For most people, beer is beer.  You take grain, hops, water, and yeast, you brew it, then you drink it.  For a certain group, of course, things are a little different.  Beer suddenly becomes a status symbol, a statement.  Drinking Budweiser says something about you.  So does drinking Flat Tire.  If you brew your own, well, you’re in a whole new ballpark of coolness right there.  For most people, putting that much thought into beer is a pointless exercise.  For most people, treating operating systems the way white snobs treat beer would also be a pointless exercise.

Nerds, needless to say, are not most people.

For nerds, the operating system of choice, more often than not, is Linux.  It may not be the operating system they boot their machines with, but, sure as the sunrise, most every self-respecting nerd will have a virtual machine that runs Linux or, more likely, have their computer(s) set to dual boot between Linux and Windows.  For nerds, Windows is a necessary evil - they don’t like it, but it’s what most games are run under.  Some nerds will spend an incredible amount of time getting their favorite games to run under Linux; those that do achieve a small slice of ur-Nerdiness that other nerds are obligated to feel supremely jealous of.

What is it that makes Linux special?  The answer they’ll give you is complex, focusing on how Linux is more secure than Windows, how Linux is “easier to use” than Windows, how Linux is “free as in speech”, and so on.  Under no circumstances should you ask a nerd what “free as in speech” means. The real answer, however, is much simpler - it’s because Linux is based on UNIX, an operating system that was the primary means of job security for nerds until Windows NT came along and made it possible for any idiot to become a mediocre sysadmin.  What made UNIX special was that it was almost incomprehensibly and fiendishly difficult to work on, requiring you to enter commands like the following to do anything useful:

[ 1] s/^[^A-Za-z]*/&\n/
[ 2] :loop
[ 3] /\n$/!{
[ 4] h
[ 5] x
[ 6] s/^[^\n]*\n(.).*/\1/
[ 7] y/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/
[ 8] x
[ 9] G
[10] s/\n.([A-Za-z]*[^A-Za-z]*)([^\n]*)\n(.)/\3\1\n\2/
[11] b loop
[12] }
[13] s/\n//

Right.  You can see how anything that requires someone to know how to do crap like that to do something as trivial as capitalizing the first letter in a word could be a great source of job security - as a UNIX admin, all you had to do was slam your hand on the keyboard from time to time and it’d look like you were doing work.  For all you knew, you probably were.  Then, Microsoft got it in their head that they could make a server-grade operating system, and, just like that, every nerd on the planet knew the jig was up.

Well, not quite every nerd… while most nerds were playing with UNIX at school or convincing their bosses that an expensive UNIX server was required to accomplish some seemingly trivial computer-related task, there were a few nerds trying to come up with another reason to keep UNIX in the server room.  Their goal:  Create a free UNIX, one that didn’t cost anybody a single dime to use.

They were successful, but the nerds made a fatal mistake - they forgot to get buy-in from important white people first.  What many nerds forget is that, in the end, important white people are always the ones that pay the bills.  This bugs nerds to no end, and will be the subject of future posts.

Meanwhile, another branch of nerds were working on the same thing.  Unlike the first group of nerds, they couched their efforts in terms of freedom from corporate manipulation, inventing terms like “open source” and “free as in speech”, which was necessary to get buy-in from important white people.  With the help of a rather precocious Finnish nerd, Linux was born.  It was free.  It had just enough of a social statement behind it for nerds to play against white people guilt to push it into the server room.  It wasn’t made by Microsoft, which is a big, nasty corporation - white people hate big, nasty corporations.  Most importantly, it was even more fiendishly difficult to administer than the original UNIX, at least at first.

There was just one problem - it’s really hard to show off how much of a nerd you are outside of a server room.  Thus, the quest to get Linux on the desktop began.

That quest began over ten years ago.  Since that time, Linux has only started to get usable enough for ordinary people to have a faint chance of figuring it out.  Meanwhile, another UNIX-based system, built on the efforts of the first group of nerds to create a free UNIX, is all the rage among trendy white people.  Real nerds (i.e. nerds that are not white people in disguise - since white people gravitate towards money, and since being a nerd was a rather lucrative title for a brief period in American history, there are many white people that chose a career other than law after art school) hate Apple due to their ability to make a user friendly version of UNIX.  If important white people actually figure out that it’s possible to run servers on their trendy white fruit-adorned products, nerds will be out of a job permanently, only to be replaced by much more socially adept liberal, left-leaning white hipsters with penchants for turtlenecks.

Just like a nerd’s knowledge and preference of Monty Python productions say something about the nerd, knowledge and preference of Linux distributions is also useful for sorting out how close a nerd is to ur-Nerdiness:

Ubuntu - Ubuntu is widely considered the “starter” Linux, something that those who are not familiar with Linux will cut their teeth on.  It’s relatively inoffensive, runs on most hardware, and is fairly easy to use.  It’s also the operating system used on the laptop that’s being used to write this very blog entry.  Claiming that you prefer Ubuntu will either earn you an understanding smile or a derisive jeer.  Either way, it will not earn you a seat to the next nerd D&D party.  In wine circles, declaring Ubuntu to be your favorite Linux distribution is akin to declaring that “Arbor Mist” is your favorite wine.

Fedora Core/CentOS/OpenSUSE - These three distributions are based on distributions that nerds run into at work; consequently, they’re fairly popular choices among nerds.  Generally, Fedora Core or CentOS are fairly safe bets; claiming to like OpenSUSE puts you in the middle of a political firestorm among nerds that you want as little as possible to do with, due to the corporate parent of OpenSUSE getting dangerously cuddly with certain large corporations.  In wine circles, declaring one of these to be your favorite distribution would be akin to declaring a common Paso Robles wine to be your favorite.

Gentoo/Slackware/Debian - These are three older distributions; older, in the case of Linux, means “pointlessly difficult to use”.  Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to feign competence with these distributions. You will be found out nearly instantly.  This would be the equivalent of claiming that your favorite wine is some well known old French vintage - you have to really know your stuff to have an intelligent conversation about it.

Xandros/Linspire - These distributions are forbidden!  Claiming that you enjoy these Linux distributions is like enjoying wine from Oklahoma.  That’s just not cool.

Following the Linux distribution/wine analogy, claiming that you don’t like Linux at all but instead prefer any flavor of BSD or Solaris is akin to walking into a wine party and declaring, “Oh, I don’t drink grape wine - I prefer mead.“  It’s a gutsy, daring, bold move that better be defensible, otherwise you’re just going to become the douche of the party.

Image of Tux found on Wikipedia.

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