Episode: 4536
Title: Welcome to the Linux Community
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4536/hpr4536.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:13:26 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4536, for 2025-12-22
Today's show is entitled, "Welcome to the Linux Community"
The host is Deltaray and the duration is 00:30:27
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "I invite you to participate in the Free Linux Open Source Community"
Hi, I wanted to welcome you to the Free Linux Open Source BSD software community that we're
all part of.
We're glad that you're here.
You might be here recently because some operating system or piece of software has made
you frustrated, maybe it's invader privacy, changed its policies, caused your system to
not be supported anymore or whatever.
You want more control over your system, you want to have more privacy and maybe you want
something free.
Our community is vast and multifaceted and has a lot to offer and things like Linux can
feel confusing it first.
I'm mostly because it's based on a different system.
It's based around Unix and not around maybe being super user-friendly at first, but it's
gotten there over the years.
It expects the users to be a bit more self-guided and self-motivated and trying to figure
out their own problems, you know, there's not like a support number that you can call
or a genius bar that you can go to in major cities.
There's going to be a lot less hand-holding, you know, you're going to have to do some
of the stuff on your own.
But honestly, all that has improved quite a bit over the decades and we've all been
through the stage, you know, as everyone was a beginner once for myself, you know, I've
been using Linux for almost 30 years and in the beginning when I tried to use it as a
desktop, I was able to install Linux, but it took six months before I had a working graphical
interface because, you know, my video card wasn't supported or something like that.
But now it's gotten much easier, there's a lot more support for all the different hardware
out there.
So it's likely that you're going to be able to, you know, use it almost immediately.
If not, it might be because you're using like some, you know, piece of hardware that just
hasn't had its drivers written for it in the Linux community.
But you don't have to prove anything to anyone to belong, you know, you, you don't have
to learn everything either, like there's, it can feel overwhelming at first and you might
be thrown a lot of documentation that seems irrelevant and that's fine, it's there for
you when you need it and it gives you the opportunity to explore different things.
And if you're wondering if Linux can do something, run some piece of software or some
piece of functionality, the answer is very likely yes, but it's going to be in a different
way, you know, you're going to not have, for instance, Adobe Photoshop, you're going to
have the GNU Image Manipulation Program or Critta or Inkscape or Blender or, you know,
one of these programs that does the same functionality, but just as a different software
package, whether it be web browsing, you know, there's web browsing as a huge part of daily
life these days and oftentimes we're running a lot of cloud applications through our web
browsers and the web browsers almost become an operating system itself, but, you know, Linux
has several options for different web browsers that you can use, whether it's Firefox or Brave
or Conqueror or Chromium and then the commercial options like Chrome and Opera have Linux versions
that you can use. Audio production, you know, there's, there's lots of different audio production
applications. In fact, I would say that a lot of people don't really explore the incredible array
of music production applications that the open source community has. I've only recently started
to discover how much is there and I've been using Linux for a long time, but there's like
these digital audio workstation software that you can use to do all kinds of music production
and some people are actually preferring to use Linux for music production because it's a bit more
stable or offers some things that the other platforms don't and also with the window management
capabilities that Linux has it, it makes it sometimes easier to lay things out and so on.
And games, games have long been a concern for people moving to Linux, they want to be able to
that they can play the games that they want but that has come an a long way over the past 30
years. It used to be that mostly we were just using games playing games that had been made for Linux
natively but with the advent of software like wine that has really matured and then has forked
off into a few different varieties of software emulation that make it possible for roughly about,
I don't know, 80, maybe even 90% of the games on Windows now work under Linux.
