With the continued enshittification of Windows 11 and relentless onslaught of privacy-invading additions to commercial operating systems, I have seen more and more people discuss wanting to try out, or outright move, to Linux. The question that generally then follows is, “Which distro should I use?" The perennial answer to this question has generally been either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. While both of these distributions are indeed relatively beginner-friendly on their face, and the added promise of a focus towards stability reduces the chances that a new user would need to engage with more involved troubleshooting tasks, I find the presented options rather lacking for any context beyond a generic response.

First and foremost, this is not an article designed to convince you to use Linux. Frankly, I don’t think it’s entirely beneficial to try and convince you of that much. Rather, I want to take a look at the things that make Linux and other Open Source or otherwise “niche”1 operating systems appealing to myself and folks with similar sensibilities. I have been using Linux for well over a decade at this point.

I posted this to the Fediverse today and wanted to archive it here as well. I’ve been mulling over these thoughts for awhile and I think finally managed to massage them into a mostly coherent stream of thought. So I present it here without edit nor embellishment, enjoy. I’m often reminded of - and both scared and empowered by - the fact that culture, history, and politics are not stagnant.

Recently, working on a migration project where a portion of the stack was built in ruby, I needed to determine a small and dependency-less way of implementing a liveness probe/health check for sidekiq. After coming across a number of posts detailing a gem I could include as a dependency, I decided to take a stab at creating something a bit simpler. For a number of reasons, I don’t love introducing new dependencies to a stack, especially when it comes to production-grade code.