Linux

I spent most of yesterday trying to boot Linux on my netbook. To make things interesting, I formatted my hard drive first. All of my old data gone in a flash. Until I got Linux working I wouldn't have a computer. I'd have to use the public one, the one my brother uses to watch the same 'comedy' videos he has the past five years. This was, of course, A Problem. It remained A Problem over 15 hours and five distros. Eventually I pinned it down to a problem in the power management software and got a netbook remix of Fedora working on the comp. Pretty sure I botched a few things on the way. Such is the price of change.

Of course, my job on this blog is to ramble insanely and occasionally talk about physics, not complain about Linux. My thoughts keep coming back to the erasure. Of course I saved the important things. But a sane person would have made sure Linux actually worked before they torched their system. Or they would have had a backup of the old OS, in case they wanted to go back. Hell, why even do Linux? I don't have a major need for it. I can say I wanted to start anew, but then I should have just wiped and replaced Windows.

My family thought I was crazy. And they were right. What I did was possibly the most irresponsible thing I could have done, short of chucking my computer out a window. I knew all of that going in. I knew, I typed in the commands, that there was a good chance I would never get the computer functioning again. And yet I did it anyway. And I have to keep asking myself why.

Okay, I know why. The thoughts make perfect sense in my head. Mostly I was asking myself how to explain it. There are two factors at work here, both drives that most people would call insane or stupid. First of all, I had to erase my hard drive so that I had the risk of it not working. This is difficult to describe. We have to face the consequences of our premeditated actions. But consequences are fickle and unpredictable. We have no way of knowing what will fizzle out and what will go too far. Repercussions blindside us. Mastering the art of response is kinda like trying to shoot by getting randomly pushed into warzones for five minutes at a time. We have to find a way to train ourselves by manufacturing our own potential crises. We can't ignore it, because we engineered it to be unignorable, and we cannot complain, because we knew it would be our own damned fault. All we can do is respond. That's the reason I erased everything first.

So why Linux? Linux is something I cannot use as well as Windows, something I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that would cause me great difficulty if I switched to it. Why not Linux? Comfort leads to complacency leads to stagnation. Better constantly shift my world very slightly, make myself eternally uncomfortable, than risk that. I've always been a person obsessed with flux. In confusion and chaos we find ourselves.

I have no idea how much sense these reasons make to another person. All I know is that these are massive driving forces for me. Switching to Linux isn't going to revolutionize my life, but it will continue to familiarize me with taking these unpleasant and beneficial actions. I guess you could ask are they really beneficial. Who knows? Maybe making chaos more comfortable will itself lead to stagnation, and ten years down the road I'll find new driving forces to combat that.

*G's job is to actually be insightful.