I regularly play games through Steam, the Steam environment on Linux that normally only run on
Windows or we're only made for Windows but actually can work on Linux through
through proton and wine emulation. And then of course there's a wide variety of options for programming,
you can do office work and that works fine for the most part. I use Linux, I'm like a cyber
security professional but I work in office environment and I have to collaborate with different
people and I'm able to interact and do things with them without significant issues, you know,
no problem. Video conferencing works, stuff like Zoom and Teams work under Linux. So I mean there's
a lot of different things that you can do. A lot of people think of Linux as being a server
operating system and that's, you know, that's maybe what, well I won't even want to say that's
what it's best at. I mean it does, it does that stuff and that's what, you know, a lot of the
internet infrastructure is running on Linux and BSD operating systems and I'm kind of lumping
everything into, you know, just saying Linux and kind of meaning like the entire free and
open source community but, you know, it's a shorthand way of saying it but there's lots of different
possibilities out there for you to get involved in and I don't want to just welcome you to the
community. I want to invite you into the community and the reason why I say invite is because
the open source Linux BSD community what it needs most is people. It needs people to participate
in it, you know, and not just writing code, writing code is just one aspect of developing open source
software. You can participate in forums and ask questions and that's actually helping to develop the
community because you never know when your question might end up with an answer that other people
end up referencing later. So it's important to ask the questions that are on your mind or, you know,
when you're having some kind of issue to try to help figure them out. Chat with other users.
There's user groups out there. There might be like a local Linux users group in your area
then you can connect with and you might make new friends and be able to solve some of your
problems that you have and so on. Show your friends and colleagues what's about, you know, just
maybe say, hey, I'm exploring this Linux stuff. You want me to show you or whatever, maybe they
end up using, you know, maybe they'll end up using Linux or maybe they already do and they can help you.
Submitting bug reports. If you find a problem in a piece of software, something doesn't
seem to be working the way it's supposed to find the place where that software is actually hosted
and where they would want bug reports to be submitted and then give them a good bug report,
including details about the problem, what version you're running, what distribution of Linux you're
running and so on. You can help out with the user experience and UI design of, you know, of both
command line software and GUI software, command line software has a user experience to it that
sometimes needs to be refined and, you know, GUI software, sometimes isn't laid out the best way
or whatever, maybe it takes too many steps to accomplish a task. And so if you have experience
in these types of things, you can help out in that regard. One great example of this is Blender,
Blender 3D is this 3D modeling and animation package that is widely used now and has had this
great story of its development over three decades where it's greatly improved and some of the
those improvements came about through a user that had ideas for how the user experience and the UI
could be improved and made up a thoughtful, you know, demonstration and mock-up of what those things
could be and then the leadership of that project was receptive to it, you know, and they were
the coders there were receptive to the ideas and were willing to slowly work towards those goals
and now Blender is, you know, better than ever it's this amazing piece of software and there's
no reason why that can't happen to some other programs. Maybe you have a talent for making
artwork or, you know, sounds or media or something like that. There's always a need for, you know,
themes or refinements to themes like in the GUI, making icons, maybe it's making graphics for
websites that are needed or splash screens for programs as they load up. Also, having example documents,
that can give new users an idea of what's possible or how to do something, that kind of stuff
can be very useful and very helpful for new users and so you can help out new users in that regard.
You can make tutorials, you know, whether it's using a blog format or, you know, a YouTube video
or TikTok video, a mastodon poster or social media post of some kind, maybe you make a get hub page
or whatever that kind of explains how things work. You could write up documentation officially
for the software or improve the documentation that's there. Maybe you find that the documentation
doesn't explain something well and you can reach out to that project and say, how can I
improve this documentation? And that's a great way to help new users that are coming to that software.
And then, you know, you can also, these software projects, they, they actually have services
that they have to pay for like hosting and supportive the project in various different ways or
they might even have legal fees and so on. So sometimes they have a way of contributing monetary
funds to them so that you can help them or maybe you actually can offer services of your own,
like maybe you run a web hosting provider or maybe you're a lawyer or maybe, you know, you can
help be a community leader in some way. There's all kinds of ways to help out.
The community needs people to survive is long and short of it. So I really would like you to
invite you to participate in the community, not just be a consumer of the software.
