Why Linux Now?

I am not the first disgruntled user to decide to give up on the major OS and move to linux. Indeed the very creation of the linux kernel was in part due to the corporate malfeasance that was the practice of charging thousands of dollars for the UNIX operating system.

Also, this isn't the first time I've gone through this. In 1999 I had moved to a new city and worked at a small PC repair/build shop where my bread and butter was scrubbing the inordinate number of viruses PCs of the time accumulated, and attempting to rescue the precious data of people who depended on hard drives that couldn't handle a computer falling 1 foot. I discovered Red Hat linux loitering in my favorite technical bookstore, before enterprise, before Fedora, distributed on CD with kernel 2.2.18. I then enrolled in a community college course to learn linux system administration, and the rest is history. I remember being ridiculed by a few people I looked up to for doing this--little did they know I had laid the foundation for my career.

Of course at that time linux on AMD K62 with EDO RAM was more of a novelty. Many things did not work. Dependency hell with early rpms was truly hell and could take days and wiping your system to resolve. Custom compiles of your own code or a kernel could also take a full day on those slow single core machines. There wasn't even a thought of using office software or graphics software yet. It was just the joy of seeing it run Apache web server so efficiently.

There is a marked difference between building and configuring computers versus actually using them to do something creative. That divide has always been very clear to me being on the former side so many times. I have to take time to remember that most people only experience computers in the latter way: as users of semi-magical but mostly frustrating black box.

The second major push to linux occurred after having acquired a job that would allow me to use my machine as I saw fit, I chose to commit to the linux desktop completely. This was at the release of Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. At that time the linux desktop was burgeoning, and although not even close to the completeness of today the linux desktop was actually becoming a full time usable system. Parts of the German government had committed to using SuSE. The US government had embraced Red Hat Enterprise with the success of SElinux. I had just finished my RHCE 5 a year or so earlier. Ubuntu had just introduced Unity Desktop which to me is still the cleanest desktop for X11. Enthusiasts have preserved Unity (https://ubuntuunity.org/) though to me it is unusable until it migrates to Wayland. I was learning Ruby & Puppet at the time.

Unfortunately about 2 years later, the startup where I worked was acquired and the first mandate was Office365 & Sharepoint and that forced me back onto MacOS only. My audio system was still a Macbook Pro with Ableton Live and I'd never really completed the transition mostly because Jack Audio Connection kit was so obtuse and the tools I tried did not really agree with me except Hydrogen drum machine. Music making at the time was simpler yet more difficult for me to complete and I had less time for it.

And here we are again in 2026. It's more than a decade since I last tried to switch and we have seen so many changes in every operating system driven mostly by the huge hardware gains in that period and, of course, now AI. By comparison my first linux machine was a K62 400Mhz with 128MB EDO RAM, my first transition system was a Lenovo Thinkpad T60 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, and my machines today, including my iPhone, leave those specs in the dust. So what changed?

What has changed is the relentless pace of enshittification of technology. I use the term enshittification directly from the book by Cory Doctorow of the same name: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250417602-enshittification?bookstore=bookshoporg. Apple is a gross purveyor of enshittification and it seems to grow worse as we approach a departure of Tim Cook. Steve Jobs was excellent at inculcating in us that he was a benevolent dictator providing us the tools we didn't know we needed all while bringing us the walled garden of the App Store, for our protection, of course.

But now the negative trade off that came with so many similar controlling moves by Apple is laid very much bare, I think most obviously with the relentless '1 year per OS major revision' nonsense we all endure now. There is no real functional benefit to the user to an annual major OS release, there is only a benefit to those that charge a subscription cost to their private software, or as the case may be to obligate you to buy new hardware due to obsolescence or obligate you to a major software version upgrade. It seems like all MacOS software vendors have now adopted this cadence, not to deliver anything functionally new but just to deliver that annual punch to the user's wallet. There is no ethical standard for what constitutes an upgrade so in may cases the upgrade is literally just patching for the new OS version.

This type of upcharge is at the heart of enshittification. Take OWC SoftRaid (https://www.owc.com/solutions/softraid/) for instance. For no apparent reason Apple deprecated software raid in their OS years ago, but OWC kept it alive to run their external storage enclosures. For a while it was free, then a small charge, then they charged upgrade fees every year when the MacOS major version updated, then switched to charging an exorbitant annual subscription fee of $150, for no real functional difference except being compatible with the latest OS. Alternatively, since Apple abandonded inclusion of ZFS they promised years ago, you can take matters into your own hands and brave using OpenZFS if you carefully read the documentation and take care during upgrades. All of this is for what should arguably still be included in the OS provided by Apple.

I am not saying that OWC should not be allowed to charge a fee for a software service. In fact, I am strong believer in open source but do not believe in free software, and I do not crack software. All software comes at a cost, it's just a matter of who bears the cost. While there are many volunteers, huge enterprises like Canonical are what makes linux distributions free, huge technology companies fund and support the development of the linux kernel. The open source community is not techno-anarchism. If you don't like the cost of a software product use something else. When I want to edit graphics I choose not to pay Adobe and use tools by competitors or free open source tools.

So to be clear, I do not choose to switch to linux because I believe it should all be free. I am happily subscribing to Bitwig Studio which I believe is worth every penny. I am switching to linux because I believe it is actually better. I am switching because it is more free in that sense of being unchained from bad decisions of the latest benevolent dictator.

And to be even less subtle, some of Apple's latest decisions have been outrageous. The initiative to focus on a bunch of ugly glass visual bubbles on the screen while the core OS still struggles with basic performance problems is infuriating. The convergence between MacOS, iPadOS and iOS into the same enshittified platform is a not so slow reduction in quality and feature set. It's 2026 and we still can't do basic development work on a $2000 iPad and its Files app it's close to useless. It's 2026 and I still can't copy a media file to my iPad and then copy it back using the same cable due to Apple's DRM. It's 2026 and I had to spend a full day analyzing logs using Claude Code to discover I needed to disable useless synapse caching related to Spotlight on my Mac Studio so I would stop getting stupid spinning beach balls and crashing Finder. It's 2026 and while I have been warned about kernel extension based drivers ad nauseam, they are the only stable way to install drivers for external interfaces because the new buildkit based drivers are just too flaky. It's 2026 and iMessages are still closed to non Apple devices despite every other secure chat client having found a way to do it. And despite the existence of https://opensource.apple.com/ Apple also seems hellbent on quashing any hardware interoperability not just by not cooperating with UEFI initiatives, but most recently by releasing monitors that contain A processors that are only usable by Macs.

I am not the only one feeling this weariness. But I am able to contribute to moving away from it. I have gone through several iterations discovering a set of distribution and related software to help me move forward and I will follow up with explanations of these in further posts.