I freakin' love Linux as a personal workstation OS. I got into it in 1995, back in the days when Linux was punk rawk and you had to dig around on tsx-11 and sunsite to find things to run on it. I still dual-booted Windows there for a few years. Then I noticed something: Windows would, suddenly and without warning, stop working. As in, blue screen on first boot. All the way up through Windows 2000 -- 9x, NT, didn't matter. Windows would find a way to fail and, often as not, take the whole disk partition with it.

So I decided, okay, Microsoft, if that's the way you're gonna be, fuck you. Yeah, yeah, I know. Windows "Just Works" out of the box. Except when it doesn't, in which case you're up shit creek. The extra tweaking I had to do to get Linux fully going was well worth it because once Linux was configured, it would stay that way -- forever if need be.

For that reason I still run the same distro today as I did back then -- Slackware. Where other distros try to win you over with newness and shininess, Slackware is shibui. Shibui is the Japanese aesthetic of crafting simple objects out of natural materials, in such a way that the natural texture of the material shows through and gives the object an understated beauty. Slackware is a simple distro put together in such a way that the "natural texture" of Unix shows through, making it easy to configure to your liking provided you're willing to learn the command line and some basic configuration files. It's very much like a BSD in that regard.

I know I'm not a typical user, but I fit the profile of an ordinary Linux user from another era. I'm glad to see more and more Windows users give Linux a try, but I just hope there'll still be room for people like me in the vast and changing Linux ecosystem.