And one of the great things about open source and our community that we've created over the decades
is that it offers unlike a lot of commercial software. It offers you the ability to control your
own destiny. You can do, you know, what you want with the operating system with the software and
nobody's going to really tell you no, you know, you can't do that unless it's illegal. But for the
most part, you know, if you want to have your computer boot up into just the command line mode
or maybe you want to make everything pink or something like that, you can, you know, it can
become a form of self-expression for you. And it's unlikely that down the line, the, you know, the
software that you're using is going to start restricting what you can do. Maybe sometimes that happens
but usually there's so many options out there that you can just switch to another distribution
or another desktop or something that does give you those abilities. I've, I've actually switched
distributions of Linux probably six times over my career. I started out on Red Hat. Back
when it was Red Hat Linux, the original Red Hat Linux and then I switched to Gen 2 which was, you know,
more for having the ability to get down and dirty with the operating system compile your own software
and make everything run just a little bit faster. It was like having a hot rod and it was great
that I had that ability to continue to develop my Linux skills in the same community but just a
different sub-community but in a new way, you know, with, with another operating system that just
might not be possible. It might be a one-size-fits-all situation and they'll say, well, tough or,
our operating system doesn't do those things. But with the Linux community, you have the choice.
You have the choice to do what you want to do and find a distribution that fits your needs as a
professional or as a user and customize it the way you want. Linux and the, you know, the
dust tops and the the window managers which is kind of a new concept for people coming to Linux.
Everything is kind of modular so it can be switched out. So, you know, whereas on Windows or Mac,
you just have the set, you have one GUI and you don't think of like how the Windows are decorated
and stuff like that. You can actually change the way Windows are decorated. You can make it so that
instead of having to click on a window to focus it so that it has the, you know, the cursor and the
keyboard and mouse input. You can actually make it so just moving your mouse between Windows
actually gives them focus without you having to click on it. That's called focus follows mouse.
There's also sloppy focus. You know, I mean, there's all kinds of different interesting
concepts that you can do. And virtual desktops, Mac has this now, but this has been a part of X
Windows and Unix and Linux since the beginning, you know, it's like it's been around forever.
The ability to have different desktops that you can switch between and keep your applications
kind of organized on these different desktops. This is one of the concepts that keeps me on
Linux. You know, it's like, I mean, I have no real reason to switch away from Linux, but it's one of the
things that, you know, if it went away, I'd have to really think about it because I love the ability
to switch between virtual desktops and you can like stick Windows to the different desktops to
to move them around or you can make it so that Windows is always on top of other Windows or
always below, you know, you can do all these different kinds of interesting things that aren't built
into the other operating systems. And then, you know, there's the different desktops themselves.
You might start out with something like GNOME or KDE, but then there's other options like
Mate or XFCE or, you know, the different tiling window managers and many other options.
And these all function in slightly different ways and give you different options, but mostly the
same options. But they're targeted at people who want to accomplish different things. So you may
find that you don't like the way GNOME works. And so before you just give up on Linux all together,
you might try out the different distributions or the distant, different desktops. You don't have to
try a different distribution, but a lot of times certain distributions have been tailored for a specific
desktop experience. But you can still switch between them. You know, I mean, you can run Fedora
and then if you don't like the GNOME environment that comes with it, you can install KDE on Fedora
and then switch to that or install XFCE and switch to that. You can even do it between different
users. You know, it's like each user can have their own desktop environment or you can change it by the
day. You know, it's like on Mondays or on No on Tuesdays or on KDE or whatever. And so, you know,
there's nothing stopping you from doing that. And a lot of people seem probably think that Linux
is all about the terminal and that, you know, we live and breathe and stuff in the terminal. And some
of us do, you know, it's like we're still using the GUI, but we're using the command line quite a bit,
but you don't have to. You know, a lot of the functionality that you will need to
use a link system. You don't have to use the command line for it. There'll be some stuff that you do,
you know, to like fix something or install driver or something. But usually, when every
you encounter this, you're following some tutorial to explain how to do it. So I wouldn't sweat that too much.
