It feels like all I've ever known is Linux at this point. I know all its quirks. I know what packages I need to install if I want to compile this or that. I wouldn't call myself a veteran Linux user; more seasoned than anything else, as I've used it for many, many seasons, but I can't say I've won "the War" with it.
Is there even a war? Or is it something else? Maybe that whole "seven-year itch" happens with operating systems, too? Do I hate Linux?
A Future That Glimmered
The Spouse and I watched a brief video recently that covered turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics and philosophies that would go on to become Aqua, Luna, Aero, or even that whole Crystal craze that took Linux (or at least KDE) by storm during the early '00s. It was a strange kind of futurist, corporate solarpunk for lack of a better description that imagined crisp, clean air, crisp clean water and ice, vibrant blue skies and verdant fields. This was the era of that absolutely iconic "Bliss" wallpaper.
It was a radical departure from the mechanical greys of Win9x and pre-OSX systems. Computers stopped being machines—tools, even, and started being experiences. Corporations like Microsoft and Apple wanted to get in your head, and make you feel a certain way when you booted into their OS.
It was the culmination, I feel, of the environmental fervour of the '90s: The Cold War was over between the United States and the USSR—now the former USSR. We could now have serious talks about nuclear nonproliferation, and why not address all the other problems caused by an industrial world, like acid rain? Real Captain Planet shit. We ain't letting the Exxon Valdez happen again, eh? Those photos of waterfowl covered in crude were just too much to bear. Those cigarette-smoke-stained beige boxes were guilty by proxy, and had to go...
Multimedia Mode
While the rest of the non-tech world was grappling with something other than nuclear annihilation, personal computers were gaining enough power to do more than light office work.
It wasn't that changes to the interface design were ignored completely as a marketing bullet points throughout the '80s and '90s; it's just that I remember it was always secondary to the capabilities of the system underneath. Major OS revisions were always dominated by announcements of the latest software updates from third party software houses. It felt like a team effort, like those third party programs were part of the new OS experience, and maybe even dictated the UI.
Furthermore, once the '90s rolled into town, and once CD-ROM drives were starting to slowly creep into the expansion slots of desktop towers and clunky laptops, multimedia was the corporate buzzword. Yes, you too could watch a 160p bitcrushed video of a space shuttle launching in the comfort of your home. Thus, even as interfaces were becoming more advanced (and much fanfare and even derision was made of that 95 Start button; plenty would clown on Microsoft for making users click a "Start" button to shut down their machines), the defining factor was still capability. We weren't really looking at the UI at that point. We were watching that one Weezer music video.
And why not? It was a wondrous time. Every year brought visible and tangible gains to colour depth, speed, number of applications one could have open at the same time, and how much could store on a drive. Technological progress wasn't fucking around.
Lag Time
The groundwork for the impending vibrancy of UIs was being laid in that technological race of the '90s. You can't render a wallpaper like "Bliss" using CGA colours. Well...I guess you could, but the impact would definitely not be the same. At the same time, many artists and corporate suits were simmering in that environmental stew of the post Cold War. It took a new millennium, and maybe even a tech bubble bursting, to finally bring everything together.
Both XP and OSX landed on the same year, representing competing ideas for what that clean-air-clean-water corporate future could look like. Linux lagged behind, but would eventually catch up with KDE 3.1's Keramik UI and Crystal icon set in 2003. Everaldo Coelho, the progenitor of the Crystal Project, explicitly stated his rationale for the aesthetic as being a response to the interfaces of Windows XP and Mac OSX.
Trouble in Paradise
I think this was about the time I stopped loving Linux, and instead only liked it.
Really, it wasn't any one problem. So many things were happening at the same time, and it would be unfair to single out one over the other. I also don't want to lean too heavily on the concept of an "Eternal September" which is, I feel, a geeklitist attitude, but it was certainly part of the backdrop.
I related to @erysdren that this felt like a switch from a computer being a private thing that one controlled to something that got wildly out-of-control. Even as the Internet was creeping into homes during the '90s, it was easy to imagine simply not being on the Internet with a computer. A computer was still inherently useful without being hooked up to the Web, and the responsibility was ours and ours alone to tame these quirky little boxes on our desks that stopped working sometimes and made funny noises.
But that didn't last. Even as early as Windows 95, Microsoft was pushing the idea of blurring the lines between the personal computer and the Internet. Microsoft would eventually get into trouble for it in perhaps the last great use of the Sherman antitrust act any of us will ever see. Shit, that's depressing.
Linux wasn't immune to this. If you had a web browser, you largely had access to the same information as everyone else, and the same vectors for loss of control, like following fads, fads like shiny UI or do-everything functionality.
