[UFO Chicago] what draws you here?

[kiran]

Hell I was a Mac enthusiast for years(SE), then I got my first PowerMac 
7100/66 and a local service provder shell account. I knew nothing about 
CLI and I couldn't get the SLIP service working(really Green). I bought 
Unix in a Nutshell by O'reiley, learned some commands and for a while I 
totally forgot about trying to get SLIP to work for a few months, I was 
enamored with CLI. Two years later (96) a friend told me about linux, so 
I bought LinuxPPC and installed it, tinkered, poked & proded the system. 
It was hard for me at first to stick with it since I relied on Mac apps 
alot at the time (and a 250M HD), but in 98 I finnally got a dedicated 
Gnu/Linux machine up and running (my goal for a while) and now use it 
99% of the time in favor of Windows or MacOS. There are still some apps 
that work better that I still need to use in the MacOS....and well ok I 
used windows for games I "needed" to play & work. I wish I could say 
100% linux use, but I'm still a bit uncomfortable with some of the gpl'd 
graphic apps, but I'm working on learning some of the equivalent 
graphic/layout programs, soon, soon 100%! I think the G4 runs linux so 
much better than MacOS (even OSX). One thing I noticed was that I though 
Gnu/Linux was unfirendly at first, but have reversed that opinion, 
because I have found myself trying to do things in dos/windows (at work) 
that would take two seconds in *inx, but are more difficult/impossible 
in windows or MacOS. *nix always had too many options before, but now I 
can't live without each new option I learn....ok within reason ;).

John Kilbourne wrote:

> I'm curious why people are drawn to go through the trouble of 
> learning and using linux. (assuming that others share some sense that 
> it is challenging.) 
> 
> I remember two things I read between August and October. The first 
> was a snippet of In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neil 
> Stephenson, where he described linux as a free all-terrrain vehicle 
> that gets 100 miles to the gallon and doesn't break down, and windows 
> as a kind of plain station wagon that is expensive but has 
> dealerships on every corner for people who believe in ABC news. It 
> wasn't till I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar that I decided, "I 
> want to learn this". Eric Raymond said that learning unix/linux is 
> one step to gaining some sort of mastery with the computer (along 
> with learning a few programming languages and some other advice that 
> I've forgotten now).
> 
> I figure that just getting linux to run means I must have learned 
> some general, useful things about computers. This is self-verifying; 
> nobody has to tell me that I do or don't know something. When my 
> email goes primarily to my linux box, that will be one additional, 
> objective indicator that I've learned something. It was only last 
> week that I finally got my RH 7.2 configured to access the web 
> through my DSL (thank you roaring penguin and linuxquestions.org. 
> 
> So why do you do this at all?
> 
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> 
> 



-- 
/kiran