And then there's lots of different editors out there for editing, you know, VI, EMAX, Nano,
Kate, whatever you want to use. You know, there's no right answer. There's just what you prefer.
And in the end, I think it's about having fun, you know, you get to take around your system a lot
more to discover new options and possibilities and new ways of using your computer. And when you
do figure stuff out, you can take pride in that aha moment that made you progress and
learning something new and doing something different with your system. And you might change those
preferences later and so on. So yeah, in the community, you're probably going to find that there's
a lot of people with strong opinions on things. And some of that comes with people's ability to
choose and they stand by their choice and so on. And don't, you know, don't worry about that too much.
If you are one of those people who, like, gate keeps or something, try not to do that. Remember,
the ability to choose your platform is what makes free Linux open source great.
Or at least it's one of the things that makes a great. So you shouldn't try to
oppress somebody for, you know, for their ability to choose what software they want to use.
You're also building a lot of skills that are in demand, you know, a lot of cloud environment and
internet services and like the top 500 super computers and science research and stuff is based on
around Linux systems. You know, a lot of the virtual private servers that you can set up or servers
on stuff like Amazon web service or Azure or whatever is running Linux by default. And so
getting down and dirty with it and like learning how to do things is going to give you skills that
might land you a job or make new connections or something or give you new abilities to do stuff
that lands you new job or whatever. And also, I mean, people have been using Linux for a long time.
I'm one of those old people that, you know, is close to getting closer to retirement, not quite
at retirement. But, you know, as the old guard retires, there's going to be new positions opening
up and those positions opening up and so on. That's going to demand those skills. So working at it now
may help you to land a job later. The other thing is, E-Waste. E-Waste is a big problem in our
world. You know, we're becoming too much of like a throw away society that has created toxic
things that don't sit well and land fills and so on and isn't good for the environment. And the
commercial community really thrives on forcing users to retire hardware that's just, you know,
like a couple years old, operating systems that no longer support a computer that's only
three or four or five years old is is kind of unacceptable. You know, it's like we're causing people
to constantly have to upgrade and throw away their old computers. Hopefully you're taking it to an
E-Waste or cycling center, but some people aren't. And so on. And so Linux offers the ability to
bring new life into those old pieces of hardware because oftentimes, you know, unlike something like
windows or Mac, which says, you can't run, you know, or lay a top ring system. It's like, well,
first of all, they force you to upgrade. They say, like, you have to upgrade to this new operating system.
But then they say, well, your old computer won't run our new operating system. So you have to upgrade
your computer. And so what are you supposed to do then? Run an old insecure operating system that
opens the door for viruses and malware and stuff? Well, Linux can often run on much older hardware
and, you know, a lot of people, they're refreshing their computers every, you know, three years,
or something. You'll find that Linux users often are running their same hardware for as much as a
decade or even more than that. I once ran a piece of hardware like my home desktop computer
for something like 12 years. And I did a few upgrades to it and stuff. But in the end, in the end,
when I went to go replace the motherboard, I still kept the case, you know, and I still kept like
the drives and stuff like that. So, you know, the modular way of doing things on a desktop computer
allows you to not have to cause things to go obsolete faster. And the same can be true with laptops,
too. Wow, it's hard to replace, you know, the motherboard and a laptop. There are laptop
makers out there like framework that allow you to treat a laptop more like a desktop computer
and that it makes it kind of modular. So, you might consider things like that. And I wanted to
close by just talking about how, you know, open source matters and how much of a difference it's
made in the world. So, back in the 90s, it was becoming common for commercial software vendors
to force you to upgrade to some costly upgrade. Maybe it costs a hundred dollars, $200,
maybe even $500 to upgrade to the next major version of a piece of software. But then that new
version would hardly have anything really new in it. They might move the icons around and update
the graphics and stuff like that of the icons. But people would be waiting for certain features
to come along and they wouldn't make it into a new version, they get frustrated. And that's because
the commercial vendors wanted to keep pulling you along, you know, putting a carrot in front of
you and having you follow the carrot. But with open source, there's no reason to do that, right?
