Embracing Open Source Part 1: Ideology and Background

This post is the start of a series I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I want to chronicle my journey with Linux, Free and Open Source Software, and taking back control over my data and my devices. If there’s a topic you are particularly interested in reading about in a future installment, please feel free to send me a message.

It’s been nearly twenty years since I got a PC that was mine and mine alone. It was a laptop, a Dell XPS Studio 1640. It was huge, thick and heavy with a bright red top and a leather strip on the lower part of the screen’s back. I loved that thing. It was 2009 and most of the corporations that are in the news now for anti competitive practices and harming teens were on the upswing. It was a golden age of free software that — because the companies involved were raising venture capital funding — was more focused on gaining users than anything else. Windows was still an operating system you paid for, and Adobe Creative Cloud was still four years away. We were starting to move towards the enshittification hole, but we hadn’t tipped over the edge quite yet.

This was around the same time that I first heard of Linux, an alternative operating system to the commercial juggernauts Apple and Microsoft were peddling. I even tried Linux, booting into an Ubuntu 10.04 live CD on my red leather laptop. It was an interesting experiment, but Linux wasn’t ready for me yet, and more importantly, I wasn’t ready for Linux yet. Even with the release of the poorly received Windows 8, I went back to Microsoft, to what was comfortable and familiar.

Over the years, I heard more and more about how Linux was “good now” or that every year was “the year of Linux on the desktop.” Now a meme, these insistent claims felt like a form of denial at the time. I tried Linux again in 2018 or so, several years after valve released the first version of SteamOS, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with Steam preinstalled and right around the time that Valve released the first versions of their Proton compatibility layer. It felt a bit better in some ways, but still I found myself returning to Windows a month or so later. It wasn’t until the fall of 2023 that I made the switch again. This time, it stuck. I ran Manjaro for a little over a year, learned a lot about Linux and rolling release distributions, and switched to EndeavourOS earlier this year.

So, you may be asking, where’s the ideology the post title promised me? Trust me, dear reader, it’s coming. Right now, in fact. I gave you my background first to establish my position. I’m a fairly recent full convert to Linux generally speaking, though I’ve enjoyed the fruits of FOSS projects for decades, most commonly in the video game emulation space. I’m no coder or contributor, I am far from a terminal wizard, and I am constantly looking up ways to make my computer work the way I want it to. So why the effort? Why not just go with the herd, install Windows 11, and use a computer that has wider support because it’s the default? I break down my reasoning like this. I want my data to be mine. I want my data to be portable. I want my data to be private, and I want my computers to do what I want the way I want it to. If I can get all that and also not have to worry about developers abandoning or shutting down software I’m using, I think I can be a lot happier in my technology life.

So what do I mean by wanting my data to be mine? Let’s look at an example. I have an Android phone. My phone comes with an app for taking notes. Because it’s Android, those notes live in Google Keep, a web service run by Google that synchronizes your notes to the cloud, allows you to share them with others, and collaborate on them. All useful features to be sure, but who owns those notes? They don’t even exist on my phone. They’re on a web server somewhere controlled by a corporation that has so many fingers into the proverbial information pie that the pie is more fingers than filling at this point. If google decides to kill Keep like they have with so many other services, those notes are just… gone and I’ll need to find a new way to take and share notes. In this way, my notes aren’t mine. Whether they survive or not is just up to someone else. The same can be said of music, movies, video games, calendars, instant messaging, search, online file storage, and so many more types of data. I want to claw back whatever I can, even if it means investing time and energy into providing those things for myself.

Adding on to the previous point, I want my data to be portable. Yes, that means being able to export my information and take it with me, but more importantly, that means being able to continue to interact with that data outside its original context. If my note taking app of choice shuts down, I want the notes to be in an easily readable and standard format so that I can read them with any number of alternate programs. I want my movies to work outside of whatever digital store I purchase them from. I want my music to be available offline indefinitely. In fact, I want all of my stuff to be available whether I can connect to the internet or not. Similarly, I want any internet availability of my data to be based on my own terms. I want to host it myself, which means I’m also a much smaller target for hacks or data breaches.

So if my data is available offline, is not tied into a corporate service, and is portable and readable in standard formats, then that naturally leads to data privacy. I know I can’t escape the eye of corporate tech giants completely, but reducing my footprint where I can is something I want to strive for. I will admit that privacy is somewhat less of a concern for me compared to the other points, but it is a nice benefit to have as I address the other issues.

The last point is mostly about Linux. At first, I just wanted to get away from Microsoft insisting that Windows must have an online account, but over time I realized that in almost every instance, if my computer didn’t do the thing I wanted it to, it was easy to change that behavior in Linux. Mostly through the way that Linux applications tend to handle settings. While I still believe that most mainstream computer users should not be expected to edit text configuration files to change settings, I cannot deny that the flexibility and portability of text files is really great. For example, I can reinstall my entire operating system with the applications I use, then just drop my configuration files in my home folder and be right back to the configuration I had. Linux best practices are also beneficial in helping me ensure a computer does what I want. For example, programs are intended to output data in such a way as to make that data easy to ingest with another program. The example folks who are newer to Linux will still probably recognize involves curl, which is a program for getting data from the internet via URL. So you might have a command that looks like this: curl http://server/script.sh | bash. This command uses curl to pull a script from a server, then immediately pipes, or sends that output to bash which will execute the script.

As I move forward in my Linux journey, I will keep coming back to these four major principles. My ideal is to have as much of what I use day to day covered by them as I can. I’ve already done a lot of this work, so keep an eye out for the next installment in this series where I go over how to pick a Linux distribution and get started with it in 2025.