 I asked a question yesterday on the community tab about what your first operating system was and the responses were all over the place as I expected them to be. Really it has to do with how old you are, when you first got into technology and all that stuff or when you first went to school or whatever maybe. There were responses of people who used MS-DOS, the Commodore 64, early Magintoshes and there were also responses of Windows XP, Windows 8. I saw somebody said Windows 7. Very few people actually said Linux was their first experience in an operating system. And that's not really all that surprising because usually your first experience with a computer at least the way it used to be, your first experience with a computer was probably when you first went to school. Nowadays chances are the kids coming up today will probably have their first experience with an Android phone or an iPad or an iPhone or something. So what's your first experience was really has to do with when you first started using technology. The reason why I asked that question was because I've been thinking a lot about brand loyalty. Now when I first started using computers back when I went to elementary school ages and ages ago, my first experience was with one of the early Magintoshes. I'm not sure which one it was. I had really no interest in knowing what the computer was at that point. I just knew that computers were cool. And throughout my grade school years, I moved from those Apple computers and we moved into like Windows computers. It was around the time Windows 95 and 98 came out and those kind of things were being transitioned into use in schools. And the internet was just becoming a thing really. It was more it was just becoming a thing that more schools had. And it was the days of Alta Vista and the Netscape browser and things like that. So my journey through technology and stuff has been fairly varied because after that, I was a Windows guy for quite a while. And then I tried Linux probably in 2001-ish. A guy I worked with at a pizza joint handed me a CD with OpenSUSE on it. That was my first experience with Linux. In those days, if I remember right, the OpenSUSE disk came with both GNOME and KDE on it installed already so you could switch back and forth. It was really cool, but it was mostly useless because there's very little you could do on it as a normal computing user. Like I managed to get it installed and it was really cool and all that stuff, but really all computing stuff back then, at least compared to today, today really was mostly it was a tool. It was to write a report on or something for school, maybe a little bit of gaming, but there really wasn't a ton of gaming. If you wanted to game back in the early 2000s, you didn't get on computers to game. You got on a PlayStation or an Xbox, but I didn't stick on Linux. I went back to Windows. I use Windows 98 and Windows XP and then I went to college and because of the way student loans work and that kind of stuff, I ended up with a Macintosh and it was one of those little white Macbooks. That was my first modern experience with a Mac prior to that. My experience with Macintosh was way back in elementary school. I was a Mac guy then for a long time. The reason why I've been thinking about brand loyalty so much is because for whatever reason, my little experience as a Mac guy, which probably lasted throughout my college years, I think I use it from 2005-ish to 2011, I guess, and then I went back to Windows. Even now, even today, for whatever reason, I still have some kind of brand loyalty to Apple. I don't understand it. I don't like the company. I don't like how it's run. I don't agree with their world-garden approach to technology, none of this stuff, but I still pay attention to all their keynotes. I still, for whatever, feel like I have to defend them to other people. That's really stupid because, I mean, it's dumb. The same thing is happening with Linux. This has been something that's been going on for a long time in the Linux community. You pick a distro and you become loyal to it, like the people who are really very hardcore into Debian. They will defend Debian probably to the death. Vinyl Arch has such brand loyalty amongst Arch fans that they have literally become a meme. I mean, they've become a meme. They are a meme. And I'm one of those people. I use Arch, by the way, now granted, I use an Arch-based distro. I don't use Vinyl Arch because I'm much too lazy to actually install Arch itself, so that's a whole other thing. People who use Vinyl Arch look down on people like me because of our laziness. I've been thinking about brand loyalty. Because I have a weird attachment to Apple, I don't even own an Apple product right now. I have an old iPad that won't turn on, but I don't use an Apple product day to day. I have an Android phone. I have a computer here that runs Linux full time. It doesn't have a secret partition that's running Big Sur on it or anything. I have that weird attachment to Apple, but I also have a weird attachment to Arch. And so it's just been something that I'm