About Heaven, Hell and Earth

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What’s the difference between heaven and hell? That’s another thing I was teaching my kids, because the common understanding is that hell is a place of eternal suffering in darkness, some kind of a maximum security prison for evil souls, and heaven is a place of eternal happiness and light.

What I told them is that heaven and hell started off as identical places, sort of like a monastery and a prison being almost identical in most ways – in both you have people who are removed from the rest of the world and have their individual cells. Also, there are no doors on hell, that prevent exit. So, what is it that keeps the demons and evil souls inside?

An illustration: take two identical rooms. In one you put 10 evil people, who enjoy humiliating others and causing suffering, who hate God, despise spirituality, and feel most at home in the most materialistic existence possible, where God seemingly cannot disturb them in their evil. In the second room you put 10 good people, who enjoy spreading truth and knowledge, who enjoy making others feel good and empowered, who spend their free time meditating and praying for God’s guidance in everything they do, who aspire to always be better, and who see everyone who is better than themselves as a positive challenge, as an example of something they can achieve if they work harder.

Now guess what is going to happen in each room. In the one with evil people, you will get hell, and in the one with good people, you will get heaven. The thing is, the inhabitants of each room will think they are in heaven, and hell is in the other room. To each group, the way of life of the other group is painful and intolerable. Since the doorway between the groups works in such a way that it only lets you through if you truly change your consciousness in such a way as to become a member of the other group, everyone could theoretically leave, but the inhabitants of heaven have no wish to leave, and the inhabitants of hell could leave, but they would have to repent, exhibit sincere remorse, ask God for forgiveness and adopt true goodness. And if you live in hell, it’s difficult to see heaven as a good place. The others tell you that heaven is inhabited by stupid boring sheep who blindly worship God, who is a tyrant that doesn’t allow anyone to have any fun. To them, heaven is a place of restrictions, fear, slavery and weakness, because they wish to be able to ridicule God, tell lies and laugh cruelly at the stupid victims who believe them and are ruined, they wish to be able to humiliate, beat up, torture and murder others. In heaven, you can’t do any of those things, because it’s so restrictive, and only those who are pathetic enough to be subservient to God can live there. So, basically, if you live in hell, you first need to face the hard truth: that you are in hell, that hell is not the other place, but the place where you are. You need to accept the fact that you are evil, that you are vicious slanderous scum, that all the evil that is happening to you is the result of your choices, and that everything you considered to be good is the result of your evil choices, and of the evil company that you kept because you, essentially, are a worthless piece of trash. You also need to accept the fact that your enemies are neither pathetic nor stupid nor evil, that they are and always were right, and that you slandered them because you were evil. You need to accept all those things only to be able to even conceive leaving hell. Hell doesn’t need doors. The fact that the inhabitants can see heaven and are so disgusted by what they see that they feel the need to crawl to the darkest corner of hell in response and re-affirm their choice for evil, is the true reason why hell isn’t empty. The dark souls see the light of heaven as a destructive force, a deadly evil that wants to destroy everything that they are, and they are in fact right – the light of God is destructive to all evil. In order to leave hell and enter the light of God, an evil being needs to basically die, by ceasing to be everything that it is. Accepting that you are evil and that all your former choices were wrong is hard, and the evil ones are weaklings, because all their choices were in fact those of weakness, because it is always easier to destroy than to create, it’s easier to lie than to tell the truth and accept the consequences, it’s easier to use sarcasm and cynicism to ridicule, than to use valid arguments and to explain your position clearly. Essentially, hell is not only full of evil ones, it is also full of weaklings and idiots, and all of them believe they are strong, good and smart. The problem is, when you are a weak evil fool who believes he’s a righteous intellectual powerhouse, you stay where you are because you think it’s the bright center of the Universe. Hell is where the others are. Your prison is that of your nature. There need not be steel bars on doors and windows if you think you inhabit the best of all possible places.

So, that’s how hell works. You can find ample evidence for this on Earth. Most people live in a hell of their own making, imprisoned within the boundary of their own choices and nature. After a while, they become not only unwilling, but unable to leave. But don’t be fooled into thinking that you understand the reason why people stay in heaven. In fact, if an evil being were to experience even a glimpse of heaven, he would run away screaming. Heaven is not some hedonistic paradise where fanatics get to fuck their virgins and where you get to listen to angels playing lyre on cloud nine. Heaven can be painful. You see, when you experience the light of God, the light is so strong that it makes almost every difference from its nature feel dark. Every imperfection within your soul looks like a dark stain, a source of shame and remorse, something you feel the need to deal with immediately, because it’s intolerable to see the difference between your spiritual structure and God’s light. That’s the reason why there is stratification in the spiritual world – in fact, the real, actual world. Not all beings can take it all, and certainly not at once. So, how to explain the motivating factor?

