The Unix (Linux) Frame Of Mind

If you are migrating from Windows to Linux, one of the barriers you will encounter (besides the myriad superficial differences in the user interface) is the whole "culture thing."

Using a Unix-like operating system involves more than learning where the buttons are located on the desktop. It requires a different way of thinking about your computer. On top of that, Linux requires that you learn about your relationship with the Free and open source software communities. That will be the subject, no doubt, of many future postings, but for now we'll talk about the Unix frame of mind.

To understand Unix, you have to understand its historical context. Unix certainly has its faults, but if you understand its history, you can see that many of its "features" are due to the state of computing during its formative years. But it's also important to realize that just because something is old does not mean that it is necessarily bad. Take for instance, the command line interface. If you listen to pundits and the PC magazine writers, you would think that the command line is the equivalent of waterboarding to the modern computer user. I liken use of a graphical user interface to watching television and the command line to reading a book. They are very different, but both are valid (and valuable) if used in the proper way.

So what is "the Unix frame of mind?" It is based on some the following principles:

The computer is multi-user. Unix was designed for "big" computers. Big, expensive computers that supported many users at the same time. This has a number of implications. For one, it meant a different security model. On a multi-user computer, it is essential that one user cannot trash another user, or the entire system. It also implies that communities can form among the computer's users. If you have Fedora or any of the other Red Hat family of Linux distributions, you may have noticed that it runs sendmail by default. This is part of the Unix tradition. Users on a system send email to each other. The first form of instant messaging was the write command which sent a text message to another user's terminal session.

Automate everything. Back in the 1960's IBM used a marketing slogan, "Machines should work. People should think." Yet today, we have millions of office workers sitting in front of PCs pumping their mice all day. Why? It's because the computer is not doing the work. The human is. The Unix way is to instruct the computer how to do the work and then forget about it. Back in the 1990s I marveled at the cron daemon. It could perform tasks on a scheduled basis. I remember leaving my PC on all night and letting it do the work I needed and having a summary of the results each morning. It did the work so I didn't have to.

Everyone programs. The computer is a tool, or rather, it is a huge collection of tools that can be arranged to perform work. To do this, you must program. You have to break your tasks into simple steps and arrange the tools to perform them. Unix actually makes this fairly simple. You can create pipelines of commands or write shell scripts. Have you noticed how, over the years, Windows has removed all the programming tools from its system? This keeps the users helpless. If they want a solution, they have to go out and buy it. By contrast, every major Linux distribution includes the shell, perl, python, text editors and thousands of tools for building solutions. If you need more, there is just about every programming tool under the sun available for immediate download.

A computer is not "easy to use." That is a marketing myth. A computer is no more easy to use than a violin, but with much study and practice, both can produce beautiful music.

It all depends on your frame of mind.

Every Linux user should learn something about the history of Unix. The Wikipedia is a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Also check out Eric Raymond's The Art Of Unix Programming:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/