Developers of Linux became obsessed with "keeping up with the Joneses", always feeling inadequate. It was a wholly different feeling than the complaints of the mid-90s of a lack of hardware support. Now everyone was obsessed with market share, so much so that everyone dropped any kind of concern for copyleft/free software philosophy and embraced IBM's envisioning the OS as a wunderkind that was just getting started in doing amazing things.
I will admit that I got swept up in that. I wasn't so much concerned about my own personal experience of using Linux and whether or not I could somehow luck out in getting that winmodem working in the next kernel update; I was concerned about what everyone else was doing with their PCs. That they weren't using Linux was intensely bothersome to me.
I joined the race. I obsessively searched out shiny Aqua-like or Crystal icons. Skeumorphism! Look at this screenshot of my desktop! Linux can do it, too! Why aren't you using Linux?
Damn Lies
Yeah, so that whole environmental fervour of the '90s turned out to be exhaust and mirrors. Recycling was eventually revealed to be an elaborate marketing lie. Other lies would take a bit longer to die, like electric cars saving us all from smog-choked cities. E-waste and its costs are being seen for what they are. The clean computing visions of OSX, Luna, Aero, and Keramik/Crystal Project were built atop a mountain of trash, pollution, and exploitation.
Fads had already moved on in the late '00s. The Web moved from an information-dominant to a presentation-dominant format, and the transition required graphic designers to learn how to be tech-savvy (or, more likely, required devs to learn how to be graphic designers).
CSS was a concession to stop web designers from using HTML tables for layouts. It was (and still is) such a pain in the ass to deploy. Getting fancy stuff to look good on the turn-of-the-millennium web was difficult. Flat was good enough to ship and had a fast dev cycle compared to skeumorphic shit, and I'm convinced that one tutorial web site, Little Boxes, almost single-handedly dictated the visuals of Web 2.0 and the eventual Metro interface that had precedents in previous Microsoft software, but became fully realized in Windows 8.
Flatland
That Metro vibe was the end stage of a design philosophy that had obliterated any kind of unified design philosophy in OS user interfaces. The world became flat, and seems to largely have stuck to being flat ever since. Even KDE's incoming next-gen interface, while very clean and very pretty, looks like more of the same that has been standard for over a decade.
I'm not saying that all the problems in the computing world are because there's been zero innovation in UI. I'd say it's a symptom of a greater problem, but not the problem itself.
What I feel I'm saying is at this point, it really doesn't matter too much what OS you use. Everyone has effectively equivalent functionality. Identity, however, became a confused sludge.
No one fucking respects any kind of UI/UX conventions whatsoever. The Web absolutely murdered that idea. Desktops are a mess of native apps, websites-in-disguise, and widgets. Using a computer outside an Internet connection is unthinkable. Every OS now expects it to be there, or you do almost next to nothing. It used to be that a Linux distribution and its entire software repository plus source code would come bundled in a single retail box as multiple CDs or DVDs. You did not need the Internet to get a full, rich Linux desktop up and running. This was a selling point for Linux in the '90s.
The loss of identity in the dominant computing space, I feel, is what makes OSes like Haiku so appealing. Haiku has an identity dictated by a design philosophy, and if you want to make something for Haiku, you better make sure it fits the vibe. Maybe similar design docs are available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS, but no one's going to get mad at you if you don't use them.
Just Being Friends
I use Linux because there's inertia there. Functionally, however, I don't think there's any significant difference between me using Windows, Linux, or OSX aside from maybe my options for gaming being cut down by a bit if I went with Apple. Otherwise, browsing the web or typing up a document is the same. We're all using Google Docs anyway, right?
Yes, there's always the quirks as I mentioned at the start of this essay, but I'm talking about the broad strokes and even identities of these operating systems. I had that realization that if I had to stop using Linux today and switch to either of the other two, I don't think I'd really care. Krita's available on Windows, too. Even with the deployment of Copilot, I really don't expect that shit is going to last, so any ideological qualms I have against nonconsensual ML/AI will eventually pass if I'm patient enough. Windows is still Windows, even if a Kronenbergesque artificial horror is stapled onto the side of it.
Do I hate Linux?
No, I don't hate Linux. I don't even think it's correct to say that I'm bored of Linux if the same fundamental experience is available on the other two big OS options. "The Year of the Linux Desktop" has been here for quite some time, you see, and it's seen in the identity sludge that is the modern Linux experience that is near indistinguishable from the sludge experience anywhere else.
And that's where, I feel, the dangers of nostalgia for old interfaces comes in. There's a good argument to be made about how design philosophies were more rigorously enforced in the pre-Web 2.0 days, but aesthetics alone aren't going to save us even if it is kinda cool that I can dress up my Linux desktop to look like an IRIX workstation.
