERYTHING! I'm going to run Linux!
  8. ...A FEW MONTHS LATER...
  9. I sure miss playing games with my friends.
  10. Why is my [Random Device] not working after [Unrelated Update]?
  11. Fuck this. Fuck EVERYTHING! I'm going to run Windows!

I am being dead serious, here. This is exactly how my relationship with computers and operating systems progressed from 2000-ish until 2020-ish.

This cycle was so consistent and predictable that my friends would actually and literally point and laugh at me whenever they spotted me crossing one of the items off the list of steps above.

"You'll be back," said my friends when I told them I was switching to Linux.

"You'll be back," said my friends when I told them I was switching to Windows.

And they were right, always.

In 2021, I finally and forever "solved" this problem by having two machines---one running Windows 10 Professional, the other running Ubuntu Linux. I used the Windows machine for games and any proprietary software I wanted to use which didn't support Linux. I used the Linux machine for programming, spinning up servers, and general technological tomfoolery.

The Near Now

In late 2024 and early 2025, running proprietary software, produced by massive corporations, controlled by billionaires, was no longer even remotely acceptable to me. This is for a number of reasons...

Supporting these corporations is immoral

Corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are destroying the world. This destruction has been ongoing, and comes in many forms, but the most recent and clear example is in their enthusiastic embrace of "AI" in the form of LLMs which require planet-boiling levels of energy to produce and maintain.

Purchasing their products supports them directly by giving them money. Using their "free" products either supports them directly by giving them ad revenue, or indirectly by contributing to their market dominance. Often, it does both.

Using proprietary software violates privacy

Proprietary software like Microsoft's Windows, Apple's MacOS and iOS, and Google's ChromeOS and browser have been repeatedly proven to violate user privacy. Whether their proximate cause is an intentional choice, or a security vulnerability, these privacy violations are the result of a deliberate design: The software goes to great pains to collect and monetize any and all data they can extract from their users.

Privacy-preserving software collects only that data which is absolutely required to do the specific task it was designed to do. It keeps this data away from any other prying eyes which happen by. And it immediately and reliably deletes this data when it's no longer needed.

Every single "data breach" you've ever seen reported in the news is the direct result of software failing at one of those requirements. And in the case of proprietary software like Windows and Chrome, this failure is by design.

Using proprietary software is dangerous

The corporations which control the most entrenched proprietary software in use today have made it very clear that they will enthusiastically cooperate with governments which want to imprison or kill their "enemies." And they will do this whether that "enemy" is a foreign agent, a woman seeking birth control, or a teenager who wants to change their name.

Car companies have been caught sharing driving data with car insurance companies. It's not an entirely-paranoid notion that data from fitness apps and nutrition trackers is being shared (or will soon be shared) with health insurance companies. Privacy advocates have already warned people not to use apps for period tracking.

This may sound like I'm going back over the "privacy" ground I covered in the last section---and that's because I am. We are at a point in history where any piece of information we allow our software to collect can and will be used against us. Whether this is in a court of law, or health insurance claim, it's much the same---people will suffer.

Using proprietary software is dangerous to others

Maybe Bob reads all of the above and decides he still wants to run proprietary software produced by corporations like Microsoft and Google. Maybe Bob doesn't care or believe that these corporations are destroying the world, or his individual action will make much difference. Maybe Bob doesn't mind his data being harvested and used or abused. Maybe Bob decides that the convenience he receives from using proprietary software outweighs the alleged detriments.

But Bob is friends with Alice, and Alice has looked at the available information and alternatives and has come to a much, much different conclusion. Alice doesn't want her data harvested by corporations who have gone on record supporting mass surveillance. She doesn't want the government monitoring her menstrual cycle. She doesn't want her insurance company to know she blew off the gym on Tuesday to have pizza with her friends.

It sucks to be Alice, because if Bob uses proprietary software, her data is probably being collected against her will.

Alice can run her own email server, with a FOSS operating system, on hardware she controls, but if Bob uses Gmail, Google will still have every email Alice sent to him. Even if she somehow convinces Bob to use an email encryption system like PGP, if he's using Windows 11, Microsoft Recall is probably monitoring his screen, caputuring the email when he decrypts it, and doing whatever it wants with the contents.

When Bob makes the decision to use proprietary software to communicate with Alice, and he clicks "Accept" on those "Terms of Service," he's also forcing Alice to abide by those terms whether she wants to or not.

And, of course, his use of proprietary software like Google Chrome contributes toward its market share, putting less pressure on the industry to support alternatives.

And, as I hope I explained above, alternatives to proprietary software might be critical to Alice's safety and wellbeing.

I spent a lot of time sitting with these thoughts and others. I thought about my own computing needs, my personal tolerance for inconvenience, my technical aptitude, and my willingness to help others.

In general, here in the United States, we've decided that smoking cigarettes isn't something people should do in public buildings. This decision was driven, at least in part, by the available information about the effects of second-hand smoke.

To smoke or not might be a personal choice, to which each and every one of us is entitled. However, personal choices become less clear cut when making that choice causes direct harm to others. To be blunt, if I light up a cigarette next to someone with severe asthma, that makes me an asshole.

Given the present, rapidly-expanding, techno-fascist trend? I have trouble thinking that using Windows isn't kind of like that.

I choose to use Linux because I don't want to experience the consequences of using the alternatives, and I don't want my friends and loved ones to experience them either.

Tales From The Loop

I'm an ordinary sinner.

I've been "Bob" too many times to pretend that I'll never be him again. And I've said "Never Again!" to Windows too many times to ever believe it.

Deciding to give up proprietary software---even a little bit---means deciding to make compromises. Switching browsers means websites will sometimes look or act in ways they didn't used to. Switching "office" suites means documents might need style tweaks when converted. And switching operating systems means everything gets turned upside down.

Gaming on Linux used to be a huge problem, and it still kind of sucks no matter what the "purists" say. Odds are pretty good that if you want to run the latest, "Triple-A" title, you're gonna go through some bullshit to get it working, and you might not get it working at all.

It's possible that, in a few months, I'll decide the trade-offs aren't worth it. My machine might act up after an update, I'll lose an afternoon getting it straightened out, and just be done.

Hell, it's more than possible, it's likely, given my track record.

Today, though? I'm feeling pretty good about my choice to run Linux and not own any Windows machines. Firefox has been treating me well for over a year, now, and the only game I'm really interested in these days is Chess, which I can play on just about anything.

Like I said way back at the top of this rant, maybe you'll decide to give Linux a try. Maybe you won't. Maybe you will, then ultimately decide you'd rather be doing literally anything else with your life.

Whatever you choose, at least now you know why I made the choice I did.