Ubuntu Linux by phylevn@flickr

The never-ending war. The free vs the proprietary. The scattered vs the one. The culture vs the company. GNU/Linux vs Windows. Hesa, one of the teachers at ITU, wrote a blog post about students preferences concerning their operating system and programming editor.

Needless to say, these are the two things which probably have caused the vast majority of all flame wars to date. The possible exception might be Nikon vs Canon. And so it was with great pleasure I read his post and quickly recalled the first few days of uni. Coming from a GNU/Linux background I found it remarkable to be the only one in my class running it. Out of a 100 people I would expect at least(!) one more to run a Linux based os. Well, except a few people who insists on running Mac!

Why I choose Linux
Personally I started using Linux on the server side sometime during 7th or 8th grade. I began tweaking with Gentoo and spent an unimaginable amount of hours on only getting the OS installed! All this happened on some old Pentium I which I had around at the time. Compiling the kernel took a mere 8 hours if I recall correctly.

Time moved on, Gentoo got replaced by FreeBSD on the server, and instead I started using Gentoo on my desktop computer. However, while not fully satisfied with all the applications I kept dual-booting for quite some time. It wasn’t until my computer got old and basically too slow for Windows that I migrated to Linux completely. There was no chance I could afford a new computer and with Linux I could get the latest software on the same hardware as before.

Today, despite having a new computer I’m still on Linux, more precisely Ubuntu, and it suits me perfectly! Maybe it isn’t faster than Windows or OSX but it works faster for me. In fact, when I’m back in Windows these days it makes me as a user feel stupid.

Making your pick
As students in IT I believe it is our job to be familiar, no I would even say be comfortable, with more than one operating system. As software engineers we should satisfy expectations of our users. We do that by understanding them.

Start a flame war with yourself! Question your choice of operating system, irrespective of whether it is Windows, Linux, OS X or some obscure dialect of Lisp. Find out what you like and be ready to motivate it. That’s what counts.

Hesa’s statistics shows that SEM students are exploring alternatives to Windows and I’m very happy to see this. It shows we’re open and ready to understand the ones we will work for!

What is the motivation behind your choice of operating system?

Ps. Just to clarify: I’ve worked with Macs too.