Following instructions; avoiding assumptions (part 1): downloading the ISO

For the sake of this exercise, I'm going to ask you to do something simple. In this particular case, the downloading of an .iso of the latest Linux Mint to your computer's hard disk.  

There are quite a few assumptions here: that you know what's meant by download; that you know what Linux MInt is and that you know what an .iso image is. 

Often, it helps to have a statement of what we want to achieve and why we're doing it. So...

Linux Mint is a popular Ubuntu-based distribution that we're going to download as an .iso file; we're then going to write the .iso to a USB thumb drive and boot into the live environment. This will allow you to explore Linux without making any changes to your computer. If we're happy with the live environment, we're going to take the next step and install it on our computer. 

Well, okay, you're reading my channel, so I'm entitled to a few assumptions. For example, you know how to open a browser and navigate the world wide web. If given an URL, I'm assuming you'll be able to get there. So please go here:

https://linuxmint.com/  -- you will be taken to the Linux Mint home page. 

The Download button is right there on the front page, so click on it. You might expect the download to start here, but it doesn't because there are choices to make, always a complicating factor. When you click on the Download button, you're taken here: https://linuxmint.com/download.php ... 

... where you have to decide what version of Linux Mint you want to download. We're going to download the flagship Cinnamon edition. 

Click the Download button. Again, the download doesn't start. You have to make more decisions and more choices. We're on a page where we have to choose a mirror (download location) from a list. Most will work, but there's no point downloading from a UK download mirror if you're in Australia. Also, there's this scary message, which most of us ignore, including almost every tutorial on downloading and installing Linux Mint (but it's about checking you have a genuine .iso): 

Scroll through the list of mirrors until you find one that takes your fancy. I'm in the UK, but there's nothing to stop me going German or Danish (adding a cup of coffee as it downloads).

                                                      

Click on the link and the download will either start or your file manager will open inviting you to save it somewhere. The file name will look like this:

If the latter, navigate to where you want to save the file and click Save. The download will begin and all you have to do is wait. 

After all of the above -- avoiding assumptions isn't easy -- all we've done is download the file. We haven't done anything with it. The more complicated bit is still to come. 

I think I'll add "(part 1)" to the title, and pick it up in "(part 2)"

Ubuntu-based

"DistroX is a Ubuntu-based distro that provides a sleek desktop experience while being light on resources..."

"DistroY is a Ubuntu-based distro optimised for..."

"DistroZ is a Ubuntu-based distro designed to provide an easy transition for Windows users..."

I could go on. There are, in short, a lot of Ubuntu-based distros. Among my favourites are: 

• Linux Mint
• Linux Lite
• Pop! OS (which has taken a sabbatical to essentially rewrite Gnome in Rust)
• Zorin OS
• Tuxedo OS (for KDE)

All the above are Ubuntu-based, but are independent distros in their own right, as distinct from the official flavours of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

There's a chap called Titus on Youtube, who gets quite sniffy about all this forking. He avers that you only need three distros. Those are:

• Debian
• Fedora
• Arch

He mentions Opensuse, which I would include, but dismisses it as too niche. He doesn't mention Slackware at all. He also rather charmlessly suggests you could eliminate 90% of "all these forks and Linux distributions and no-one would blink an eye.." Despite the smug, elitist tone, he does have a point, particularly when it comes to understanding why there are so many distributions. 

You and I could make our own distro. Let's call it John OS. So what do we want to base it on? Let's base it on Ubuntu in keeping with the title of the post (Ubuntu, itself, is based on Debian). So we take the Ubuntu base, and add an existing desktop -- say Cinnamon -- which we're going to customise to give it a unique look. Maybe move the bar to the top and set it to auto-hide, make it fatter or thinner, and install Plank at the bottom with our favourite selection of applications pinned. Let's go with Brave as the browser; Gnome Office (just to be different) as the office suite; Haruna as the media player. These choices will be described as "eccentric" if you're lucky enough to get reviews because there are more conventional choices: for example, Firefox is usually the first browser of choice. 

Distros come and go; there are lots of discontinued distros. Anyone remember Pinguy? But Titus's entirely valid point is that you could just have installed Debian or Ubuntu (to stick with the theme) and uninstalled and/or installed the things you needed to achieve the same effect. All the ingredients are out there; you can take the ingredients and bake the cake how you like. Distros are just ready made cakes in the patisserie window for you to choose from. 

Ubuntu

Ubuntu came, saw, and conquered -- in Linux terms, that is. And not monetarily, a fact that would lead to all the subsequent bad decisions, after the "How do we monetise this?" question had reared its ugly head and wouldn't leave the room. It was released in 2004 and used Gnome 2.6 as its desktop environment. 

Based on Debian, Ubuntu was amazing. Straightforward to install with a curated selection of software rather than just everything thrown in. It stood the biggest chance of making whatever year the year of Linux on the desktop was supposed to be. They took some criticism for handing out CDs of their free operating  system in a nice cardboard wallet without mentioning Linux at all. But I understand the rationale. Linux had -- and still has (entirely unjustifiably in my opinion) -- a reputation for being geeky, difficult, not for ordinary users. And too many well-meaning Linux channels are too ready to heave an understanding sigh and go along with this, which is just fine and dandy for Microsoft. They don't want an informed population who demand the right to install and use an OS of their choice on their computers. I'll address these issues in future posts. 

