Pointer: blog post, "RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?"

[blnchflr]

I came across this blog post in the openSUSE forums: RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?

I've met a few characters that are living the Linux dream or at least claiming to. But here's the rub... is there anyone who's exclusively using it? I don't mean "I've got Linux installed on my USB stick" or "I dual boot". Is there anyone who is actually using Linux as there sole operating system. Booting into everyday to check their email, write their documents, develop their code, surf the web and yes.. play their games. I fear there is not.

Having used Linux exclusively for almost a year, and knowing people who've been Linux-exclusive for longer than that, not to mention MAC USERS, the author seems naive or sheltered. Which surprises me, as he's a coder - apparently I'm prejudiced about coders :o)

Comments

[dragonwolf]

My friend has his entire family on exclusively Linux, and I'm pretty sure he's pretty hardcore OSS. No flash, no MP3, no nothing unless it's completely FLOSS. He's been that way for longer than I've known him and I met him a good seven or eight years ago.

As for myself, I run solely Linux on both my desktop and my laptop. I do have a virtual machine for testing on IE, and to make occasional use of Visual Studio, because I'm a web developer (there is no way in hell that I would disgrace my Linux installs with the atrocity that is IE, especially in the rare case that I have to test on IE6, so IE stays locked in VMs, to fire up only when needed).

I consider myself somewhat of a gamer. I played World of Warcraft until about 6 weeks ago (and might pick it back up when the next expansion comes out), and it arguably ran better under Linux than it did under Windows (especially with OpenGL enabled). I've also had Diablo 2, Starcraft, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire running under Linux. The rest of the games I play are console games, so those are moot.

I've actually found Linux more convenient than Windows for a recent web server setup that I did through SSH. It's possible I did it the hard way, but it taught me a ton about terminal commands, and it was as simple as firing up a terminal window. No need for other software, like PuTTy, to get going. It was also nice that I happened to be running the same OS as the server, so a lot of stuff mapped to the same places and the naming schemes were all the same, so I didn't have to deal with remembering with file system scheme I was typing in for which half of the command.

I actually feel like I'm cheating on my current Grad school course. It's a web development course and the first assignment is to create a basic web page (to be built on through the course), to be done in a basic text editor. The school assumes you're running Windows, so they assume "basic text editor" equals "Notepad", but since I'm on Linux, "basic text editor" equals gedit, which means I still get the code highlighting that's part of the reason a real code editor isn't supposed to be used yet.

[blnchflr]

I wouldn't mind having easy access to testing webpages in IE, because I do want my websites to be accessible to all browsers. I write xhtml 1.0 strict, and validate - but that isn't always enough to make sure IE doesn't do cooky things to it. However, I couldn't live with Vista taking up 29GB of my hd, when I wasn't using it for anything else.

since I'm on Linux, "basic text editor" equals gedit, which means I still get the code highlighting that's part of the reason a real code editor isn't supposed to be used yet.
:oD

[dragonwolf]

However, I couldn't live with Vista taking up 29GB of my hd, when I wasn't using it for anything else.

I know how that goes. I actually have XP running in my VMs, in part because I've ended up with a zillion copies of it over the years (I got free software packs and downloads courtesy of my school, and rationalized by the fact that it's in my tuition anyway). Granted, I gave it 40Gigs of space, but that's because it's also doubling as my development environment for .NET apps when I need them (and thanks to Sun's little feature in their disk creation/allocation system, it doesn't actually take up that much space until it's actually using that much space, so the drive file is only about a quarter of that size). Of course, I also have an entire TB drive dedicated to holding data, so even 40GB is pretty trivial.