linux, year 1

It's impossible to speak dispassionately about Linux.

Maybe if in 2024 you have never considered installing Linux, have never knowingly spoken to anyone who uses Linux, never read a single essay or watched a single video about Linux, never read that xkcd comic about Randall Munroe's cousin who installed Linux and didn't know he made a comic about it because she broke her wifi going down a distro-hopping rabbithole, you might be able to talk about Linux with indifference – like, "oh yes, that exists, I don't know anything about it" … but if you know about Linux, you either know the jokes people make about Linux, are angry about the ways it doesn't work for you, are angry about the deck being stacked so hard against Linux, are angry that so many people's computers are designed to betray them to make the rich richer, or (often) all four.

For us, all four.

So it's impossible to speak dispassionately about Linux.

A year ago today, after a bit more struggle than we were planning on, we installed Linux for the first time on our brand new desktop computer, and by brand new we mean our cheap surplus desktop computer from 2015. It was US$35, and supposedly didn't come with a hard drive, but accidentally came with a hard drive, so we got our friends to help us set it up so the OS was on that drive and our home directory was on the bigger drive we bought when we thought it didn't have a hard drive.

On August 11, 2023, we already wanted to try out Linux. We were only sitting at two out of four at the time, but those two were the jokes and were Microsoft building ads into Windows 10 and 11 (not that those would run on our primary computer, anyway), so given how we'd found ourselves in a friend group with folks who used Linuxes, Linux seemed like the best way to have an OS that still got security updates. We didn't know how hard it would be, but we hated ads enough that that wouldn't've stopped us anyway. What was stopping us was good ol' executive dysfunction – we'd bought a surplused desktop computer to Linux, but it needed a hard drive and going to Micro Center mid-pandemic is scary, so we were cruising along on our Windows 7 laptop planning to eventually get set up with Linux as our side OS so we could learn it with a safety net. Until, on August 11, 2023, the Windows 7 install we had refused to boot.

And, uh, I guess that's as good a starting point as any. A year ago a week and a half ago, at the beginning of the aforementioned more-struggle-than-we-were-planning-on, we had our primary computer's OS break in a way we could not fix, not even with the install media, and that OS was installed on the same hard drive partition as everything else. Fixing our computer would have meant wiping everything. We were damn lucky we had another machine we could try and get running instead, or we actually would have lost everything. So "set up a computer so the OS and our home directory are on different drives/partitions" sounds like a strange thing to do until not doing it gets you in trouble. Lots of folks do do it, but it was never normal in our world.

Until our world was on Linux, where it's just a regular option that gets offered to you at install.

That … that was a bad week and a half. A lot of our life is online, and online had been shrunk to a single phone touchscreen. But this isn't the anniversary of that bad week and a half, it's the anniversary of August 23, 2023, when we finally had all the pieces together, had friends and acquaintances in a group chat whom we could ask for help, and started installing NixOS.

(…stars, NixOS. When we asked about traditions for celebrating one year on Linux, folks had some good suggestions, but the only one they could find that was already a common practice was writing a blog post evangelizing your distro, and we do not evangelize NixOS. If you want to ask, ask, but NixOS is not what this post is about.)

The thing about trying a different computer thing than you're used to is that there's always a big transition period where you have to deal with new broken and missing features that you have no coping mechanisms figured out for. (As opposed to our old broken and missing features, like being unable to Alt-Shift-Tab or record a single application's audio, which we were used to.) That makes it very hard to evaluate whether the change was good or bad, was on net an upgrade or a downgrade. A year on, I think more things were broken than fixed, but a year on…

There's a lot of stuff about switching to Linux which we could have predicted, and you could predict – Linux has good hardware support, but we've still had more technical problems than we had before, when we were using Windows 7 – but on the other side … well, we didn't understand that, when Linux users seem to know a lot about computers on average, that's not just about who chooses to install Linux. We learned a lot here, and mostly for good reasons. Linux doesn't want us to be ignorant and compliant. It doesn't always teach well, but it kinda assumes that we … care about our own computer. And want to be in the loop when things happen to it.

…a year on, we can't be mad at Linux about broken things, because we know that almost every broken thing on Linux was broken by a corporation that profits from charging money for it. Linux – and every other free-and-open-source operating system, of which there are shockingly many – exists in defiance of the companies that try to make that unworkable, and exists on the strength of, overwhelmingly, volunteers who were willing to try and make a thing work without exploitation. There's no money in making Alt-Shift-Tab work on Linux. It working is a gift, in the most literal sense of the word. We're not mad at Linux when a Unity game doesn't run on our computer – we're mad at no-one, and at ourselves.

