If everyone on Earth drives a 1993 Toyota Corolla... nobody has an awesome car.
We're not really talking about cars here. We're talking about computer Operating Systems.
Back in 2013, I wrote a book entitled “Linux is [BLEEP]”. (That bleep is a naughty word that is a synonym with “awesome”.) That book was filled the brim with naughty words like that. I wrote that during my “blue” period (I don’t swear much nowadays.)
The book was mostly a series of essays about Linux related topics. With lots of goofiness and naughty words. Miraculously, it went on to become an Amazon top 10 best seller in the Essay category. Which is just weird.
What follows is one of those essays. I always liked this one.
Note: There’s even a mention of the “Unity” desktop environment. Can’t get much more 2013 than that.
My first car was a 1989 Buick LeSabre. All white on the outside and all red on the inside. It was a boat of a car. Huge. Difficult to park. And it sucked down gas like an [offensive, racist metaphor to use for someone who drinks something really fast].
But I loved it. The ride was smooth and the red-leather bench seats made this the ultimate car to take to a drive-in movie. Driving it made me feel like a pimp. Which was a pretty amazing accomplishment for this pasty, skinny, little nerd.
The car was unique (or about as unique as most mass produced cars get). It had style. It had personality.
... It got totaled by a truck delivering cheese only a few short years after I drove it off the lot.
[Seriously. A cheese truck plowed into that poor Buick. Stupid cheese truck.]
One of my co-workers, at the time, had a 1993 Toyota Corolla. In blue. A perfectly fine car. Drove well and got reasonably good mileage – certainly it guzzled the gas at a far more reasonable pace than my big old Pimp-mobile.
There was just one, glaring, problem with that '93 Corolla: It seemed like every single other person in the greater Seattle metropolitan area had one too. Also in blue.
At first, he thought that was awesome. Driving around town he would smile and waive if he pulled up next to another person in this particular car owner club. Lots and lots of waving. And smiling.
As the months dragged on, the smile vanished, with the wave turning into more of a limp raising of the pointer finger – without actually removing the hand from the steering wheel – in order to let the other Corolla-ite know that he had, indeed, noticed that they were driving the same damned car.
Eventually even that little finger-raising thing went away too. Replaced, instead, by him adamantly refusing to make eye-contact with anyone driving that accursed car. I call this “Adam's Grumpy Corolla Period”.
Oh, yeah, the guy's name was Adam. I forgot to mention that. Well. Truth be told his name is pretty irrelevant. We could change it to “Steve” and the story would be the same. You know what? Forget that I even told you his name. It'll be more mysterious and exciting that way.
The “Grumpy Period”, for this UNNAMED DUDE OF MYSTERY, continued for quite a long time. Maybe a year or so. Not joking. This man really started to hate his efficient little blue car. Not through any fault of the cars, mind you – the car was just doing its job. And it did it well enough. Got him from point A to point B. Never broke down. It wasn't the roomiest or most comfortable car around, but it certainly did what it was designed to do.
He resented it. Even started kicking the tires.
And not in that “I'm going to tap the tires with my feet in order to see if they're of good quality” way. More in the “Take that you stupid car” way. It was hard to watch this Man-Car relationship, that started out with so much love and hope... devolve into something so... sucky.
[Seriously. What's the deal with “kicking the tires”? Why do people do that? Are there really cars out there that fall apart when a person lightly kicks a tire? Does the wheel just pop off?]
But, eventually, all his negative car-feelings lost steam. His spirit was broken by the blue, metal (and plastic) beast.
About this point he began to reconnect with the rest of the Corolla-driving world. Not in an angry way, nor in a happy way. What was once a smile and waive had become... a shrug. Here, let me walk you through a typical experience:
Adam... I mean SOME GUY... pulls up to a stop light in his little blue car. Right next to his car is another one, just like his – only in a slightly different shade of blue – driven by another man who also looks like he's had his will broken.
The two men make eye contact.
One man shrugs and cocks his head, ever so slightly, to the side. As if to indicate “Yeah. I know. Boring car, right?”.
The other man does that thing that's “half-way between a smile and a frown” and slowly, and slightly, nods his head. Closing his eyes for just an instant, as if weeping, quietly, deep down. They understand each others pain.
At that moment any car could pull up beside them... and that third car would instantly be awesome.
Just by it's very nature of being different. Any car. Any car, at all. A beat-up pick-up truck with a duct taped muffler… and mudflaps with Yosemite Sam on it. One of those tiny little two-seaters that look like plastic escape pods. Or my big, old boat of an '89 Buick. All would be made instantly more awesome by simply not being the same as every other damned car.
Now, I'm not big on the whole “using cars as a metaphor for computers” thing. Been overdone. And, really, it doesn't even apply most of the time. Computers and cars are, as you may have noticed, not the same thing. But, in this particular case, I'm going to force this analogy to work. (And, yes, I know that a "metaphor" is not the same thing as an "analogy"... but I'm going to force that to be the case as well. Through sheer will power.)
Let's do an experiment. Go around and look at the faces of people using PC's running Windows. Doesn't matter what they're doing.
Note the look of distant sadness in their eyes.
Then sit down next to them with your laptop, running Linux. You could be using any flavor of Linux. Any Desktop Environment -- KDE, GNOME, Unity... it truly doesn't matter. Don't say a word. Don't make a point of showing them what your computer screen looks like or what you are running... just make sure they can see it out of the corner of their eye.
[Yes. There are multiple people... but they only have one eye, between them, of which they can see out of the corner of.]
Give it a few minutes. Wait until they've definitely noticed that you're not running Windows.
What you do from there is entirely up to you. Just note two things:
You have just made another human being, who had already had his will broken by a boring Operating System, even more sad.
You are awesome.
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