Revolution

"The revolution will not be televised
the revolution will be no re-run brother
the revolution will be live..." Gil Scott Heron..1971


A day devoted to the geek in me, I finally gave in to temptation and bought a Linux magasine with the intention of exploring all things free and open source.

Like everyone else, I've been seduced by sleek sophistication of microsoft and apple - the demon spawn of Jobs and Gates. I suppose at least Gates is doing a bit of good with the $zillions he's scammed off us.

Thing is, there's lots of amazing software out there that's free and open .. not spying on us, tying us in to these global corporations, but functioning for everyones mutual benefit.

Adobe have just announced that their software will be available as subscription only - £20/month for photoshop users. Now they have the monopoly, they can suck everyone into this parasitic pricing structure. Is this value for money? No. Is it getting ploughed into developing the product? No. Are there very rich shareholders (soon to be much richer) licking their lips and leafing brochures for a new beach condo in Antigua? Absolutely!

I think the least I can do is look into the open source revolution and become involved in some way. I've looked through the Linux magasine, and concluded that I'm probably not clever enough to fully understand it, but I'm going to try.

I bought the mag for the free "distro" DVD of the openSUSE operating system only to discover when I read it, this flavour probably wouldn't suit a newbie like me. I'm plumping for Linux Mint I think. Not only are there 50-100 different "distro"'s of Linux operating systems available, but Linux Mint has 4 different interfaces (MATE, Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce) - as different as Apple Mac and Windows. How fantastic is that? I can install it alongside Windows and choose Linux or Windows when I turn the PC on.

That's just the operating system - there are 1000's of applications including spreadsheets, word processors and databases as good as microsofts, GIMP that does pretty much everything Photoshop does and so on..

I might have discovered a new obsession..