How open source has commoditized computers

By Greg Turnquist

Greg L. Turnquist worked on the Spring team for over thirteen years and is a senior staff technical content engineer at Cockroach Labs. He was the lead for Spring Data JPA and Spring Web Services. He wrote Packt's best-selling title, Learning Spring Boot 2.0 2nd Edition, and its 3rd Edition follow-up along many others.

July 31, 2014

mac-snow-whiteAs I type this blog entry, from my wife’s newly purchased MacBook AIr, I marvel at the power of open source. Thanks to open source, we are no longer bound to a particular vendor, operation system, or anything else.

My wife’s old netbook was the last machine in this household that ran Windows. Back when we got married and lived in a smaller house, the desktop computer in the living room ran Ubuntu LInux. It took my wife little effort to learn how to drive that machine, considering she primarily used computers to browse the internet and a little bit of picture management when making Shutterfly books.

I introduced her to OpenOffice (later migrating to LibreOffice) for writing. I then threw in Dropbox and gave her her own folder to keep her own written works. With all these in place, it didn’t even take a whole day before she was up and running, editing her manuscript on the new Mac.

By moving to a handful of open source projects, the need for a particular vendor evaporated. Now we can pick a machine based on more important things like: quality, performance, and tools. I got her a maxed out 13″ MacBook Air (8GB memory , 512GB SSD disk).

Suffice it to say, she is definitely happy. You can even see the decal she just ordered up above! I have gone in and done a couple extra steps, like installing Crashplan to back things up. I am also installing Homebrew in case I need this machine as a backup development workstation. I also flipped on remote login support so I can ssh into this lightweight laptop as needed. It truly is a thing of beauty. Ahh! Goodbye Windows!

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