Subj : Re: Windows vs Linux
To   : Nightfox
From : boraxman
Date : Sat Apr 23 2022 13:06:59

 Ni>  bo> For someone who had only realy used DOS and Windows up until 98, it w
 Ni>  bo> quite a paradigm shift to see multitasking and networking on the comm
 Ni>  bo> line, in text mode, and the filesystem, no drive letters and long
 Ni>  bo> filenames natively supported. 
 Ni> 
 Ni>  bo> Things I assumed were fundamental about PC's, weren't.
 Ni> 
 Ni> Linux was definitely a paradigm shift.
 Ni> I had seen networking on the command line in DOS though, at least to some
 Ni> extent.  It was possible to set up DOS in an IPX/SPX network, and many
 Ni> DOS games supported IPX/SPX network protocols for multiplayer support. 
 Ni> My high school had a computer lab with some PCs that had DOS & Windows
 Ni> 3.1 set up on them, and I remember seeing Novell Netware network drivers
 Ni> for DOS when they were booting up.
 Ni> 
 Ni> Also, at some point around 1995 or 1996, I had seen a dialup internet
 Ni> stack for DOS..  It would let you dial into your ISP from DOS and then
 Ni> exit out but stay resident, and there was a text-based web browser for
 Ni> DOS that I had seen as well (it was similar to the Lynx web browser in
 Ni> Linux).  That DOS internet package may have been part of Kali, which was
 Ni> a piece of software mainly for games, which translated IPX/SPX
 Ni> networking to TCP/IP so you could play DOS multiplayer games over the
 Ni> internet.  (They later made a Windows 9x version of Kali too..)
 Ni> 
 Ni> Nightfox

The other paradigm shift, which I'm discussing with tensor about, is the "Unix philosophy".  This took longer to sink in.

In DOS and Windows, you think of the computer as an OS, and applications which run on the OS.  The applications are mini appliances, in that they are all each self-contained systems.  You run Application X to solve problem X, Application Y to solve problem Y.  You have Application X saved files and Application Y saved files.  They are all their own computing environment, and multitasking really does nothing more than allow these applications to run simultaneously in their own little worlds.

Initially when I moved to GNU/Linux, I looked for windows equivalents, an word processing program, a program to do this or that.  But (and learning Emacs helped with this shift) I started to realise that the computer wasn't a platform, but just data and data transformation, and that data could be liberated from their application jails.  My data wasn't data for an application, it was MY data, and should be, where possible, application agnostic.  Bookmarks, address books, saved passwords should exist 'outside' of apps, and belong to your system.  Your system uses your data, and software is just their to make your system use your data.

A good example is the unix "pass" program.  It is a password manager, but all it does is save username/password pairs (as well as any other information) in text files encrypted with GPG.  The thing is, it is very easy to build your own program to interface with this, and there are many existing ones which do.  I use redpass, which with a press of a key, comes up on the screen, and I can select which password to retrieve, and autotype it.  But with the data stored in an open format, any 'pass' based tool utilities the same database, and you can write your own scripts which use that data.  Previously I used a different password manger, in the "windows style", which is good, but the data was trapped in that.

I now view my system as one holistic system, and prefer tools which facilitate this.

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