I was pretty disheartened to see that I had missed an internet brouhaha. I truly love when an internet subcommunity loses its collective mind because so one expresses an unpleasant opinion. If you don’t take things too seriously, you will actually see a pretty good side of people. Often, people argue with poor points, but pretty good humor.

So back in 2018 some internet talking head uttered the following, and launched 1000 proverbial ships.

Linux is only free if you don’t value your time.

-Internet nobody

I did not find that to be a controversial statement. My reaction was pretty much “Yes, that is true.” Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. I don’t want to ever go back to using anything else, not ever. But you need to be realistic about a few things. Linux doesn’t value my time. But, having one parent that uses Windows, another that use Mac, and having found myself trying to fix something on both, neither do those. It ends up boiling down to personality, and the truth of the matter is that I like being challenged. If I can do something the hard way, I’ll do it the hard way. For kicks. I live by the mantra

BUSY > BORED

and I have learned that living live in certain more difficult settings can help alleviate one’s boredom. Simple case in point: by living in foreign countries, where I frequently don’t speak the language, even the mundane tasks of navigating your quotidian life (like going grocery shopping) can provide a fun quick little challenge to help keep your mind alert. Truly, if you’ve never looked deeply at a tin of Hungarian mystery meat trying to discern what the fuck it was, you haven’t lived.

I like Linux because it challenges me to learn a little bit every day. It’s fucking terrible, and I love it. I do not know what everyone else’s experience is, but I have never once gotten anything to work on Linux out of the box. Everything I have ever tried to do requires zen like patience. In 7 years of trying, I have never once gotten WINE to run for me. Not ever. And while that would be a good story for this purposes, I have a more recent one that illustrates my point.

A place I applied to for a job reaches out to me to do a pre-interview screening through some shit service called Kira Talent. It’s one of those job applicant monitoring systems. Cool. I follow the link and they want to test my webcame/microphone. Manage to do that, but then ‘return’ button then stops working.

Balls.

i check their website, and lo, they make no mention of Linux support.

God damnit.

I google some solutions and find nothing. The results suggest that this is a known issue, but no one says anything. I try the usualy dumb solutions (try another browser, incognito window, clearing cache, blah) nothing. The problem really is the OS.

Ok. Solution. Seeing as Wine has never worked, I’ll try an emulator of Chrome (I am reasonably sure this was not my idea, but I read it somewhere). So I download VM Virtual box, try to install-

and I get an error.

Google how to resolve the error.

And I get it installed. I then install a ChromeOS virtual image for it-

and can’t get it to work. It just bricks before ever fully loading. I google solutions and nothing ever comes of it. I likely don’t have the sophistication to work out what the problem is, or how to articulate it in googleable terms…

I will conclude my journey there. This is the linux experience for me. Every solution is a hydra, giving me two additional problems. At some point, I will lose either miraculously resolve my issue by means I barely understand (following something I found on Github that looks like it was written in fucking Klingon) or lose steam on working on it. And this has been the ways it always goes in the entirety of my linux using journey. In my smooth brained way, I have learned a lot by doing this. Just not enough to be a competent user.

So no. Linux does not respect my time. It never will. Ho-hum. But using Linux, I will never again have to explain to my boss that I couldn’t get the work done because my computer is still updating itself and I cannot use it.