There's a persistent myth that tech companies must "protect" their customers from the many features of their technology. Sometimes companies restrict their users for fear of unexpected breakage, and other times they just expect users to pay for features to be unlocked. I love an OS that protects me from stupid mistakes, but I want to know without a doubt that there's a manual override switch somewhere. I want to be able to control my own experience on my own computer. Whether I'm using Linux for work or for my hobbies, that's precisely what it does for me. It puts me in charge of the technology I've chosen to use.
It's hard for a business, even when its public face is an image of a "quirky revolutionary", to deal with the fact that reality is actually quite diverse. Literally everybody on the planet uses their computer differently than the next person. We all have our habits, we have artifacts of good and bad computer training, we have our interest levels, our distractions, and our individual goals.
No matter what a company anticipates, there's no way to construct the ideal environment for each and every potential user. And it's a tall order to expect a business to even attempt that. You might even be tempted to think it's an unreasonable demand to want a custom tool for every individual.
But we're living in the future, it's a high-tech world, and in fact technology empowering users to design and use their own tools has been around for decades. You can witness early users of UNIX stringing together commands on old
Computer Chronicles
episodes, aired way back in 1985. We see it today in spreadsheet applications, possibly the most well-used and malleable (and unintentional) protopype engines available. From business forms to surveys to games to frontends for video encoders, I've seen everyday users, claiming to have "no programming skills", design spreadsheets that rival applications developed and sold by software companies. This is the kind of creativity technology should foster and encourage, and I think it's the way computing is heading the more *open source* principles become an expectation.
Today, the same power is delivered by Linux: the power to construct your own utilities, and to offer those tools to other users in a portable and adaptable format, whether you work in Bash, Python, or LibreOffice Calc. Linux invites you to build tools that make your life easier.
Services {#_services}
I believe one of the missing components of the modern computing experience is connectedness. That seems like a crazy thing to assert in the 21st century, when we have social networks that claim to bring people together like never before. But social networks have always felt like more like a chaperone prom than a casual hangout. You go to a place where you're expected to socialize, and you do what's expected of you, but deep down you'd rather just invite your friends over to watch some movies and play some games.
The deficiency of modern computing platforms is that this casual level of sharing one another's digital life isn't easy. In fact, it's really difficult on most computers. While we're still along away from a great selection of sharable applications, Linux is nevertheless built for sharing. It doesn't try to block your path when you open a port to invite your friends to connect to an shared application like
Drawpile
or
Maptool
. On the contrary, it has
tools specifically to make sharing *easy*
.
Stand back, I'm doing science! {#_stand_back_im_doing_science}
Linux is a platform for makers, for creators, and developers. It's part of its core tenet to let its users explore, and to ensure that the user remains in control of their system. Linux offers you an open source environment and an
open studio
. All you have to do is take advantage of it.