This weekend I set up one of my old machines with Linux, which is a free, open source version of Unix. My intent is to get a web server running on it, since I am rather irritated at the paltry file size limits of my current ISPs. I worked with Unix a lot back in the late 80's and early 90's, but much of that knowledge has flown the coop. So now I can experience the frustration of being a novice user all over again.
Despite what various Linux boosters proclaim, I don't see it displacing Windows any time soon. It is too hard to set up, and it involves way too much typing of arcane commands to be attractive to the average user. However, as I played around, trying to get my Ethernet card to see my other machines, I found that my fingers still remembered many of the old commands.
In particular, the command grep, which is used to search files for text containing certain patterns, was a joy to use again. In Windows, you can use the "find" command to locate files containing certain strings, but grep goes one step further and shows the line in which the pattern occurs. This can save a lot of time when you are racking your brains trying to remember which help file you were reading to configure an obscure bit of software (and believe me, to the novice, all of the Linux software is obscure.)
Well, it is pleasant to play around with Linux, if for no other reason than to thumb my nose at Redmond. Ultimately, I hope to have a stable system that can serve up my web pages without ridiculously small quotas (like 10Mb or even 6Mb). Several of the places I had been squirreling away pictures for my web site have gone out of business or have lost the data I uploaded, which you may notice if you poke around on the "Pix" page. I want to restore all of those and add a lot more. Plus, I am always mindful of the original purpose of this site, which is to share my pool skimming experiences with the world at large, and I need a lot of file space to do that justice.
You can respond to my ranting here.
No swimming for an hour after you rant!