Preaching Linux to ordinary passing normies, painfully cringe (げきさむ).
I have a relative who is a furry, goes to Furry Infinity meetups, knows a bit of 3D modeling, likes playing R6, and is also a Megaport Festival live-music guy, while I only go to CWT. I say I use Arch Linux btw all day and suggest that he switch his system to Linux.
While taking an Ubuntu basics course offered to freshmen, I debated with the professor about the difference between soft links and hard links, leaving the Linux beginner classmates next to me completely confused.
I suggested to the professor that papers should not use the proprietary font Times New Roman. We should use the free Liberation Serif!
At an NTU Bahamut board meetup, I introduced Ubuntu on my laptop to a KanColle admiral.
When statistical software could not run on Linux, an older sister figure who only knew what a Macbook was asked me why I used this weird system.
Nobody had heard of Duckduckgo. When I said there are search engines other than Google, it drew a wave of awkward stares.
While taking an English teaching methodology course, I used GCC bootstrapping as an analogy for linguistic grammar bootstrapping, drawing a speechless silence.
When taking a course using the operating systems dinosaur book, I insisted on installing MSYS2 on a Windows computer and using Vim to write multithreaded programs. The result produced by GCC was different from the teacher’s MSVC.
Even though it was clearly a course teaching .Net Windows Forms, I demonstrated how it ran translated through Wine on Linux.
I secretly installed LibreOffice on the shared office computer, and it has not been noticed to this day. Maybe they think this Office 2007 just looks strangely weird.
At a GenAI teaching site, I yelled fuck you Nvidia, we should buy AMD or Intel graphics cards and install them to run on Linux, what the hell is Windows even. But they said that after using Linux, they often broke the graphical interface and did not want to try anymore.
When someone asked what an old Windows XP laptop could still do and said they were willing to try all kinds of systems, I suggested they install Plan 9.
In a professional translators’ group, I suggested using Weblate, commonly used for open source collaboration, instead of the commercial software Crowdin, and got blasted by pragmatists.
Wandering around the College of Liberal Arts wearing free software clothes, like old man Richard Stallman (おやじ), makes me feel he could wear the same signature red shirt from youth to old age. What is slightly sad is that in the past, almost nobody in the College of Liberal Arts recognized the FreeBSD daemon and Linux penguin on my clothes. I should go walk around the College of Science.
All of these problems were only relieved after I attended the small-circle meetups of Kaohsiung KaLuG and Taipei SLAT. I do not want to be a script kiddie anymore. This is the real domain that belongs to super hackers! One day I will go to COSCUP!
