Linux.com: Linux: Niftier Than Sliced Bread

“Linux is, by all accounts, a bitch to learn. It’s certainly
given me hours of frustration, hours of wondering why something
wouldn’t work, or hours of wondering how to do something. There
have been moments of triumph, of smacking my forehead when I
realise that I’d been doing something fundamentally wrong. There
have been moments of insight, when the structure clicks in to
place, and finally, I grok. I will often while away an afternoon
attempting to figure out what a program does and how it does it,
and then spend hours thinking about what else I can do with it; the
implications of what I learn in any given hour can keep me busy for
days.”

“It takes long hours of work to achieve this — long hours
of staring blankly at documentation, playing around with commands,
searching through configuration files. But in the end comes the
reward. The moment when you completely understand how a
program, a protocol, a configuration file, or what a document is
saying and how to accomplish what you’ve been trying to do is worth
every minute of the hours you spent trying to do it.”

“That said, here’s the cool stuff I did this week, and what
bearing it has on the thesis that Linux is worth the immense mental
effort.”

Complete
Story