How we use computers has fundamentally changed, and the demands that are made on us, both in a labour and social sense, are more insistent and intrusive in an always-connected world that requires even single-player games have an Internet connection. There's no possible way to just stay in your home and have a satisfying, sustainable at-home experience, even with a hobby OS like Haiku. At the end of the day, we still need to get work done. People expect us to sigh use Discord or Google Docs, and any aspirations to an offline existence aren't necessarily due to the OS we've chosen to main. It's really a weariness of society.
I don't hate Linux. I hate the world Linux exists in. I hate that so many promises were made across all sectors of society, environmental and space exploration especially, and it was all revealed to be lies puppeteered by the most pathetic assholes whose only salvation is that they are rich as fuck. I hate that my good memories of old interfaces and old games are entwined with a time when I was ignorant of those lies. I hate that I thought like those rich fucks, and believed it was all about market share. I hate that I was an annoying piece of shit in college evangelizing FOSS when really all I was doing was contributing to the sludge.
So how do I really feel about Linux itself?
Linux is amazing, actually
On a fresh install, I typed in pwgen in a terminal because I needed a secure password quick. Fedora Linux didn't have it installed, and this happened:
bash: pwgen: command not found... Install package 'pwgen' to provide command 'pwgen'? [N/y] y * Waiting in queue... * Loading list of packages.... The following packages have to be installed: pwgen-2.08-11.fc39.x86_64 Automatic password generation Proceed with changes? [N/y] y * Waiting in queue... * Waiting for authentication... * Waiting in queue... * Downloading packages... * Requesting data... * Testing changes... * Installing packages...
And then Fedora dutifully ran pwgen automatically as soon as it was finished installing.
Holy shit.
Just think about how cool this functionality is that I'm sure isn't specific to Fedora Linux, that my OS was thoughtful enough to see me try to get a task done, realized it didn't have what it needed to accomplish what I asked of it, went and found what I needed, then asked me to add that functionality to itself.
My PC didn't have to do that. It could've just said "bad command or file name" and left me to do the leg work on installing pwgen from elsewhere which I probably wouldn't have thought was that big of a problem. My bad, eh?
But it didn't.
Considered in isolation, Linux is a goddamned triumph. That it's so messy but still works is even more of a miracle. I can make the GUI look like anything, including Windows 11 or the latest MacOS. I can say "fuck the GUI" and rock the command line only. I can still dig into the source code for most any program I run on it, if I had any programming training whatsoever and was interested in those kinds of things. I can play almost any game both modern and ancient, something that even Windows struggles to do. If there's any way I can sum Linux's innate character, is that it excels at being a functional hot mess. It survives being a hot mess of GUI toolkits, protocols, package formats, and even executables run through WINE. It might even thrive most of the time, though not perfectly.
I'm not as familiar with Windows or OSX, but I'm sure they have their little "holy shit" moments, too. They are also triumphs within their own domains, and I think that if people really lounged in a chair and did a bit of navel gazing, they'd also see that they don't really hate the Linux experience or the Windows experience or the Mac experience. Those have only been getting better and better. People just hate being a participant in a highly manipulative and exploitative social world they can't seem to escape. The identity that comes from those little battles with a particular OS is obliterated by a unified hatred of the identity sludge of cross-platform misery. It's really a symptom of all of us facing the same enemy.
It's not modern computing or computing in general that has to go in some kind of short-sighted "RETVRN" cottagecore fantasy. It's the masters of computing who need to be handed their hats and shown the door. Although it still feels like we're still woefully far from any kind of control of our computing experience, seeing there's a problem is a great first step, and the implosion of Twitter has perhaps been the single greatest business failure that has snapped a lot of people out of the doomscrolling, hate-algorithm haze, and really made them ask hard questions about their relationship with social media.
How do I really feel about Linux?
I don't love Linux. I don't even like it now, but I don't hate it, either. I'm comfortable with it. I know how to get work done with it. Any nostalgia I felt for past times is just that: nostalgia. Shit sucked for Linux back in the '90s. Maybe I could get that same vibe again with Haiku or a BSD. That's what VMs are for, I guess: little computational holodecks one can step into for a brief time and enjoy the vibe while real work is being done outside.
I don't really feel like evangelizing for Linux anymore. I don't care what you use. I know you're going to be able to open my document or see my web site or play a game with me. That part of modern computing is good.
I make a lot of noise about how much Wayland sucks, but Wayland ain't Copilot, lol, good luck Windows users. I'll take dealing with Wayland any day. I hope the AI craze passes by for y'all soon. Every OS has dumbass shit rolled into it, every OS gets their turn to hang their asses out with astoundingly bad decisions. Life goes on, as they say.
I'm still gonna let Xenia sexually destroy me.
