Livin' on the Edge: Linux's Impact on Computing

Summary

This episode of the CISO IT podcast explores the history and importance of Linux.

Automox CISO Jason Kikta shares his personal experience with Linux and highlights its advantages and innovations. The conversation also touches on the changing attitudes towards Linux, including Microsoft's shift towards embracing it.

The episode emphasizes the role of Linux in driving innovation and its position as a vital piece of the software ecosystem. The host encourages listeners to explore Linux and experience its potential firsthand.

Transcript

Hey, welcome everyone back to the CISO IT podcast from Automox. I'm your host, Jason Kikta, I'm the CISO at Automox. And this month is a little bit of fun for me because we're talking about Linux and how important it is to us here at Automox. So I'm basically using this as an excuse to talk about the history of Linux and, and how much it means to me as an operating system and.

What it's taught me over the years and how much fun it is. Like, Linux is a lot of fun. And I think that if you're really into computers and you've never played around with Linux, you're probably missing out. And if you've never used Linux as your primary desktop for any period of time, then you haven't truly lived on the edge because it's...

It's a bit of an adventure and it's less of an adventure today than it was 20 years ago when I did it. But Linux is just a lot of fun and lets you do so many cool things. So, yeah, I'm going to tell you a little bit of my personal love story with Linux. And Linux is, I think, older than a lot of people realize. 

Linus Torvalds announced back in 1991, which is really, really a long time ago. And I remember feeling late to the party when I tried Linux for the first time in 1999. I was like, wow, I'm behind, I'm not keeping up. And obviously in retrospect, I wasn't doing that bad, but this was, I mean, again, it was 1999. 

You can already imagine that Linux was not something that was just, it wasn't really feasible to download. Right. The challenge at the time was that not everyone had internet access and even if you had internet access, it was usually dial up. So the popular thing back then was you'd go to a physical bookstore, like a Barnes and Noble, or some of the dozens of other bookstores that along the way, have all gone out of business and you go and you buy it like a magazine. Computer magazines were really, really popular then and not just things like 2600. But like they were PC World and PC Mag and there were a whole slew of magazines devoted to Linux. 

And most of them, the Linux magazines in particular, would have a CD-ROM, right? Not even a DVD at that point. Usually, but usually a CD-ROM that was pre-burned with a particular Linux distro. And my very first one was Mandrake, a French distro that I don't believe is around anymore today. And I got that baby and fired it up, repartitioned my computer to my PC to shrink down Windows and, and install this, this Linux partition. 

And then I was dual booting. And it was just, it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun because, you know, I, I'd used Unix before this was also by the way, like before Apple had changed macOS right? Because with macOS X everything changed for Apple, and they brought in BSD under the hood. And before that, it was all their proprietary system. I don't even think it had a command line. If it did, you couldn't do a whole lot with it. You really had to go to a real flavor of Unix to get that sort of feeling of an operating system before

Linux became widely available because it was the only game in town. And it was just having that sort of POSIX concept of “everything's a file” and you can pipe things around, and just being able to do so much from a command line interface was really neat. And it was also cool to see the innovation that was happening in GNOME and KDE at the time.

Early Linux desktop...was it the most stable thing? Absolutely not. Were there a lot of features missing? Sure, but you could really push the state of the art in what was possible in a GUI. And it was a lot more exciting than what Windows and Mac were offering at the time in many ways, because they were just like widgets, desktop widgets that..

Here we are 20 years later, and they're now commonplace on Windows and Mac. But like back then you could do a lot of stuff in the Linux way, way before you could do it in the mainline desktop operating system. So it was very, very cool. And at the time as well, it was a little bit counterculture, right? I mean, this was back in the days when Steve Balmer was the CEO of Microsoft and he was saying:

“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” And you had the CEO of Oracle out there saying: “Open source software is free like a puppy.” To be fair, it is to some degree that it's going to require some time and some patience and there's a learning curve. But, there was a big movement in the industry with, Microsoft really pushing the concept of total cost of ownership to show that you'd save so much money by sticking with Windows, right, especially in server contexts, over trying to bring in Linux and other open source tools to replace them. Buy ISS on top of Windows NT or Windows Server, instead of running Apache on Linux. That was what they were really pushing forward. 

Of course, then you fast forward and life has totally changed because by 2011, Microsoft is one of the top five contributors to the Linux kernel. Then I think 2014, they were talking about how much they love Linux. That's Satya, right?

Satya Nadella, that's the current CEO of Microsoft talking about how much he loves Linux by 2014, right? Just 10, 15 years went by and they're saying that they love it. And then Microsoft has its own version of Linux. And I've heard people speculate today that Microsoft might end up doing with Linux what Apple did with BSD. I don't know if that's true, but it's just fascinating to see how much.

The adoption of Linux has gone up over time and really has opened people's minds to open source software. I remember there being so much discussion at the time and, and back and forth. 

These are the days of people having debates like the cathedral and the bizarre about how we should develop in the future. And people saying it's going to be all of this or no, this will win out, this will stay the dominant model.

