I've been using Unix flavors for much of my software life, so Linux is just yet another of those flavors. Also I've used Microsoft (except for Windows 1.0 and 2.0 which were useless...) during all that same period of time, Although I realize all the reasons Unix is not Linux, nor was HP Unix (Hpux) the same as IBM Unix (Aix), there are actually much more versions of Linux than there were of Unix, although for obvious reasons -- Linux was developed to run explicitly on PCs which had been build specifically to run Microsoft stuff. Plus the source code was able to be altered by anybody with the curiosity or courage to try it.
Over the years, of course, Linux has also been redesigned for use as a replacement for Unix on many architectures, not just x86 machines, and unlike Unix it has also been able to penetrate the micro miniature world of cell phones and other tiny devices. Google's Android system is based on Linux, but so is a competing system.
Another popular system, the Apple Mac OS X family, is another system that is Unix-like, but is not really Unix. This started out during the NeXT days, a machine that was cute but for some reason did not make it very big. Maybe it was too expensive. It also used a flavor of Unix inside. I suppose BSD Unix is very close to the Apple's stuff.
Yet, with Linux there is not just one big monolithic LINUX 5.1 SuperDuperWindows or anything like that. There are probably hundreds of versions of Linux, especially if you count the bare bones kernels that run in tiny computers to the full scale multiprocessing servers and the many different desktops (this machine is openSUSE 10.3 currently -- thus the icon at the beginning paragraph). Many Linux purists (like virgins except hairier...) dislike openSUSE for making a pact with the devil (Microsoft). I was not happy about that either. It just so happened that my newest Dell laptop would only work correctly with this particular release of Linux, unless I did some serious driver repair by myself.
Microsoft is starting to subdivide into many pieces now, with various Windows CEs, servers, Vista (5 different ones!), and all the old MsDOS versions, Windows for Workgroups 3.1, etc. Microsoft has many systems named for the year they came out, almost like cars -- except with cars there is some long embedded habit of coming out with a brand new model every single year.
One of my laptop's was retrieved from the trash -- a Thinkpad 600e with W98. Boy was that a clunker. I replaced it with NT after a lot of effort (which improved performance quite a bit over W98 -- it was not able to run XP at all.) If I had been smart at the time I would have put Redhat Linux on it, but my jobs at that time required working only with Microsoft, so I tried to just use it for that purpose.
The other day I tried Ubuntu on the old Thunker -- it ran great. I might just completely replace the NT system with that, once I've made sure there are no remaining needs for the compiler or anything else from the old NT world. It took a lot of effort to revive old Thunker from death and I'm a little hesitant to just willy nilly start from scratch.
Yet, I have other laptops, other desktops. I don't need Thunker. But I think I will always need Linux. I can no longer stand Microsoft jerking me around. I have tried all the .NET crap. Maybe I am just old fashioned, but I really can't stomach the modern "spank your hands" programming tools. It is like being a soldier with a toy plastic gun. I've written programs in almost every level of language (but certainly not in every language there is...). I do make blunders, but I will repair my own blunders, thus learning more than if the machine did everything for me (and very slowly at that.)
Linux is not perfect. I think it is very dangerous in the hands of sloppy users. If you don't make sure it is wearing diapers, it will happily take a dump on you. The various desktops (mostly Gnome and KDE) try to help, but once you start really doing something besides play the games and use the Internet it takes a bit of intellectual effort. This is also true with Unix, or even more so -- there were very few GUI tools for Unix systems management, and there are only a few more GUI tools for Linux. Mostly there is a need to just type stuff in the shell in an exceptionally cryptic manner.
The good thing about Linux, at least today's versions -- I can still write in C as well as in all the object oriented languages and stuff runs just fine, thank you. I have Ruby programs, PHP, Perl, Python and other such scripting programs. I think they are fun, and for many things they are adequate. Until machines begin to communicate on Internet with Terabits rather than Megabits, I doubt that the overhead of Ruby or PHP would matter too much.
Plus, I don't have to buy anything. All the languages I could ever want are free to install, although I've only installed a few that I really use. There are also IDEs, editors, databases, email, browsers, etc, etc, up the yin yang. In fact, Linux suffers from too many choices rather than too little. I would think that the European Union would be far more afraid of Linux than Microsoft when it comes to market share problems. At least Microsoft costs some amount of money to use -- Linux and everything it can run is totally free. (The exceptions are the various copyrighted image or music formats... although reverse engineered versions of those abound anyway.)
Now, I will close this long winded blog entry. I just wanted to rant and rave for a while.
