Ironically, I'm switching to FreeBSD because I'm already tired. My bones are aching from years of abuse. I'm tired of..
..being told what I can and can't do with my computers. Did you know many scanners and photocopiers cannot reproduce money? Apparently the US government has worked with the hardware manufactures to perform this feat. What's next? Probably not being able to listen to music that I'm not "certified" as owning. Or being able to rip a DVD I purchased.
..of not being in control of my computer. The two straws that broke my Wincamel's back were SP2 killing my machine (which I eventually solved with a BIOS update), and then (less seriously) not being able to set the theme of the task bar to the Win 2000 theme. Now I'm going to run GNOME and FVWM2, which I will be in full control of my desktop. No weird crap anymore.
..of skills becoming outdated. I was a master of the Commodore. I was a master of AmigaDOS. I was a master of MS-DOS. I was a master of Win95. I was a master of Windows NT4. Then a funny thing happened, I realized if I spent the time to learn UNIX, I could run it for the rest of life, without having to learn a new OS every time Microsoft needed to keep their stock price up.
..of GUI's. What a marvelous thing to be able to shell in to my own computer, from anywhere in the world, from many kind of computers - and check my mail, read newsgroups, write programs, etc.
..of having to enter serial numbers for tons of software I legitimately purchased. The worst is having to type in Microsoft's 44-digit activation codes anytime I want to change my HD, say from RAID 0 to RAID 1. Normally this involves a call to India.
..of purchasing software. Why drive to CompUSA and purchase WordPerfect, when I go to my ports directory and install OpenOffice? Actually I've done both, and going to the directory was a lot cheaper. Why buy MS-SQL or Sybase when I can get Interbase, MySQL, or PostreSQL for free?
..of stupid software. Firefox is so much better than IE, it's hard to where to begin. Throw in the Adblock extension, and it's the perfect tabbed browsing experience. IE is a nightmare of fear and chaos, "Hey someone sent me a cool JPEG to view, OH ITS A VIRUS!"
..of Linux distributions with fatal flaws. I went on a giant search to pick the perfect Linux distro, and I ended up selecting FreeBSD. Every single distro had some aspect I didn't like.
..of proprietary formats. All the emails I lost over the years that were in some kind of Outlook format that at the time I was either too lazy or too ignorant, to make a back up of.
..of malware. UNIX has been secure since it supported multiple users, which was a very long time ago. Windows has never been, and likely will never be, secure. I bought my brother a Mac, he sometimes calls to see if he needs to be concerned about the latest virus making the rounds. "No.", I tell him.
My point is, the knowledge you gain about UNIX is your's forever. The freedom is forever. The control is forever.
If want to be a sysadmin, you don't have to be master of everything. You just need to be on the path - and you are.
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