Reality is: we find ourselves in a blended future where pretty much every commercial product in existence uses some degree of open source software and integrates it in, the ones that have compatible licenses and there's some open source software that, prohibits those use cases or makes it prohibitive and that's their choice and that's fine. We've really reached this diversity in the software ecosystem where no longer does everything have to be bespoke one offs. We have a lot more commonality, we have a lot more common ways of doing things, it's spurned other innovations, Linus- a lot of people forget, Linus Torvalds invented Git, right? He created Git back in 2005, because he was frustrated that he didn't have good enough version control around Linux kernel development. 

So he invented Git, and looked at all the things that spawned and what that's done for modern application development. It's really changed the face of the world. And again, debates that people thought would play out that ended up not quite playing out is, everyone in the Linux world back in the day was just very focused on, this will be the year of Linux on the desktop. And finally, we're going to beat Windows and in reality, now, it's probably never going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. But who cares, right? Linux has the majority of the server market in the world. They certainly have the vast majority of embedded systems out there and small devices, right? 

So, it's a matter of best fit for the best tool. And there are use cases where Linux is great. There are use cases where Windows and Mac are great. I love teasing Windows users. Actually, I love teasing all users of all things because everyone seems to be sensitive to things. And we can have a great argument about whether Emacs or Vim is best ...Vim. But these old style flame wars that were very wrapped up in one thing winning or another.

I think we all, my generation probably, missed the forest for the trees to some degree, because we were so focused on who's going to win and who's going to be dominant that we didn't stop to think about it enough. The fact that we're building these awesome new tools and awesome new possibilities, and this is what the world's gonna run on and it's gonna play out in ways that we couldn't even foresee and use cases that didn't even exist yet. 

So it's just been really fascinating to watch this journey over the last 25 years of how Linux has truly come into its own. And it's absolutely a mainstay of modern computing and has really, in some ways, found a lot of commonality while still maintaining its strong diversity. 

We've solved our way through things like "Dependency Hell" used to be a common catchphrase among Linux users because it was just very challenging to install packages once upon a time because there are so many dependencies. And then you'd have. ross dependencies and incompatible dependencies. And like that isn't really a thing that a modern Linux user would stop to think about the same thing with drivers, right? It was just impossible to find drivers back in the day.

It still sort of blows my mind a little bit. When I think back that I was once at a point where I would have to go in and like edit a driver and mess around with the thing to get it working or to take a driver meant for an older piece of hardware and modify it to get to work with a newer piece of hardware that had come out in the meantime. And that’s largely unthinkable today, simply because the compatibility has gotten so much more robust. I mean, you still find some of these issues to a degree. 

I don't think they ever will go away entirely because that's just the nature of computing. But it's a night and day difference to spin up a distribution today and be able to just have it just run and run like it's expected and not sit there and go like, OK, let me start writing down all the various things on my system that have suddenly disappeared, and don't exist, or aren't supported. And I got a keyboard and a mouse, and I at least kind of have video. 

So, let me start there. Maybe I don't even have video, right? Maybe I couldn't even start up the GUI and I'm just stuck at the command line and all I got is a keyboard, mouse and a command line. And now I'm just gonna start hacking away at it until I can get this system into a usable state. It's just mind boggling how far we've come. And what I'm really excited about is to see what the future holds.

Linux remains one of the major, I guess you call it a “Bastion of Innovation” within computing and tech in general is that it's somewhere that people can do a little bit free-r thinking, you can get a little bit closer to the hardware if you want, you can swap things out and build your own Franken-system if you want to experiment or try new things or

Try to get it to run on an older piece of hardware or a smaller piece of hardware that just doesn't have quite the same capabilities or expanded to do new and novel things. Even if it's not what you're using on your day-to-day system for work, it's still very important to us in computing because it's one more point of pressure to force the industry forward and to get us to innovate, which is just really exciting to me. So I don't know if I have any great predictions about where we're going to see Linux in the future or what it will be capable of. 

Oh, gosh, Android. I forgot Android, right? So Android, again, a whole ecosystem of mobile devices built on Linux.

Pretty much the only remaining thing to conquer is the desktop. But I don't know that this is going to happen anytime soon. I don't know that it really needs to happen, but I think that we will continue to see Linux being a vital piece of the ecosystem.

I think that it'll probably continue to drive innovation. I don't know what the future holds for it, but I'm really excited to see it. So, thanks for listening today and joining me as I strolled a little bit down memory lane and reflected on what was really one of the pivotal operating systems in my life. 

If you haven't used it yet, or you've only used it in a work context, and you've never installed it on a personal device give it a try! Partition a drive, buy an extra drive, get a Raspberry Pi something and fire it up and see what the art of the possible is because you won't regret it. You'll learn more about computers in a shorter amount of time than you would from reading about it in a textbook, right? Experimentation is a great teacher!

You're gonna definitely experience some ups and downs with it, but, you'll be the better for it. So thanks so much and I hope to see you all next month.