In the physical world, you have people you admire. When you admire someone, you feel the need to live up to certain standards, in order not to disappoint the one you admire and respect. You are not forced to live up to the standards, but you still do it, because failure to do so would be intolerable – you would feel ashamed and terrible if you made those people feel disappointed in you. However, if you made them feel proud of you, if they react to you with pleasure that you did so well, that is the greatest reward. You earn being in the company of great people by living up to the standards of being a great person yourself. That is the motivation and the ethics of heaven – you don’t want to disappoint God, who is the light in all that is true, brilliant, beautiful and great. You don’t want to disappoint your friends, who worship the same light. You want God’s light to shine brightly in you, and you want your friends to smile at you and feel great joy at your wonderful accomplishment and purity. That’s why you are ready and willing to suffer through all hardships, why you are willing to endure any kind of pain, why saints are willing to endure everything to the point of death and not betray God – because God is all that matters. For the same reason, they are able to resist temptation of lesser pleasures that wish to lead them astray; because God is all that matters. If a great dinner awaits you at home, you will easily resist the temptation of a McDonald’s drive-in on the way. If one is tempted by lesser things, one doesn’t really know God. If one is afraid to do evil because he’s afraid of God’s punishment, he’s a fucking idiot. God is not the one who punishes evil, evil is a choice that leaves you without God.

And that is the tragedy of this place – it’s a trap, that attempts to lure you into accepting the lesser things by blocking your access to God. It’s not an instrument of spiritual evolution, but its opposite – it’s something that wants to lure you into accepting the lesser choices and binding yourself to things other than God. It’s vicious, evil and dangerous almost beyond measure, because it projects mirages upon sand in order to lure you into the desert where you are to die and be consumed by the vultures who control the mirage projector. It offers pleasure and fulfillment from things that are inherently empty. It threatens with dire consequences if you don’t obey, and you don’t know whether its threats are empty. All you have that could offer you any kind of immunity to its lures is memory of God, and your memory was blocked upon entry, so you cannot rely on it. All that remains is your nature, the very structure of your being that guides your choices, and it needs to have great strength in order to offer even mild and moderate guidance. In heaven, it’s relatively easy to choose God, because He is obvious. You will choose against Him if you are outright evil. Here, it’s much harder, because it’s a place designed by God’s enemy, in order to prove some evil, twisted, perverse idea, to destroy as many good souls as possible and to produce as many evil demons as possible, by turning God’s ideas about evolution upside down. The irony is that some of the greatest spiritual teachers are those with the strongest intuitive memory of the actual spiritual world, and their teachings reflect that. On the other hand, the teachings that reflect the nature of this world most correctly, and give the best guidance for success here, are the most spiritually corruptive forms of godless satanism and evil. For instance, if you follow the instructions of Jesus in this world, you’re fucked, but you will fare great after death. On the other hand, if you practice some form of Machiavellian satanism, you’ll do much better here, but you’ll have to make spiritually corruptive choices and your long-term prospects are not good.

But if it comforts you, you can be an angel here. You can be a saint here. You can be a presence of God’s light here. You just have to endure the ridicule of demons, and your flesh is exposed to their weapons. They can do to you everything they wish they could do to God. The choice for goodness here will expose you to much suffering. The real question is, how much is God’s smile worth to you? How much is the pride of other angels in your success and purity worth to you? That’s the crux of the matter.

Religion for children

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I don’t believe that one should not explain religion to children and instead wait for them to grow up and “make up their own mind”. It’s as stupid as saying one should not teach them maths or science and should instead let them grow up ignorant and uneducated and then, when they’re 18, they can make up their own mind about how much 2+2 is. However, I don’t believe in filling their heads with dogma, either. What I do is wait until they are old enough to understand the real explanations, the real theology, and then teach them as I would adults. The thing is, religion is demanding, much more so than science. I could explain forces and vectors to my kids at a very early age; I could teach them how to code in Logo almost as soon as they could read and write. But religion requires a much more advanced and mature ability for abstract thinking, and although you can fill children’s heads with formulaic explanations, in my opinion that would be worse than useless. As a result, I had to start by giving them a very good foundation of rational thinking, problem solving and, essentially, breaking down complexity into solvable parts. At the age of 13, with my older kid, I’m still not sure whether he quite gets is, but I did explain quite a lot about Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, in the sense that I explained how they approach similar issues from different standpoints and provide valid answers, and how different theologies can produce essentially identical ethics. Also, I try to strip down the superficial and get to the core issues; for instance, I explained Christianity as a top-down approach, of a revelation of deep truths from God’s perspective, that’s essentially identical to what was later revealed in the near-death testimonies. Buddhism, on the other hand, is the bottom-up approach by a man who figured out the fundamental problems and worked out ways of solving them, figuring out some of the most sophisticated spiritual truths in the process. Hinduism, however, is a mixture of both top-down revelations through scriptures and bottom-up processes of Yoga, and isn’t as much a religion as a set of religious paths wrapped together by common culture and civilization. Judaism is a history of one tribe’s process of figuring out transcendence, with varying degrees of success; if not for the magnificent phenomenon of Jesus, which required knowledge of the backstory and context of his teachings, it would be historically irrelevant and nobody would care about it; transformed and reshaped by Christianity, it reaches great sophistication and value, although most parts of the traditional Judaism are useful primarily as examples of the things people tried, before Jesus, and failed. But not all religions are good. Islam, for instance, is a product of a deranged mind of a madman, who heard a few things here and there about Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, it all got mixed up in his head and spewed forth in form of psychotic hallucinations. Unlike good religions, Islam is spiritually worthless and exists only for ill. If Satan ever created his own ideal religion, it’s Islam. It makes people dumb, unquestioning, deluded and violent. Essentially, it’s a false religion, trash that needs to disappear. It’s a spiritual virus that reduces everything it touches to shit.

