Why are we here now - Psychology, Philosophy, and Licenses

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venam
Administrators
(This is part of the podcast discussion extension)

What introduced you to Unix and how these reasons shaped up with time (aka why are we here now)


Link of the recording [ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nixers...-07-26.mp3 ] (Update of July 2016)

--( Transcript )--
#Our Introductions to Unix

We had four speakers and everyone had a different story about the first
encounter with a Unix system.

-------------------------

One of them was introduced at school during a C development course where they
had to compile programs using the GCC on a Xubuntu box.

At the time, this user was playing an online video game that had a console where you
could input commands, it was impressive.

The resemblance with the system attracted him, it felt surprisingly cool and
powerful.

It gives you full control.

-------------------------

Another user was also introduced in an academic environment.

The campus computer labs were running Linux and that grabbed his interest.
A friend of his that wanted to help tried installing Crunchbang on his laptop.
However he messed up the installation and erased/overwrote the other partition.

Now he had to stick with it and gradually got interested in how customizable
the system is.

-------------------------

Before starting university this user was part of the hacking community.
He heard of a distribution that came with a bunch of tools pre-installed so
he doesn't have to download them one by one.
After getting it installed he tinkers with the system and finds how it's
easier to write automation scripts in it.
Gradually, switching from distro to distro because of the lesser need for
pre-installed softwares and more for a programming environment.

-------------------------

Back to 2000 when dinosaurs roamed the earth this user had to write a school paper.
He had to write it on his slow (relatively) hardware running Windows.
Unfortunately, one day it couldn't boot anymore.

In search for a free OS and fast solution and having heard of Unix before, he downloaded a
Unix distro and installed in on the machine.

Once running he was impressed that this could do way more than what he had
imagined. He tried a lot of things on the system and got hooked.

#Our Current Reasons

Once the transition to Unix is made it's hard to go back.
You don't feel at ease. You're imprisoned in systems where you have zero control
over your system.

This is because we are administrators and developers. We are tied to it.

The power of the command line, the friendliness to developers,
the availability of choices and resources, the amount of control, have tainted on us.

Also, because we are in the field and that trying those OS doesn't require you
to invest anything other than your time, we can fill our curiosity for our
passion of computing. It's fun, it's a hobby!


The community mindsets have changed some of our ways of life and work.

Namely, the Unix philosophy and minimalism.

The dichotomy of communities inspires freedom.

Everybody can find a community that suits their mindset.
It's different people using the same system.

The idea of freedom has inspired us as human beings.

It's our way to boycott big markets and help bring access to technology to poor countries.
By using this system we are supporting this movement.

#Conclusion

It was an interesting podcast.

Our introductions were all pretty much random.

We came from different backgrounds and we all arrived in the same place.

Music: Harmonica Shah Chrysler
pranomostro
Long time nixers
Nice.

I was introduce to unix when a coworker of my dad heard that I liked C programming
and gave him a Ubunt DVD.

I installed it and fell in love.

I think I could change my OS, but only if it's open. I am not locked into any system anymore.
swathe
Members
I attended a community college back in 2001 and one of the subjects was on the Red Hat 6 desktop release (pre-RHEL). It was interesting but I didn't touch it again till 2005 or so when I played with Fedora Core 4 but I never really started playing with it till ubuntu 8.04. I've used it pretty regularly since then. Tired everything from ubuntu to Gentoo. Currently on Fedora 23.
t60
Members
My first experience with a unix system was when I was younger watching Jurassic Park. "A UNIX system! I know this!" This piqued my interest, but the water didn't start to boil until I was in college. My hardware/software teacher told me to check out Ubuntu. "It's free" he said. I downloaded it and burned it to a disk and within a day accidentally wiped my windows drive. I scrambled to redo my homework and got to playing. Later in school I took a CCNA course and got very used to the CLI, command completion and more. I wished that I had this level of control over my computer...little did I know that I did. I messed around for a few more years with other *buntu flavors, Open SUSE, CentOS, Debian, etc. I was fascinated with virtualization for a while, and still am to a point. A few years ago I decided to try to install arch and failed miserably. I tried and tried until it finally worked. I felt like a kid again, it was as if I installed an OS out of thin air. More recently, I have grown more wise and decided to venture out a bit more. I would like to drop systemd ASAP...binary logs? Really? This brings us to today where I am searching for a solution which temporarily lies in gentoo, but will most likely end up somewhere in the world of BSD.
pranomostro
Long time nixers
Really?

