Going open source and early computer education
It started back when I was an undergraduate student. I tried several Linux distributions for a short time, but due to compatibility issues with the hardware, I reverted to Windows after I found a free Windows 10 license and Office 365 for students. The stability was good enough for a student that was struggling to finish his undergraduate thesis, so the naive journey to go open source abruptly ended. Recently, it sparked again when I tried to fix my brother's old laptop. The poor thing tragically fell from the bed into the water that flooded our home quite some time ago. Fortunately, the board is still functional, so after it received a hard drive and WiFi card donation from another laptop, it flung back to life. The old hard drive contained a Windows 7 operating system which was no longer supported by Microsoft, so I tried to find an alternative.
Good Ol' Windows
The familiarity of using Windows operating systems went back to the early days of my interaction with computers. My family did not own a computer but was fortunate enough to have a relative who did. It was a Pentium 4 CPU, sufficient to run Windows XP, and I played around with it every time I visited their home on holidays. Years later, after my relatives owned laptops, the "old" computer was donated to us. Mostly, I just learned from curiosity until I got familiar with the menus, buttons, toolbars, and other interface terminologies, building what I call the "Windows intuition".
Open Source? Linux? Ubuntu?
At first, I was introduced to software on Windows as modular packages (installer) that installed the software to the computer and when one of them is no longer needed, it could be uninstalled or somehow detached from the computer. The big question was, where do they get installed to? Some time later I learned the rudimentary concepts of operating system. I realized that there were options based on the hardware manufacturer, for example if I had a computer from Apple, then I would have Mac OS X (now macOS) as my operating system.
The common practice among self-proclaimed computer enthusiasts/hobbyists such as myself at the time in Indonesia was that there would always be a way to download a software and crack it so then it could be used for free. Nobody around was really able to articulate the reasons why this is illegal, on the contrary, it was considered ingenious probably because doing a simple Google search was not yet popular. Open source options seemed to be trivial because the mindset was, "if I could use a popular, high-valued software for free, why would I use alternatives which are probably less convenient to use?".
It was blurry about how I learned the existence of Linux. I guess it was back in high school, when I was trying desperately to multi-boot my netbook (yes, a netbook) with Windows 8 (I think it was still a developer preview), Mac OS X, and Ubuntu to create some sort of crazy hybrid Frankenstein's netbook. As expected, the efforts did not pay off and I was only succeeded in installing Windows 8 along with Windows 7 (or XP, I'm not sure). I was not invested enough to get the Mac OS X to boot properly or learn more about Ubuntu.
After graduated from high school, I got curious about Ubuntu and Linux distributions in general. What caught my attention were because it was freely available from its official website and after creating the bootable device and boot into it, Ubuntu was ready to use even without "permanent" installation. I noticed that most of the Ubuntu interface are already familiar, but the "Windows intuition" that I've built for so many years simply does not work as effectively or efficiently. When working with Windows, especially for basic productivity tasks, GUI is all you need. It makes simple file management, documents, spreadsheets, and presentation editing, even software and storage management much easier and intuitive. The infamous command prompt is sitting there just in case you need it and is somewhat hidden within the start menu. While the experience is mostly the same because both are GUI OS, with Ubuntu, some tasks are simply much convenient to accomplish using the terminal. It almost feels like not knowing how to use the terminal in Ubuntu is equivalent to only understanding half the alphabet. Sure, I still can spell some words, but it would not be as powerful. It occured to me that the terminal is the identity of Linux-based OS.
Few Remarks on Early Computer Education
If I imagine myself back to when I was introduced to computers, I could not help to think how different or improved my experience would be if I got started on Linux instead of Windows. Would I have a better agility when working with a new system? I guess no one would ever have the capacity to explicitly answer that but from a perspective of someone with a subjectively well-built "Windows intuition", switching from Windows (XP and later versions) to Linux-based OS seems to take a much bigger effort than the contrary. For example in software installation, when working with Windows, one simply need to download the installer from the Web, then most of the time, the installation wizard magically takes care of everything. In Linux, however, one might bump into problems which require the use of terminal or separate installation of package dependencies. Sure, sometimes Windows might bump into a similar problem, each system has its pros and cons, and don't get me wrong, I currently have two devices, one with Windows 10 installed and the other is running Linux, and I love using them both. I think it would be compelling to see if Linux-based OS is introduced or even becomes the core system in the early computer education for children, perhaps not in educational institutions (because I understand that it probably is much convenient to use the famous Windows or even macOS in that context) but in the student's home, at the family level. Granted, children might lean towards the most user-friendly OS (or maybe one with the most supported games) but technologically-aware families might want to introduce their children to the adventure of different operating systems, motivate them to have the agility and flexibility to use different platforms, and increase their awareness in multiplatform software.
Back to The Old Laptop
There are a lot of choices when it comes to picking the right Linux distribution for a certain hardware. I realized that it would get confusing because of the sheer amount of branding and reviews available on the Web, so I tried to filter the options based on usage purpose and hardware limitation. The laptop would mostly be used for daily video conference and to take online courses but the computing power is not that great, so finally I decided to try the "fast and lightweight" lubuntu (a flavor of Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is one of many Linux distributions). For me, the reason was simply because of the size to download lubuntu image was about two-thirds of Ubuntu which was a good indication of lightweight. In the subsequent blogs, I hope to share my lubuntu experience on the old laptop, especially when learning about data science methodology, and "lubuntu intuition" that I have been trying to build.
