Linux, December 2018

What was the first Linux I ever installed? Back in the mid to late 90's, I remember trying to get various distros up and running on whatever PC hardware I had lying around. It wasn't so much a problem getting enough working to run a terminal, it was setting up networking and getting my display adapter configured to get more than 800x600 resolution. Mostly, I just noodled around with it. I do recall once buying a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux, and putting the sticker on my Thinkpad and thinking how cool it was. I don't remember what version of Red Hat it was, but the box looked very similar to this one. This would have been 1999 or 2000.

But mostly Linux as a desktop OS was a disappointment. The quality of software was pretty low, and drivers were a persistent problem, especially those tricky networking drivers. I believe I once got an early 802.11b wireless adapter working after much trial and error, but it was unreliable. Frankly, Windows 2000 was a superior client OS at the time- stable, pretty fast, and all the software you wanted.

[*NB* Linux runs everywhere, you just may not know it. It powers the majority of the Web, and is the basis for the world's biggest smartphone OS, Android. And it's in a whole host of smaller IoT and embedded devices, such as car infotainment systems. We're only talking about desktop versions of Linux here.]

Windows and MacOS have been stuck in a rut for over half a decade. Apple's lazy, boneheaded efforts to "simplify" the Mac have been mostly annoying, and in my opinion their hardware is getting worse, particularly their trackpads and keyboards. Windows is a shambolic mess of poorly thought out ideas and lousy quality control. Windows 10 is a hodgepodge of different UI frameworks and idiotic design decisions. And the bundled advertising is insulting, to top it off.

I dusted off a mid-2015 Macbook Pro and decided to see what the current state of Linux is. I started with running a few distros in Parallels and Virtual Box to get the lay of the land. I tried OpenSuse, Fedora 28, Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux Mint, with a brief install of Arch in there as well. I know Arch is sort of the distro the cool kids are using, but I don't huff enough beard oil to see what's so great about it, I guess- it's just really minimalistic, and frankly reminds me of doing a net install of Slackware back in the 90's.

[*NB* Distro is short for distribution. What we call Linux is actually a stack of technologies, with each layer being more or less modular. Pick and choose which technologies you want, package it all together, and you've got a distribution, or distro.]

Mostly, all of the distros are high-quality and come complete with the features and drivers you need to work out of the box. After testing virtualized installations, I picked Linux Mint 19 to install in Bootcamp on my Macbook; I wanted to see if I could get all the hardware working, and what the performance is like.

Digital communism on my laptop ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Everything just worked. I mean, absolutely everything, from the wireless adapter to all the function keys that control things like brightness and even the keyboard lighting. The webcam works. Even sleep and hibernate work! I get about the same battery life in Linux that I do in MacOS. And the real world performance is excellent, with sub-10 second boot times and lightning fast application response.

Linux Mint features my favorite desktop environment (DE) called Cinnamon. Based on the Gnome DE, Cinnamon is attractive and intuitive. If you understand how to use Windows, you'll pick up Cinnamon in no time.

Image stolen from linuxmint.com


You get a lot of software included out of the box. Firefox to browse the web, Evolution to read mail, LibreOffice to work with Microsoft Office documents, and assorted small programs for podcasting, image editing, media playback and so forth.

Modern Linux distros generally include a graphical package manager, which is a way to install new software over the Internet and get updates. Occasionally you'll need to go to the application developer's website to get something, and sometimes you'll have to do a little bit of command line work. But by and large this stuff just works. New technology like snaps and flatpaks are making software more portable across distributions. Skype, Dropbox, Slack, Visual Studio Code, Mailspring, and Opera browser were all available and easy to install.

More and more software runs on the Web. For a lot of people, Google Chrome is really the only application they need- in fact, Google's ChromeOS is just Linux that runs Chrome as the desktop environment. But unlike ChromeOS, full featured distros let you do all that stuff you use a regular PC for in addition to the Web. And you get to nerd out with terminal programs like you did 20 years ago *ahem*.

Your experience with Linux may be different depending on what hardware you choose. There can still be driver problems for some types of laptops that make it a bit harder to get working. I think the popularity of Mac hardware increases the number of people working on sorting out the issues. If you want a bullet-proof Linux machine, there are companies like System76 that make laptops and desktops here in America with Linux already installed- even Dell sells a version of their awesome XPS 13 with Ubuntu.

I could see a future where I use Linux as my primary platform, with Windows running in a virtual machine for those times I need to run Windows-only software. There are grumblings about Microsoft's new interest in open source software, so maybe I'm not the only one thinking in this direction.

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