Quite a few people who emailed me told me they were specifically interested in learning linux; that they had installed ubuntu on a laptop but never touched the terminal, or that they had never touched linux and had to be showed how to login, etc. Because this is lesswrong, those people for the most part have actually done some stuff on their own instead of just never logging in again, but I feel like I could be doing more.
The value in learning the inner workings of an operating system should be self-evident, no matter how you scorn it. It is a human-designed self-contained deterministic purpose-driven system from start to finish, with many layers of complexity, which on its own is good enough reason for me, but after you spend an afternoon debugging something that went wrong with your ssh-agent, or with your .rtorrent.rc, you are going to understand those programs on a technical level instead of an intuitive level, and that does make a difference. It’s also an option that Windows never gives you.
Quite a few people who emailed me told me they were specifically interested in learning linux; that they had installed ubuntu on a laptop but never touched the terminal, or that they had never touched linux and had to be showed how to login, etc. Because this is lesswrong, those people for the most part have actually done some stuff on their own instead of just never logging in again, but I feel like I could be doing more.
The value in learning the inner workings of an operating system should be self-evident, no matter how you scorn it. It is a human-designed self-contained deterministic purpose-driven system from start to finish, with many layers of complexity, which on its own is good enough reason for me, but after you spend an afternoon debugging something that went wrong with your ssh-agent, or with your .rtorrent.rc, you are going to understand those programs on a technical level instead of an intuitive level, and that does make a difference. It’s also an option that Windows never gives you.