The classic "It's a UNIX system!"? Neat.
henriqueleng
Members
I started some years ago, around 2013 or 2012. The first time I saw linux was when I bought my first personal computer, It came with linux, so I stayed with it for some days until I wiped it out and installed windows XP.
Then someday when I was trying to install windows 7 I just messed my hard drive. So looking for a temporary solution, I installed ubuntu, just to use until I could get another windows media. And wow, the first thing that amazed me was the it was all free, with no license headaches and it was fast (my computer was running way faster than my XP). So I just felt in love with it (I hadn't touched the command line yet, and was already loving it), that time I didn't know to program yet.
Some months with ubuntu was enough to make me try other things, so I moved to Debian, Fedora... I was really having fun on changing my OS each month. Then went deep and installed Arch Linux, thinking that I would never move from it. After some time on Arch, I got really attracted by the gentoo way of compiling everything optimizing it. So then I used gentoo for a long time, almost a year.
My last gentoo days started when I started to read on why GNU software sucks, how linux is bloated, glib and so on. So I just thought, I must get rid of it. In this time I thought about building my own distro, statically compiled with musl, but I just found someone doing it, I moved to (sabotage-linux)[https://github.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage], on sabotage I saw real minimalist, this was the tiniest system I ever had, and one of the most suckless linux distro I ever saw. But sabotage didn't had too much developers, and I was basically needing to create packages for every software I wanted to use, and this was consuming all my time.

So I moved to OpenBSD, in a attempt to get a good OS, without GNU crap, and with good support. With OpenBSD I got the best of both worlds, sanity and software quality plus a bunch of packages already made and well tested.
And that's what I"m using now. I see no more fun on change my OS every week, I just want something to work and that don't break, and at the same time that is sane and worth to develop on.
pranomostro
Long time nixers
For me, it was going from Windows 7 to Ubuntu straight to Arch Linux. I tried to install Debian a few times, but never succeeded,
and also tested Haiku (it was okay).

Now I am at a point where I boot into Plan 9 daily to do some programming (still learning about the platform though) and
into Arch to do some browsing.
venam
Administrators
I updated this thread with a recording for the new podcast.

Tell me what you think of the style.
mrmister
Members
My dad was messing with fedora 8 for a while, and i was interested. When he finally gave me an account i was confused with the new interface, so i went back to windows. Fast forwarding to about 6-7 years, i got my own laptop. I was getting really irritated with windows and its unexplained slowdowns, so i decided to install fedora. Unfortunately, i couldnt install it because it couldnt install GRUB or some error like that, so i went to ubuntu. It had most things that i needed to have in my computer. Firefox, libreoffice, vlc, and other things. I soon decided to get into the CLI and it is great once i got the hang of it.

I then realized that ubuntu was too bloated, so i started distro hopping. Crunchbang, debian minimal, and finally crux (with another linux installation of devuan). Throughout these months of finding the right system for me, i realized that although linux is better than windows, it is still not perfect and it has some flaws that keep it from being the new mainstream OS. So, with my interest in engineering, i decided to pursue a career in systems programming, so i can help make better computing for the world, creating faster and lighter software.
jkl
Long time nixers
My first steps with Unix were some time around 2011. After having played with Linux for a couple of years (my first own Linux installation was in 1998 if I remember correctly) and even having had Debian as my server-driving OS, I was unhappy with the general stability of the system. I stumbled upon a BSD discussion board and spent a couple of nights reading Wikipedia. Then I set up my first FreeBSD VirtualBox. These days, my go-to non-Windows is BSD Unix and I'm very happy to know it. Thanks for your instability, Debian Linux!

--
<mort> choosing a terrible license just to be spiteful towards others is possibly the most tux0r thing I've ever seen
acg
Members
Started dual-booting Ubuntu 10.04 a few years ago then fully installed. After some distro-hopping now you find me with Fedora wearing my Blue Hat ;).

I don't have any idea about how I ended up using *nix.
argonaut · musician · developer · writer · https://www.betoissues.com
venam
Administrators
The song in the podcast is an open, and license free song: Harmonica Shah Chrysler.
The intro is by pranomostro.
stephant
Members
From Archlinux and starting ricing since 2011 btw in 2014 went Gentoo and my desktop more riced after changed some thing. I found the great community in Nixers.