If i couldn't use Linux at work, I would just quit.

I get that Windows is kinda boring, but it's still like a thousand times more interesting and customizable than anything Apple makes. I find the whole Apple aesthetic to be painfully boring and restrictive. I get that it's more fashionable or whatever. I just hate it.

In the early 90s at the dawn of my programing/sysadmin career. I showed up to my first week of work at "Initech" in dress pants, shirt, and tie. The senior gray beard UNIX sysadmin wore wholey jeans and ratty t-shirts. I don't recall whether he sat me down and told me, or I figured it out on my own that to be taken seriously in a technical field you must dress down. Brilliant people look disheveled (see Albert Einstein, Steve Wozniak, et al). I ditched the stupid tie & began dressing more comfortably.

Anthropologists call this antagonistic aculturation. Us IT geeks intentionally set our selves apart from the business drones & we had to exercise our privilege of dressing comfortabley while working ungodly hours to solve impossible problems.

Now I'm the gray beard and I've mentoed the brighter of the pimple faced youths I've hired in the ancient customs of our tribe. Looking back, It seems that IT's greatest influence on business has not been the increased efficiency of the paperless office, but the casual attire that most office workers now enjoy.

You're welcome, world.

I know it's beside your point, but I want to chime in...

My understanding of the history of fashion is that back in the 1950s America...they were trying to nudge culture into accepting their worldview.

On the contrary, I don't think that's how the mentality came about, or was held at that time at all. If you go back to the 1850s or 1750s, suits and dresses (or some older variant of them) were a sign of wealth, intelligence, high class living, etc. They had to be hand-tailored by experts using rare fabrics and dyes that had to be shipped all around the world. Then the industrial revolution came, and clothing was able to be mass produced (usually at the cost of quality). Suddenly the middle class had access to suits and dresses, but the perception that it was something for the wealthy was still there. For many businesses targeting the middle class, the suit and dress WERE the uniform, as a means of displaying how regal their brand is.

And it's not like we've gotten past this. If you go on any of the social media sites with ads, take a look at what you see: some knock-off piece of trendy clothing that's made to look like a high end fashion brand, but targeting the lower/middle class.

All that said, I'm all for the "punk rock" mentality. Don't do what your parents did just because society told them to tell you it was important. Stick it to the man, yadda yadda. But I think it's a trap to assume that the 1950s proletariat felt any differently than the same class of people do today.

As for windows v linux, of the people who are aware of both yet continue using windows, I think most would say that they use it specifically because they have a "preference for something that i can just set up and not have to tinker with" and because they also aren't making their choice based on "the trackers in win11 or because [they] care that Microsoft is an evil megacorp".

I don't understand why so many people are comfortable using the Office Job OS when they could be using something that suits them.

It comes preinstalled on most computers people buy. Tbh that is mostly the reason.

It's like if you bought a house and it came with a full closet of "good enough for you" suits and instead of going out and buying comfy clothes you just use the suits provided, especially because you know how to wear suits and haven't yet figured out how to wear hoodies which look "harder" (ok the analogy is falling apart but ykwim).

Love your analogy. However I must say windows looks terrible. Then again so do suits, so it holds up. I had to run a win10 VM a while back in order to flip the developer bit on the oculus (don't even get me started on that PoS). Hadn't used it in years. Felt like some kind of money grab freak show. I couldn't even mount an iso without having to visit several pushy sites and use one of those creepy installers. That's when it hit me how digitally spoiled I truly am.

You people who make Linux you identity should go touch grass. Fur real, it's weird.

Windows doesn't let me have a desktop cube or have my windows burn up or be torn apart by claws when closed.

Sure, I also like the GNOME workflow and the open source ethics and repositories and the like, but my inner 12 year old likes the eye candy, too.

I work as an web admin for a small, all remote, company. I use Linux and I wear fuzzy socks.

I appreciate the not your office OS commentary. I have the use Windows for work. I do this mostly via RDP to a work provided laptop, as well as a win10 VM for MS Teams. And I take great pleasure in shutting those down at the end of the work day.

The last tolerable version of Windows for me was XP. I find myself fond of Windows 98, but that's probably just nostalgia speaking.

Oh, I thought this was going to be a post about you being trans. Threw me with the title /j

Ah, the freedom to modify software as you wish. Got to love it.

I thought you were going to say you liked lint (the source code checker).

What are you referring to exactly by "suits at home" in terms of OSes? I always thought that using Linux is about doing whatever you want / whatever feels most comfortable to you.

This all falls apart as a "reason" when you consider Windows Home vs Windows Enterprise.

The better reason is that Windows Home sucks.

Wait... You're not using Linux at work???

This is beautifully written and I agree with the analogy, though I never saw it that way before. Thank you for sharing this.