The Catechetic Converter

I’m probably going to be “that guy” to some of you. That guy who discovers something new to him and then integrates it into his personality and won’t shut up about it until something else comes along to take it’s place. I’ve been that guy kind of all my life, to be honest (ask my friends). My current “that guy” thing is the Linux distribution (I restrained myself from saying “distro”) known as Ubuntu and it has, in a small way, changed my life.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been an Apple guy since at least 2006, after an obsession with Sony products (and the building of a PC just after high school). My first ever Apple product was an iPod, the one with the touch wheel. I was so enamored with the design (as I was with the late-90s clear Macs) that I decided to finally purchase a Mac computer for myself. After my beloved Sony Vaio laptop was stolen from my apartment in college, I went almost a year without a computer (living fearfully and carefully with my entire life on a thumb drive that traveled with me everywhere—this was well before cloud storage). With money bequeathed to me from my grandmother after her funeral, I purchased that ubiquitous white plastic Apple iMac laptop that everyone had (except for the kids who had the black pro model). And I used it all through the rest of college and my seminary education. It was chipped and scratched by the time I got a good deal on a 27-inch iMac with an Intel processor, thanks to a friend who worked at the Apple Store. This was during my first year of marriage, before kids and when my wife had a very well-paying accounting job for a major firm (while I worked as the lowest-paid priest in my diocese). In addition to that, I was fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem: iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches. I read Steve Jobs’ biography (which still sits on my shelf and I pick up to read on occasion even nowadays). I was maybe “that guy” about Apple for a time.

What I love(d) about Apple is the seriousness they took with regards to design. They aimed to make beautiful products. And not only were they beautiful, they simply worked.

I hate Windows. I pretty much hate everything Microsoft. But I really hate Windows. I especially hated that Windows lied to me. Like when I went to delete software, just sending it to the recycle bin was not enough. You had to track down stuff in the registry after running an uninstaller, just to make sure it was all gone. What blew my mind with my first Mac was that deleting software was as simple as moving it to “trash.” Then emptying that trash. Then there was the refinement. Pages offered crisp-looking documents with a range of beautiful fonts. The icons for minimizing and closing windows in MacOS looked like candied jewels. The physical hardware of the machines were minimalist works of art. No company aside from Braun or Dyson seemed to be focused on the connection between function and form quite like Apple. And that philosophy carried over into the software side as well. Jobs was correct in recognizing that personal computing was only going to take off if things were designed with an eye toward intuition. He hung around with guys like Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, guys who viewed computers in a vein similar to HAM radios. But Jobs knew that he’d have to remove personal computers from the realm of hobbyists and offer a product that seemed “finished” if people were going to shell out loads of money in order to use that product. And the proof is right in front of us: the Macintosh played an instrumental role in the adoption of personal computers and Apple sits as the most valuable company in the world.

Reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs reveals something many many people have noted: Apple struggles without Steve Jobs. When Apple fired Jobs, they floundered as a company and got too spread-out, offering products that no one seemed interested in purchasing. Jobs’ return brought with it the foundation of success that the company rides today, but looking at Apple these days and you can see that they’ve not really been able to overcome Jobs’ death (compounded by the losing of Jony Ive from the design side of things as well). Jobs’ philosophy of ensuring that these consumer products simply “work” has morphed instead into an approach of spoon-feeding applications and gradually locking people into the Apple ecosystem, seemingly more to keep them from leaving than any real benefit to remaining.

Take my beloved Pages, for instance. Every time I’ve updated that program (which has gradually become more and more like a mobile app than a proper word processor) I’ve lost fonts that I used and certain settings are gone or buried for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense to anyone but the engineers at Apple. Then there’s the planned obsolescence. Which, I get. Maintaining old hardware and software requires people and thus incurs costs on diminishing returns and all of that. But Apple continues to have their hardware and software locked up, which results in these beautiful products becoming seen as disposable, discardable, and furthering an ugly and environmentally catastrophic sense of consumerism.

Jobs seemed to hold the view that a computer should not insist upon itself. The computer, for him, is a tool toward a different end, not an end in itself. Increasingly, Apple feels like they’re making products for the sake of the product, and making changes to those products that feel insistent and not like the catalyst for liberation that Jobs envisioned in his dad’s garage all those years ago.

Which brings me, finally, to Ubuntu.

