oscar.hellstrom.st :: weblog

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote an article on why the average computer user does not run away from expensive OS to a free one, (mainly Windows to Linux, but there would be alternatives in both ends) and what the “Linux Community” does not understand. I’m quite sure that this is not a problem of understanding what the average computer user wants, but rather what the Linux hackers wants. I myself do not really care if the world’s computer users would run Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X or whatnot. As long as the hacker community can have a nice OS to play around with it will do that. This is a fundamental part of what drives the community, even though “the market” does help. Linux came to exist when a Finnish guy wanted to learn more about his 386 processor (and he was fed up with MINIX). He spent a considerable time in his room hacking… and why? well not to get the world to use his operating system. Most OSS project (that is not started by the so called open source corporations) are created because someone is fed up with the current state of some software, or because someone is curious how to make things better, or even if it is possible to do it yourself rather then using what others have done.

Kingsley-Hughes writes that there are too many distributions and that this is a problem for the average user since he or she cannot just choose to install Linux. Well, this shows another interesting point of the “Linux Community” (or actually what they call the “Open Source Community”). It shows that there is not one community. Every one who is in to software and is in to sharing what he or she has accomplished is not automatically part of a community. There are a lot of individuals writing software, and if they don’t like the way it’s done today, they’ll change it. Since there are usually others who want to change things, some changes ore done in collaboration, and creates a new product. No one really cares if this confuses Mr. Anderson over in Texas.

I don’t really have fire crucial things that the average computer user could come to understand about the Linux community, but I think this one is enough. We build software because we like it, not to attract the worlds computer users. Some projects even want to scare the average user away. There are several programs you need to change the actual source to configure. The choice for this is of course not to enable anyone to learn a bit of programming. So at the end of the day, the average hacker don’t care about the average user.

Last summer I and some other folks from ETC participated in the ICPF Programming Contest. Even though our result wasn’t the greatest, we still had a lot of fun during that weekend. This year I’m already looking forward to the contest and will probably participate with some people form ETC again. Everyone who is interested in reading some information about organising the contest would find the contest’s chairman, Johan Jeuring’s blog very interesting.

Today I received my Kinesis Contoured keyboard. Enough has already been written about the keyboard by others, but it is a programmable ergonomic keyboard, which is quite different to type on compared to “normal” keyboards. After having it for a day I’m starting to get a bit more used to typing on it, though I still feel very clumsy. A bummer is also that my specialized keyboard layout does not really work very well on this keyboard, so I will have to rework that some day in the future. Though I should probably be a bit more used to the keyboard before I can figure out where I want to put the keys. I’m also trying to come up with any good use for the macros on the keyboard, which can store up to 48 macros.
All in all it feels a bit like the first week with the Dvorak layout, with frustration and all. Learning to use the Contoured keyboard will probably not take me very long though.