Being mad is really tiring. We've been mad about a lot, lately, most of it unrelated to computers. There's been a lot of unhappiness in our life this year. But we are mad at Linux, mad at people saying "switch to Linux", and mad at people complaining about being told to switch to Linux, because we can't speak dispassionately about Linux. And we're mad at the jokes, because guess what: like Randall Munroe's cousin in 2008, we installed a new distro of Linux on our laptop and the wifi didn't work. That only happened once and I think the developers of ConnMan know about the bug in question, but it makes us feel like Linux mockery is right, and we don't like feeling like we deserve to be mocked.

And, I mean, Linux isn't wrong about us. We care, a lot, about our computers. We want them to work, and keep working. And we want to make informed decisions about them – not defaults that get us in trouble. Our local backups right now are us plugging in an external hard drive and running rsync, because compression is nice but being able to just browse through our hard drive's contents on another computer is so, so easy. And apparently rsync is really really good, which we didn't know before we tried Linux. We're not just using the default backup utility that, on Windows, was proprietary and undocumented and good luck getting our data back, we're talking to people who know things and making choices based on our priorities. And that means that being on Linux is pushing us to learn things.

We're tired.

Linux is not wrong that we care about our computers, and it's also done a lot to make us care. When you take care of things, tinker with things, learn how they work and how to make them work better, they aren't just tools you need to do what you do. Our laptop had a name, but we didn't call it that – that would be so uncool. When we brought it back to life, rescued those files off its drive that we couldn't pry out of Microsoft Backup, set it up with an OS and a desktop environment that served its little 2011 heart … yeah, we call Harriet by its name. We call Evergreen, our desktop, by its name.

A year ago, Windows 7 threw up and died on our laptop – Harriet, it has a name, Harriet – and we never once considered reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch. It would have been easier. Hell, we technically installed Windows 7 on Evergreen – the desktop computer, it got a name, too – because in a Rube-Goldbergian comedy skit of workarounds, we had to download the NixOS installer ISO plus whatever put-an-ISO-on-a-USB-stick tool our friends had told us to use at the library, stick them both on a thumb drive to take home, and then use Win7 at home to actually get it flashed so we could reboot and wipe the entire drive. Because we were never going to stay on Windows 7.

Windows 7 is great. We liked it a lot. But Microsoft decided it should be killed, and at this point even Mozilla and Steam have stopped trying to support it. It's dying, even if it was still technically running on our machine and is probably running on millions of others. Because Microsoft doesn't really care about keeping old computers alive – there was literally a news article saying that we were coming up on one of the biggest waves of ewaste in history, because Microsoft declared that millions of machines should not be allowed to continue running an OS that gets updates. Windows 7 is dead, Windows 8 is dead, Windows 10 has its execution scheduled for next year, and if you used a workaround to get Windows 11 running on a computer that 'doesn't support it', then Microsoft is already working on bricking your box to make sure you can't.

Speaking of things we're mad about.

And xkcd talked about that, too. About infrastructures, and caring about who has power over them.

We can't talk dispassionately about Linux. Or Windows. Or anything, apparently. But we can pick an OS that will run on a 2011 laptop and still get security updates. And stick with it for a year.

A year ago today, we installed Linux for the first time. There don't seem to be any traditions associated with switching operating systems that we can find – other than writing a blog post evangelizing your distro, which, uh, we're not gonna do – but a year ago today, we made a radical change to our entire computational existence that is also, weirdly, kinda boring. It's just an OS. It just does OS-y things. But also it's very new, and you'd think there'd be something to mark the anniversary. Some ritual to acknowledge that it was hard and it was worth it and we did it.

In our opinion, the time to celebrate using a new OS is a year on, when you've made it far enough that you can stop working for a second and start reflecting, acknowledging, making it matter. That you can take pride in your persistence, and affirm your reasons for persisting. It's a round number that's big enough that you don't have to ask if it's enough to count – it counts.

When we asked around about the traditions thing, there didn't seem to be any existing ones, but folks did have a few neat suggestions. Write a blog post collecting our thoughts. Try something new – something we've never done before. Throw a party of some kind with some friends. Customize our computer – give it a new desktop wallpaper, configure the appearance, dial it in the way we like it.

We spent a year here, and that means we can be cringe for a second and say that it was the right choice, that corporations are exploitative toxic shit, that if we're gonna have any chance of getting to a sustainable future it's gonna have to be one based on consent, and also Linux respects us. Like, do you get that? PayPal tries to get us to download their app every time we open it and KDE won't even collect usage data unless you dive into the settings and tell it to. Microsoft tells you to fuck off if your computer is more than seven years old; Debian will run on a Pentium Pro from a quarter century ago. The first time we relied on Linux for our electronic existence was three hundred and sixty-six days ago and we're not going anywhere. A free OS was the right call.

It's frustrating instead of abusive, and we hate being frustrated but we've suffered too much abuse.

…so I guess watch this space for the post–customize-KDE-Plasma-party blog post? We've never dug into the options Plasma has for theming, so we'll see how that goes. Expect screenshots.

Here's to another year.