Nothing pleases Jonni Bidwell more than converting the uninitiated to Linux. Not even waking up before the alarm goes off.
Your magazine is all gobbledegook,” they said. “Nonsensical acronyms,” they scoffed. Yup, the management at LXF Towers really haven’t gotten very far with this Linux thing. But we don’t pander to their demands, we serve only you, lovely readers. So when you said the same thing, what could we do but show you how easy it is to get started with Linux?
To keep things unconventional we’re going to use a lesser-known, but nonetheless wonderful, distribution (that’s an OS to you) called Feren OS. Feren has been designed to be accessible to everyone, whether they’re a Mac user, a Windows user or have never used a computer before in their life. Feren is based on the immensely popular Linux Mint (which in turn is based on Ubuntu), so barring some cosmetic differences anything we demonstrate on the former should work in almost exactly the same way as it does in Mint.
Linux doesn’t have to be all command line jargon, obscure error messages or patching and compiling arcane-looking C to make things work. If you’ve had such a Linux experience in the past, then maybe now is the time to look again. Things have moved along rather impressively. And as more and more people become aware that they don’t have to buy into the privacy invading, nuisance updates, and unstable ecosystem that other operating systems offer, desktop Linux is becoming increasingly more popular with everyday users. In many cases free, open source applications are just as good as their Windows counterparts, and the more people that use them, the better they’re going to get.
Even if Feren isn’t your thing, hopefully this dalliance with Linux will show you something of what’s possible, and encourage you to explore further. There’s no shortage of great Linuxes, and we’ll never tire of urging people to switch to one of them.
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