Getting Started with Linux

Ross Brunson and Daniel Lowrie discuss why we need to have foundational Linux skills to enter a variety of job roles. How a curious mind can change things in Linux to make things better.

[MUSIC] Welcome to Intro to Linux. I am your host, Daniel Lowry, and in today's episode, joining me is one Ross Bronson to help us do that very thing. Ross, welcome to the show. What are we gonna to learn today? We're gonna talk about Linux, mostly from the standpoint of, you may have encountered it, you may have seen it, but you may not be using it that much. Yeah, it is a good question. If I'm coming from a Windows shop, I guess, and I'm now being, maybe I wanna use some Linux, big question is why? I've got Windows, it works, why am I moving to this Linux business? Yeah, a lot of reasons. Yeah. So one of the things that we really want to talk about is, for many years there, people had a question about, are we gonna use Linux or not? It was the year of the Linux desktop for about 11 years, something like that, and then we know that we're not gonna do that because it just didn't happen that way. But on the server market, Linux has really become dominant, and it kind of happened in stealth mode. For a while there, Microsoft was giving Linux, as an industry, a hard time and then it was quiet. And then suddenly, one year, we realize, hey, I think we won. So when you look at even Azure, the cloud, all the rest of them, Google Cloud and Amazon, everybody else is using primarily Linux, and there's a couple reasons for that. Number one, the reason why people do that is because of the licensing fees. So when you look at Microsoft's licensing fees and the way they've traditionally done this, it's fairly expensive to run those operating systems at scale. Pay the Big Red Machine, right? Exactly, exactly. And so the other thing that makes a big deal out of this, although Microsoft has made some advances in this, is Linux can be slimmed down to just the tiniest sliver that actually does the task. So for example, if I'm running NGINX as a web server and I just have a few files, I can put that down to sub 384k kind of thing- But where a Windows installation is gonna run you at least 60 gigs of hard drive space. Yeah, it's getting crazy, right? You can slim it down, but it's really an exercise in taking the planer and shaving the bottom of the door. So it's really important to understand the economies of scale and what people are doing these days. And because of that fact, now, all of a sudden, I can put hundreds, maybe thousands, of Linux virtual machines, little tiny ones, and when they go away, if it crashes or whatever, we just simply make more. So ease-of-use, super scalability, when it comes in the server market, it's just dominating that because it's so great for that. Yep, and so that's the kind of the empirical underlying stuff that's there. But because of the economies of scale and everybody working with Amazon, and Google Cloud, and Azure, what you have is this need for Linux skills as a foundational level. And so if people get the foundational Linux skills, then of course, I always tell people it's like a hand, right? So this is Linux skills here and you might go off into databases, you might go off into the high-end virtualization, you might go to print and file. [LAUGH] You know what I mean? But you also might be somebody who's working for Industrial Light and Magic and using Maya, but you might also be somebody who's using Maya and running a huge render farm. Right, all right, well, that's a great start. What else would we want to know about why we would be interested or need to use Linux? Well, one of those is kind of the hacker ethos. And when we say hacker, we say hacker in the right way. Right, the traditional form of hacker of, I like to just hack things together. Exactly, I like to take things apart, every kid who's ever taken apart an important electronic component to their parents dismay and horror, right? That's me. Yeah, no, I'm a- [LAUGH] Been there? Slayer of alarm clocks, that's me. Yes, telephones we're very, very dangerous [CROSSTALK] No toasters, though, cuz those are- Those'll kill you. Yeah, but the thing is, is that desire to get into things and play with things, and really just discover what's going on. There was an application not too long ago that got bought by Apple. And the inventor of the application said the reason why he did the application is cuz when he was a kid, he used to just go through the settings dialogs of everything and just discover all the settings everywhere. And I'm just like, yeah, I remember doing that. And then after a while, you can't keep up. But it's just that concept of, I have a curious mind, I want to see how things work. And if you can understand how things work, oftentimes, you can change them for the better. And so that's another important thing about Linux is you can change it. You don't have to petition Microsoft at one of the user conferences, you can actually go and do it yourself if you have the skills. That's right. I love that whole open source community. It's one of the things that drew me into Linux as well. I can go in there, I can make it the way I like it, customize it to my specifications. And then my workflow gets a whole lot easier because I know exactly how that machine's gonna perform as it does the way I want it to do it, so it's really cool that way. Anything else you want to add before we call this a show? Money, get a good job, the open source workforce, I like to call it. I've been doing a lot of talks at shows and things like that, and especially LinkedIn has a great advice network, that sort of thing. And just making sure that people are able to go out and get good jobs, and get a better job. And a lot of times, if you're in the Windows workforce or your company has a little bit of Linux, if you have Linux skills and a new project comes up or they buy something or whatever, you can be the one that says, hey, I know that. And you can actually get a cool new project or even a new job. All right, well, there's some great reasons right there for why you would want to use Linux. We're gonna look at more and other sundry things about Linux operating system as we move through this little course here, so join us back for those. As for this episode, thanks for watching. [MUSIC]