So that mid-2011 Mac I spoke about? I still have it and use it as my “home” computer. When I was called to be the priest of Saint Mary’s in Honolulu, the private school I had been chaplain to gave Saint Mary’s two refurbished Macs as a gift. Both of them the same year and model of my home computer. That was in March of 2020. One of the machines I appropriated for use as my office computer (because I didn’t have one at the church when I arrived). Shortly after the move, I started noticing that my home machine was running slow. I had a ton of stuff on there, so it wasn’t that unexpected. Then the office machine started chugging and I kept getting notices that my OS was no longer able to receive security updates, etc. It was becoming clear that I needed to buy a new computer—or two.

My parish is not big. I do not make a ton of money. So the idea of asking the parish to purchase me a new computer felt selfish. I was not about to keep apologizing to folks about the leaky roof while logging onto a brand new iMac (I really liked the mint green one). Plus there was the added element of what I’d said above about Apple, that the newer Macs were harder to repair and treated as more “disposable” (they glued the motherboard to the screen!). Conventional wisdom (that I picked up when I was working at EB Games in 2000 and part of the “PC Master Race”) was that a Windows machine should last about five years and a Mac between seven and ten, depending on use-level. These machines were hitting fourteen years of age, so old that I could not AirDrop from my iOS devices on them. So, it was time.

Then, Trump happened. Again. And suddenly all the big tech stuff changed in my eyes. Beating big tech felt like both a Christian responsibility and a patriotic need. I thought back to the early chapters of Steve Jobs’ biography and how he articulated the role tech can play in personal liberation. So I decided that I needed to learn Linux. I actually checked out Linux For Dummies from the library. In the course of my reading I learned that not only does Linux run really great on older Macs, but Ubuntu in particular.

This all means that I found myself in a position to try something new, something that would maybe inject new life into my computers—as well as me and my relationship with technology. I dug out an old external drive and got to work on creating a bootable USB drive for experimenting with Ubuntu on Mac. It was a bit more complicated than I expected. One computer basically forgot that it was able to access a WiFi network and so I had to create the drive on a separate same model Mac. I couldn’t use Etcher to get things going (the Mac was too old), so I had to learn to use the Terminal on Mac (which I’ve ever only used extremely sparingly; reminded me of DOS back in the day, which helped when I built my own PC, or when I had to do stuff with BIOS). I had two machines going, plus my iPad for instructions. I felt like I was hacking the Gibson. Once I got the bootable drive set up, I plugged it into the relevant machine, restarted it in order to boot from the drive, and was blown away at how refined and pretty Ubuntu looked—while feeling a deep sense of satisfaction that I got it to work at all. I fell in love almost immediately and so I wiped the memory of the machine and installed Ubuntu as the operating system, running it like it was a fresh computer.

I’m writing this on that machine, using LibreOffice. I love it so much that I get excited to come to work just to use this computer.

Running Ubuntu on this Mac has had an immense impact on my relationship with computers in just the few weeks I’ve had it. Not only does it feel like I’m using a completely brand new computer, it feels rebellious, like I’m in some sort of special club. When I check out apps online and I see that it has Linux support, I feel like I’m part of an inside joke that only cool people get.

Linux feels rebellious to me. I’m sure there are folks who run servers that do not feel this way. But for someone that lives among the normies, to whom it’s either Windows or MacOS, Android or iPhone, this feels counter-cultural. And it feels empowering, like I get to decide when my technology is out of date. I mean, I’m writing this on a nearly fifteen year old machine (which still looks beautiful), using a twenty-five year old Pro Keyboard (the one with the midnight blue clear plastic buttons—the peak of personal computing design—I got it for like ten bucks at a thrift store). There’s plenty of life left in these things and they do not deserve to be relegated to trash heaps. Indeed, the aesthetic beauty of these products is enduring and Linux ensures that they are still functionally useful.

There’s also a spiritual dimension to this as well. In not letting a mega-corporation or three make my technology decisions for me, I am asserting my own self-worth. I am also experiencing a sort of revival, what Saint Paul refers to as the transforming of one’s mind, in opposition to being “conformed to the ways of this world.” The tools and the knowledge to use them is out there. It just takes a little time and effort to acquire it. It doesn’t need to be doled out to me from on high. Rather, it’s all around us and among us, even within us. And this fact is utterly liberating to know.

It’s weird to say, I guess, but this little operating system has had a huge impact on me. Linux changes lives.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.