Just Use Linux Stupid - JULS!

I’m very much a product of the eighties PC revolution. The introduction of the IBM PC was pivotal in the career I ended up in, as well as my first serious programming language, Turbo Pascal.

So logically, Microsoft has predominantly been my de-facto technology partner for the past 30 years – with couple of exceptions.

Windows didn’t really become competitive as a network client until 3.1 came out in 1993. So the client-server competition in the late eighties was between Novell and various Unix spin-offs, like SCO UNIX, HP UX and IBM AIX. In those day’s I became a big fan on Unix and coined my own philosophy about it:

Life is to short for anything else than Unix

But despite technical superiority, the fractured Unix vendors had no chance against the Windows colossal.

Unix went back to the realm of academia and hobbyist which spurred off Linux. Like the mythical serpent Hydra, Unix’s demise resulted in a spawn of Linux distribution that even started to take over smart devices in the form of Android. And even macOS is a derivative of Unix!

I only discovered the last fact a couple of years and now Mac is my workstation of choice.

And last – and by no mean least, I’m slowly discovering that Linux is starting to pop-up all over the cloud!

In the last few day’s I’ve been trying out Node.js deployment on the Google Compute Engine and Heroku. For my testing I picked loopback4, which is in Developer Preview #1 and not ideal to test deployment. So of course I didn’t get it work and after brief pondering on whether to test it on Azure or AWS, I thought bugger that – let’s try a Linux Virtual Machine.

So I’ve done a full circle since the late eighties early nineties and starting to appreciate again that using anything else than Unix is a waste of time – hence my new abbreviation JULS – Just Use Linux Stupid!