Some times ago I discovered a strange and beautiful box with a number of keys like a typewriter and a small television above it; the name was also peculiar: PET 2001... I love was born...evem if, as the life teaches, the real love arrived a little time later with a name of Apple ][.
Again, maybe I'm not a faithful man (only in the tech word !) since then I switched to other delicious encounters: Commodore 64, Amiga 1000 and finally the mythical Mac 128. This one, and his childs and grandchilds) could have been the love of my life if it weren't for the price...much above my chances.
So I had to turn my attention to the rest of the world, that is the IBM empire and its damned (sorry) O.S., from Windows 3.0 upwards. Now I'm at W10 and since my age starts (!) to show some minor problems I'd like to stop here (bye bye 11).
After this long and celebratory introduction the big question is: what next?
I mean: in all this years I rarely had to spent days (and long nights) in studyng something which is due indipendently from my will. I love to study and learn, but only what really interest myself. From Basic to Fortran, from LISP to Forth and then Pascal, C, C++ amd MCU assembly.
Leaving apart the Apple DOS - which I know by heart (thanks dear big Steve Wozniak) - the operating system was just something inside the box needed to make the machine working.
Then agian, the world splitted in two different scenario: the Redmond World and the Linux World. It would be too heasy to find a concrete geopolitical similarity, so let's leave it apart. Let me just say that both worlds have plus and minus: at the end what matters is the balance.
One one side the OS tells to the user what she/he can (and have to) do, almost a one thousand things, but following its strict rules and possibly (!) buying something extra; all this without thinking too much...or, even better, without even thinking. This not entirely negative, just a little.
In the other world, the freedom is at the max level. Users can do almost everything (like some hackers teach), from writing a recipe to crash the atomic
arsenal. But...big but...to do something in the middle the poor user has to learn a magical spell: SUDO
I hate this word!
i learned it (possibly not) sometimes ago with a package called Mandrake (I should still have a CD somewhere), and I hated it immediately_ why should I learn an incomprehensible, long, complex series of letters just to let me download a program? Why shoud I have to assign to myself (who is writing at my desk alone in my room, like other milions of people) the right to modify or delete a document that I wrote?
I hate SUDO...and like me I'm almost sure other milions do.
There should be a third way, somewhere in the middle.
What will bring the future?
The BIG MS will buy the entire Linux world?
The bad boys who know very very well the SUDO will cause the MS bankruptcy?
Is a One Big Goliath versus more than 300 hundreds of Davids (distros according to the mythical Google AI), but the poor Goliath is not really poor.
I said, I'm now an old Win user, not happy after XP, but forced to do it for my interests and a very new Linux user with Zorin , the only one at the moment which gave me the chance to appreciare it and, most important, to use it; maybe one day I could also learn something.
For the time being I keep my two PC side by side: one eye on the left , the other eye just a little to the right.
I know I'm a little nostalgic but sometimes, before sleeping like now, I wonder what that genius of Steve Jobs could have done in the last few years to find a different way, maybe one of his magic touch.
Good night
