I'm doing a seminar work about Linux for my Cyber Culture and Subcultures class
(yes that really is a class / I'm on Social Science faculty).
And I need a bit of help with getting bibliography and other sources.
As you probably know Wikipedia dosen't count as an viable source nor anything like that.
So I need a good Book / article on beginning of Linux and any other "interesting" source.
The working title of the seminar work is: Social phenomena of Linux.

As I'm a political science student I'll take a loom through a more ideological point of view.
(But leave the "science" part to me, If there is any Social Scientist here and wants to know - I plan of using the Althussers theory of interpalation mostly)

So far this post lacs a real viable reason why is posted (I could look at the bibliography of Wikipedia and use that)
But I do need you to answer me one question:
Why do you use Linux (i might turn it to poll, but the problem with poll is that there can be an finite number of answers)
So I think that no poll is better.

And the I need you to (scientifically) critically asses some of my thesis.
I think I'll divide Linux distros and even users in two groups:
-Old
-New

These two groups represent two totally different ideals and "ideologies".
Old: stands ideally near the "Unix" experience. You know that "romantic" vision of a
hacker that really "hacks" the code by Him/here self...
"Old" distors in my opinion are: Gentoo, LFS, Arch Slackware (any else?)
New: well new stands for mostly Ubuntu and derivatives and other "main-stream" distros where everything mostly comes out of a box.
And the new user is a user that is not using Linux because he or she wants to get the most of his/hers computer but more or less to be different. To differ oneself from others.
And here comes the Althusser: "Because Ubuntu (per-se) interpelates potential users with "Linux for Human beings"."
But this I think is to black&white.
I'm thinking of "creating a new group" but don't know what to name it.
You know the pragmatic user that uses Linux as stand-alone or double-boot, knows it's weaknesses and strength... (modeled on myself :shade:)

Anyway hope this is the right place to open this thread (I could do it on Kubuntu forums, but I think I'll get the more diverse community here)

Well, this forum is not exactly about Linux, more about KDE, and as you maybe know, KDE is now also available for other platforms, including Windows and Mac.

But it is okay to discuss it here, still a lot of *nix users around here.

neverendingo wrote:Well, this forum is not exactly about Linux, more about KDE, and as you maybe know, KDE is now also available for other platforms, including Windows and Mac.

But it is okay to discuss it here, still a lot of *nix users around here.

Yes I know. I didn't really think on that when I posted this, but the KDEs cross platform might be a really positive part for my seminar work.
To explain:
I can now gather not only the views of those using Linux but also of those that are not using it.
And also I'm planning to have an introduction part where more about Linux as a system will be discussed so I will also take a look at DEs probably mostly KDE and Gnome and just mentioning others.
And I will probably take a look at KDEs cross-platform-ness as a showcase of what begun as an Linux project and slowly outgrew in to a cross-platform project like apache and others...
And if you take a look at OS part of user information you'll see that majority of users are from Linux, so I think they know a thing or two about their system and why are they using it.
The only real problem of posting this topic on KDE forum is that KDE is DE specific so I will not get any answer from the Gnome users...
But depending on the results I'll probably post this question / post on some other forums (probably my local Ubuntu forum to get even more diverse answers)

Well, then let me answer first. I tell you something and i leave it up to you to make something out of it.

Why do i use linux?

It started when i studied computer science when i first heard of linux and that the code is free. That was of course a big interest for me.
At these times i also had a dual boot system with windows. But to experiment/read code in the new linux system (it wasn't what i could use back at the times of Red Hat .

But now i am on a single boot linux system and am using it for everything i do. The most important part about it is, i can change it to everything i could imagine of. I have the full freedom of choice.
I can report bugs and even see where the bug exactly could be. That makes it superior to everything else for me.