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 It was a few weeks ago; a seven year old computer, first of the Windows XP generation, was breathing its last breath. It was an extra PC we had in the work place; no one much used it, because the boot up times took forever, the time it took to load the desktop would set you comatose from boredom, it made an awful cranking noise whenever a program was executed, the speakers were mute, the video was poor, and loading applications more often resulted in crashes than success. Then, one day, it wouldn't even boot into Windows; it would just hang and hang on the initial load screen. It was time to euthanize the poor thing; we powered it down; it would be in the junk heap soon.
But then something unexpected happened; someone had the idea to bring it back from the dead; it was reanimated. Three days after I was sure it was dead, I came into the office to find it there, a corpse with a plastic shell and silicon innards, executing operations, humming away quietly, given new life, reinvigorated with Linux. I was shocked to say the least. The dead are supposed to stay dead. I looked at the old PC incredulously. A shiver ran down my spine. Where was the terrible grinding noise when I launched a web browser? Why weren't the applications crashing two out of three times on launch? How come it could boot down and back up in only a couple of minutes? Someone must have replaced some of the aging hardware; I was sure of it. But I was wrong. The hardware was the same; only the operating system had changed. It was now running Xubuntu (a derivative of Linux with the lightweight Xfce desktop). Well, it must have been a rather old copy of Xubuntu to run on that hardware, right? I was wrong again; it was the latest version of the operating system. It had the latest software, the latest patches. It looked good again; the sound worked again. A new co-worker had needed a PC for nothing more than web browsing, checking e-mail, and writing Word documents. Someone decided to play God and bring a dead PC back to life. With Linux, needs were met; expense was avoided. It's not supposed to work that way; dead computers are supposed to stay dead; we're all supposed to be good little consumers and keep buying, buying, buying, every couple years. We're supposed to keep buying newer and newer hardware so we can do the same things we did on older hardware years earlier. We're not supposed to be extending the lifespan of our computers, but Linux isn't about “supposed to”; Linux has no qualms about raising the dead. It will keep doing this until, to quote The Epic of Gilgamesh, “the dead will outnumber the living!” Related Article: A Linux Valentine Only registered users can write comments.
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