We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

After maintaining an ad hoc Linux distribution for myself for several years, I replaced it with Debian and have never looked back. One of the main reasons for this has been the mind-boggling quantity of applications and tools which are available from its repositories. Given couple of keywords, or a good guess at the name of the application, APT fetches and installs the necessary packages in a matter of seconds. After years of compiling free software programs from source code, this profoundly changed the way I thought about finding and obtaining software.

Over 10 years later, the speed and convenience of this system still occasionally leaves me awestruck. As a typical example, on one occasion, I was using a pastebin to share the output of a program I was discussing with someone online by copying and pasting it.. The output was fairly long, and it was inconvenient to copy and paste, so I wanted a tool which would read the output from a pipe and upload it directly to the pastebin, without a human in the middle.

Before I fired up an editor to write such a tool, I did a quick search to check if any such thing existed already, and found Stéphane Graber’s pastebinit, which did exactly what I wanted (and more). Not only had someone else had the idea first, they had implemented, released and packaged it over a year earlier. The end result, for me, was that within 30 seconds of discovering that I needed such a tool, I had it installed and working.

Experiences like the above still make me feel like I’m living a scene from the 1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where the protagonists discover that they have already traveled back in time to anticipate their own needs. They merely think about what they need, and there it is. The fact that I am still amazed by this probably makes me sound like a dinosaur to other free software enthusiasts, but this kind of instant gratification is something which is only just beginning to emerge in proprietary systems like the iPhone. The web was designed from the start to work this way, of course, but there is much I can do with free software that I can’t do with web applications (at least for now). The web also doesn’t give me that feeling of personal connection with the creator of the software, or (generally) the opportunity to tailor it for my needs.