Ubuntu back then certainly stood out, though I also remember Mepis as being easy to use and PCLinuxOS, but Ubuntu gained huge popularity and its creator had been to space. Fancy. Then came Unity and HUD. If memory serves, they also had a cloud storage facility like Dropbox, which they later abandoned due to cost. I can't quite remember the chronology, but they later abandoned Unity and went back to Gnome, but not before they'd cheesed off the Linux community with an unannounced kick-back arrangement with Amazon. I, too, have opinions about Amazon, sufficiently strong to stop me shopping there, but that's a subject for another post. Ubuntu then introduced and pushed Snaps and forbade their official community flavours -- Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, et al -- from also shipping Flatpak. Other distros had caught up -- though, to be fair, quite a few were Ubuntu-based. But Ubuntu had fallen from its position of golden grace, and never got it back. And they probably don't care, having given up on the desktop as a revenue stream.  

A slight digression here on conjugating companies. Apparently, it should be singular, "The BBC is denying..."; "Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu..." But it feels odd to me, especially when using a pronoun. "The BBC has denied something or other. It stated that..." All this is by way of my explaining using the plural conjugation. Anyway, back to our tale of Ubuntu's tumble from the heights of Linux favour.

Arguably, a lot of the criticism of Ubuntu is a bit over-blown. Canonical is/are a corporation and therefore their raison d'etre is to make money. Any good they do or did is entirely incidental, and they did a lot of good in accelerating the usability of Linux on the desktop. To be clear, Ubuntu is still a good recommendation for new users; it's just that now there are so many alternatives -- Linux Mint, Fedora, MX Linux, Pop! OS (another story in the making) -- that don't come with the problematic baggage, even though said baggage can be rectified in a matter of minutes. Flatpak is easily installed; Snaps removed; Amazon purged. 

All this is, in many ways, too much knowledge and information. Why should you care? If you want to give Linux a go and someone offers to install Ubuntu for you, go for it. It often is -- and has historically been -- a newbie's first foray. And you're more than likely to have a good experience. There's certainly lots of support.

Before Ubuntu

Some of you will remember Linspire (Lindows) and Xandros. These were attempts to make Linux easy and break the Microsoft monopoly.They did not succeed because money talks and a dominant market position can be exploited. 

I bought Xandros -- absurdly it had activation, mimicking Windows -- and installed it on my computer. It wouldn't activate. The company, when I contacted them, worked with me to address the issue. They were glad of my patience and perseverance, and rewarded me with a Professional addition of Xandros, which I downloaded and installed. 

None of this was really in the spirit of Linux -- certainly it bore no relation to Stallman's vision -- but was rather an opportunistic space and time money-grab where some companies thought they could monetise Linux on the desktop. Xandros, I remember, had a sophisticated implementation of Wine called Crossover that allowed you to install Microsoft Office, only without Clippy. This was sold as a virtue. I believe Xandros later bought Linspire, who were subsequently paid by Microsoft to piss off, and piss off they duly did. 

I had tried a few "distros" by then: Suse -- not yet Opensuse -- Mandrake, which topped the charts for a while, Linspire (because they couldn't call it Lindows), Caldera, and the aforementioned Xandros. I almost certainly tried other distros from discs without knowing their names. 

Then came Ubuntu, which changed the game. 

DOS and all that

Once upon a time, along time ago, I had a 386 computer running Dos 5.0 and -- what I really liked -- Word Perfect 5.1, a truly wonderful word processor (all that blue). I used and enjoyed this unnetworked PC a lot, and one day I woke up to find it had contracted a virus -- a Spanish virus no less -- and wouldn't boot. I was appalled, disgusted, outraged, mostly because I had no idea how to remedy the situation.

I took it to a computer shop and asked the nice man behind the counter how much it would cost to fix. He said £25, which didn't strike me as a monstrous sum, probably a result of the fact I was considerably behind the curve and the world had moved on to Windows 9x something or other. Anyway, when he'd finished, I had what I had before only Dos had been upgraded to 6.22. Whoopity-do. I promised myself that this would never happen again. Not that my computer wouldn't fail to boot -- of course it would -- but that I wouldn't be able to fix the issue myself. 

To this end, I acquired Dos on disks -- various versions, though conventional wisdom had it that the latest was the best -- ready for the next time some foreign or home-grown virus infected my computer and stopped it from booting. I learned that these viruses were called boot viruses, and they would pass into history quite quickly. Quite rapidly, infecting networks became the aim of virus writers -- mostly for mischief, but sometimes for gain. 

Once I had all my software -- the OS, my word processor, a couple of games on disk -- I started installing things just for fun... until one day, in another flat, with my partner, I created a quad-boot system on a system with a 1GB hard disk, and danced around in an unseemly way consumed with an inappropriate excitement. For those of you interested, the four OSes in question were OS/2 from IBM, Linux (Caldera, I think), BeOS, and Dos. I used the OS/2 bootloader and was absurdly pleased that everything booted. I still have a box set of OS/2.

Many years later I would understand the politics of what was going on -- that Microsoft, for corporate reasons, was seeking to dominate the OS market by fair means or foul. Mostly foul. They killed off Dr Dos by making sure Windows wouldn't run on it. And leaned on manufactures to make sure BeOS didn't get a foothold. And so they came to market prominence -- so much so that the average computer user would come to view using Windows in much the same way as eating off a plate. Something that wasn't thought about, merely done, and justified -- if justification ever became necessary -- after the fact. 

It was at this point that Linux, an operating system free to install and use took a hold on my imagination. In a world where -- incredibly -- you didn't have a right to food, you did have a right to an operating system. Because Torvalds had decided to use Stallman's licence for the kernel he had created. I didn't understand back then that it was Stallman's vision to create a free OS, and that Torvalds had, by accident, stolen that vision by creating the kernel that made everything fall into place.

So began my trip down Linux Avenue, and my distaste for the corporate shenanigans that went on for no other reason than to protect their bottom line and their dominant market position.