If you want to feature, just, you know, build it in if it's possible if it makes sense to and so on.
And so people do that. You find that oftentimes open source software is far more
featureful than the commercial software. Sometimes there's stuff that can't do easily because,
you know, it takes time for the open source developers to do it because it's a tough thing to do
when you're working for, you know, for free. But for the most part, we've pretty much accomplished
most of the major things that you expect to be able to use your computer for. The developers
and the community that makes the software cares a lot more. You know, they're, they're making it
for their own use, but they're, they're really make, you know, they're trying to make something
that is quality, that is stable, that is secure, because they want their reputation is on the line.
It's not just that like a company's reputation. It's like their own personal reputation is on the line.
So they have a lot more skin in the game to get it right. We care a lot about privacy and we
don't want to see ads on everything. And so that's one, I mean, that's one major difference
in just the user experience. When you, when you sit down at stuff like windows, you're bombarded
with ads everywhere and stuff like that. And that's just not the way we operate in the Linux world.
You know, it's like, if we see an ads somewhere, we're like, kill it, kill it from, from orbit,
or whatever. You know, it's like we don't want that kind of system. If any of the distribution
start going down that road, then, you know, new distributions pop up that say, well, we're going
to do the same thing, but we're not going to do it with ads. Or we're going to make sure that,
you know, your privacy is preserved and we're not sending telemetry data back to some central
repository that's keeping track of what you're doing or something like that. Or, you know,
Microsoft's recent delve into taking screenshots of your desktop and stuff like that. What's that
all about? So a lot of this stuff really, you know, from a free software, Linux, open source
software point view, it's just like it doesn't make any sense. You hear me talking about free software
and open source. These are two different terms for mostly the same thing. It just depends on who you
ask. But essentially, the reason why open source software matters is because as Red Hat's founder
Bob Young said, he said, close source software is like buying a car with the hood welded shut.
You know, it's like, who would buy that? Why would, you know, but yet consumers more and more are
being forced to buy stuff that's like this, where you don't have the ability to open it up and fix
it yourself and see what the actual hardware product is doing. And so you don't know, you know,
it's like what it essentially becomes a black box and you don't know what it's doing. You have to
like put sensors around it to try to figure out what's doing. But with open source software,
you can actually open up the code and look and be sure that it's not sending your data away
or it's not like scanning your hard drive to find stuff or and send it back to the author or whatever.
And it gives you the privilege to change the software. One of the problems that comes up a lot
with commercial software is that eventually, you know, a company might go out of business or stop
making a piece of software. But there were people that were depending on being able to use that software.
A great example of this in my life is a family tree and genealogy software. My dad
once put a whole bunch of information into some family tree software and then the vendor went away
and that software no longer works or more modern versions of windows. You know, what what do you
to do? You can't open up this file format anymore. Fortunately, I'm able to, you know, run
older versions of it in like a virtual machine that runs older version of windows or something like that.
And then I can export the data. With open source, you can just port the software to work on
the new operating system or work on a new architecture or whatever. You know, you have that ability
to to keep that software alive and keep it going so that the next generation has that ability
and passes it along. Security bugs can be discovered faster. Although if people aren't looking,
they might not get discovered for a long time. But in general, you know, you'll see a lot more
bug reports on open source software and a big part of that is simply because you can look directly
at the code. But that ideally causes it to have less vulnerabilities over time. And also,
the vulnerability is tend to be fixed a lot faster. They get fixed quickly and patches get sent out.
And since we're all trying to help each other, you know, there's no reason to like hold them back
or whatever. So, yeah, let me just, I just want to say again, welcome to our community and I invite
you to participate in it. If this is your first time listening to a hacker public radio podcast,
I encourage you to also participate in this community. There's thousands of episodes out there
covering all kinds of topics, you know, Linux, relate, open source stuff, but a broader range than that.
And you might consider recording your own episode. So, thanks, take care.
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