thinking about. So basically, this is a video of me rambling about how I don't really understand brand loyalty. I don't understand why it exists. Because it does. Obviously, I have brand loyalty. I think everybody has some kind of brand that they're really loyal to. It's not even totally a computer thing. Ford versus Chevy, for example. There are four guys. There are Chevy guys here in the United States as well. It's definitely something that exists. And I don't understand it because when it comes down to the Ford versus Chevy debate, one is not better than the other. They're both really expensive vehicles when you buy them brand new. They don't last necessarily longer than each other. If you wanted to buy a brand of car that's going to last you a long time, you buy a Corolla or you buy a Volvo or something, one of those Honda Civic, something that's going to last you a long time, those things tend to last forever. You don't hear about Ford or Chevy's lasting forever. Even though they probably do, some of them, it depends on the circumstances. But there's no real reason for that brand loyalty other than it's just what you prefer. It doesn't make you better than, just because you own something with a blue logo on the front doesn't make you better than the guy with the bow tie across the street. Same thing with Linux, right? Just because I use an arch-based distro or I use Arch doesn't make me better than someone you use Ubuntu, like not even a little bit. So what? I have access to the AUR. Big whoop. I mean, don't get me wrong. I love the AUR. I think everybody should use the AUR. I think I will preach about the glories of how awesome the AUR is until the day I stop using Linux. It doesn't make me better than somebody who uses Ubuntu or Debian or OpenSUSE or Fedora or BSD. I mean, it just doesn't make me better. People who enjoy using Debian and have that fondness of the stability that comes along with using Debian, it doesn't make them better than me because I use a rolling distro and have things break all the time. It doesn't make them better. It doesn't make me better. This loyalty is weird. I guess that's the point of the video. It's just weird because it's also dangerous because maybe not in terms of like Ford versus Chevy or Mac versus Windows or iOS versus Android. Who cares about proprietary nonsense? But in the open source, the free and open source community, brand loyalty can actually be a little bit dangerous because it fosters the spirit of fragmentation that can sometimes cause projects and stuff to be abandoned, can cause their teams to break apart for no reason, and also is the reason why we have nine or 12 or 14 different package managers on Linux. We don't need that many, not really. We don't need Pac-Man and app and zipper and all this stuff. If we could come together on one, it would be so much better because we could go through and focus that development effort on the bigger things, like creating better gaming experiences, like creating a better office suite because Libre office is kind of terrible. And if we could focus some of our effort on actually creating some good things that aren't package managers, that'd be great. Because we have a disparate community that all like different things and they like to focus on whatever they want to focus on, which is perfectly fine. I think it's one of the great things about Linux is you can focus on whatever you want to focus on. We only have so much in terms of resources and the whole, my Linux is better than your Linux mentality can sometimes make that fragmentation even worse. Now, that being said, obviously, I don't think that it can be a bad thing, right? Fragmentation and brand loyalty within the Linux community can be a bad thing. And I do think that it can be dangerous, but I also think that the fact that there's choice in the Linux community is good. So, like I said, brand loyalty is weird because it can be a good thing. It can also be a bad thing. It can be an obsessive thing. And it's just, you know, one of those things that at least in the FOS community has both good and bad sides, right? But all that being said, my Linux is not better than your Linux. Use the Linux that you want to use. Use the window manager you want to use. Use the desktop environment that you want to use. Use the whatever you want to use. That's what's great about Linux. Just don't think because you use that thing that you're better than me. And I will try not to say I'm better than you because I use my version of Linux. So that was longer than I thought it was going to be. And it was a really rambly video. I'm sorry about that. I didn't have a good plan for today. And it's just that's, you know, whatever. But thanks for watching. You can follow me on Linux. You can follow me on Linux. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can follow me on Facebook at Linuxcast. And you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons. Devon, Marcus, Meglund, Donnie, Sven, Merrick, Kampen, Mitchell. Thanks everybody for your support. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.