The Good Old Days

I'm coming up on two years using Ubuntu as my desktop system. For the most part, I'm very happy with it, and Ubuntu certainly filled what had been a gap in the market. It's been interesting, though, to reflect on my early Linux experience and what I liked back then that I miss with Ubuntu.

In 1984 I took out a student loan to buy one of the very first MacIntosh computers. I totally drank the koolaid back then: I'd been thinking about a personal computer, but wasn't sold on the Commodore or the IBM PC; then I saw the Apple Superbowl ad. That was it. For the next ten years, Apple pretty much delivered on its promise. I just used the computer; I never really thought about it. It got out of my way and let me do my work. This computer went through a series of upgrades, eventually adding something called a "hard drive". But I reached a point where it had to be replaced. And in 1994, another Mac was simply too expensive.

I went with a PC, and had my first encounter with Windows 3.1. After a week, I knew there had to be a better way. Windows was the worst of all possible worlds. With the Mac, I had no idea, really, what was going on under the hood, but I never had to know either. Things just worked. With Windows, I had .bat and .dll files to fiddle with, lots of under the hood work to do... and yet nothing about the whole system made sense to me. I didn't have a foundational grasp of how the system was put together, and thus I always felt like I was flying blind.

A few days later, I was browsing in the bookstore and found a book about something called "Linux", which was described as "Unix for the PC". This seemed like a great idea to me. I had a bit of Unix experience in university settings, and Unix had always seemed like a more direct approach than the obfuscation that was Windows. Further, the book had a CD in the back for something called "Slackware Linux"; slackware was apparently a "distribution" of Linux.

It took me about two months to do my first install. After the install, it took me another two weeks of fiddling with CHAP/PAP authentication scripts by hand before I could successfully dial up my ISP. After all that, I still had no effective way to do word processing -- my most important computer application -- at least not in a way that I could share with the rest of the world. My eventual solution was to install a MacIntosh emulator called "Executor", and then run Word 5.1 for the Mac from my old MacIntosh system.

Despite the enormous time investment Linux required for me to accomplish the most basic tasks, I was happy. If I couldn't have the Mac experience of never having to think about the computer, then I wanted the opposite experience: I wanted everything in the operating system open and accessible to me, so that I could understand exactly how it worked. Linux delivered. Windows, by contrast, was horribly in between: it did a little bit conveniently, but required that you get under the hood a bit, but made you feel like you were wearing a blindfold while poking around.

Over the years I became accustomed to firing up "Vi" and editing configuration files directly. I developed a fondness for compiling my own kernel. My favorite programs were all text/command line based (pine, wvdial, lynx, etc.). For a couple of years I switched distros to Linux From Scratch, where every program that ran on my computer was compiled from source code.

Now, though I've dabbled in both, I'm neither a programmer nor a system administrator. I'm basically a "suit", the marketing guy who provides some buffer between the geeks and the executives. So when I talk about my fondness for the directness of Linux, I'm not speaking from a coder/sys admin point of view. I'm just talking about how I think a sensible operating system ought to behave.

Working that intimately with your operating system does take time, however. As my life got busier, I stopped compiling everything from source. I switched to Debian, because apt was just too convenient. A kernel compile became a rare event. Still, setup and configuration meant working directly with the relevant files.

Then I got frustrated with Debian. The "stable" version was too far behind the curve in terms of having support for current hardware. "Testing" was just not stable enough. "Unstable" was a better compromise, but felt like a compromise.

It was at that point that I switched to Ubuntu. In a way, it took me back to my MacIntosh days: the install was painless, and all of my hardware "just worked". Computing felt effortless in a way that it hadn't for over a decade. Was I finally having my cake and eating it too?

After a couple of weeks, I couldn't resist the urge to try and compile my own kernel on Ubuntu. The result was a complete disaster, a system that wouldn't even boot. Once I figured out my mistakes with Grub, I booted into a system that failed to load key modules and thus failed to recognize key hardware components. I thought about it a while, and realized that I was cutting against the grain of the Ubuntu way. This was a distro where I wasn't meant to compile my own kernel, nor hand edit config files. I had to take a deep breath, and resign myself to point and click.

And so I do, for the most part. Certainly for a generation of users who have never experienced a VAX, or a PDP-1170, or the other early systems I used, Ubuntu will seem like a refreshing option. It's the right solution at the right time. But it does take away some of that directness I had come to associate with Linux.

Part of me misses the good old days.