Happy (20th) birthday, Linux!
Wow, 20 years already! And it all started with a simple, humble posting ... IIRC I should have had my first encounter with Linux about 16 years ago, at that time I bought a SuSE distribution on several floppy disks. It was interesting and funny, even though I could not yet do very much with it. That does not mean that linux was bad, but the fields where I needed it most (Japanese, Chinese, Electronics, Amateur Radio) were not yet covered well. I also ran into Debian, but was quite disappointed at that time, because something went quite wrong and I was without docs - and nobody else around me was using Linux, so there was nobody to ask...
I am really grateful for Gentoo , to which I switched in 2003. I already lived in Taiwan then, and there were only a few Redhat books available in stores, Linux had not really caught on in Taiwan. Gentoo was a pain to install, but I learned a lot, because with Gentoo I had to, if I wanted a working system - and learning was one of the reasons I had chosen Gentoo. Another reason was that Gentoo solved a lot of library dependency problems by compiling everything from source.
With Gentoo, I switched the locale encoding to UTF-8 and enjoyed the power of Unicode - something Windows has not even today fully implemented. OS X, Linux, Solaris, the BSDs, they all truly support Unicode and also allow different locales for different users - when will Windows be there? I also threw out Windows at that time - too much trouble with it at work, so I did not want to see it at home.
About the same time I got myself a Mac mini, I also switched to Ubuntu (Dapper Drake was the edition). One reason was that I probably slowly got old, but maintaining several Linux machines at a computer centre was a bit tiresome with Gentoo and much more comfortable with Ubuntu.
I am still with Ubuntu (although now I prefer Debian on servers), and it simply does what I need. Some things I do on OS X, because they are more comfortable there. Yes, comfort is one thing where Linux sometimes can still improve, but I still prefer Linux over Windows at any given time...
So, happy birthday!
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