At one point, I tried to explain the concept of prayer, and you might find my explanation interesting, so I’ll repeat it here.

Prayer is often misunderstood, by stupid people who aren’t trained in abstract thought, as a wish-list one recites in the direction of God, expecting him to deliver. However, that’s not how intelligent people understand it. To them, prayer is not about asking God to produce material benefits to the believer, it’s not even about talking. In fact, it’s the process of focused and directed listening. In the process of prayer, you attempt to focus your mind on the best available approximation of God you can reach towards, with the highest, most sophisticated parts of your spirit, and trying to sense what it’s telling you. It’s like sensing a magnetic field with a compass; you watch the needle move and it helps you sense the lines of magnetic force, and thus you scan the topology of the magnetic field. In the process of prayer, you learn about God; where He is, where He is not, what do you need to be in order to feel harmony with That which is Out There. You learn how to feel alignment, and you learn how to feel discrepancy. You learn to live in such a way that you feel approval from that direction, you feel you’re doing the right thing. You do talk, but you talk in order to feel out the direction, you feel which words align with it the best, which thoughts align with it the best, and later, which actions align with it the best. Even learning science and maths, or poetry and literature, can be a form of prayer, if it helps you extend your mind’s reach, make it more flexible and powerful, allow you to think clearly, to feel clearly and remove confusion. Prayer can be a sophisticated and subtle thing. Of course, it can be an act of brainwashing yourself by mindlessly repeating phrases which you don’t even understand. Different people, according to their level of comprehension, understand prayer differently, but that is so with everything; people also understand gravity differently, according to their intellectual prowess.

So yeah, that’s how I teach children about religion. 🙂

About sin

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People have strange ideas about sin, and usually the accompanying imagery is sexual. I assure you, the concept has nothing to do with sex, and it is far from being trivial or arbitrary. But let me explain.

When you don’t know what is right, and you stumble around trying to figure it out, it’s a process of learning. You always make mistakes. It’s the normal process of figuring things out, of breaking through the wall of your limitations.

When you know what is right, you decide to do it, but you occasionally fail, it’s called a lapse. It’s not hypocrisy to know what is right and still occasionally fail to do it. It’s called imperfection. Only God is free of those. The rest of us fuck up, fix the mess, pick ourselves up and try to do better next time.

When you know what is right, and you decide tu bury this feeling, change it and change your concept of right and wrong in order to justify a different course, it’s called sin.

As you can see, sin has nothing to do with mistakes, errors or lapses. It’s a completely different phenomenon. Mortal sin is the kind you refuse to let go until you are destroyed; the kind that makes you stubbornly go the wrong way, defend the wrong choices, until there’s nothing left of your soul to redeem.

You can make mistakes and be free of sin. You can make occasional lapses and be free of sin. You can be deceived or deluded and still be free of sin. It’s not difficult to be free of sin, it’s not something only Jesus could do. It’s as easy as recognizing God, choosing the direction that leads to Him, and be forever loyal, choosing repeatedly, over and over again, the path of renunciation of all that is worldly, illusory and binding, the path of choosing truth over lies, of having your mind’s eye unclouded by desires and deceptions, of being always ready to let go of your life in order to follow God wherever He leads you. And it’s not even difficult, because God is such a great and wonderful prize, that casting everything else aside is no sacrifice. The only sacrifice is enduring this life, being delayed in joining God.

Who’s the enemy, and how to win?

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Watching Alex Jones on his YouTube channel, one would get the impression that “the globalists” are the enemy.

Or is it the leftist liberals, the neo-Marxists, feminists?

Or is it the neo-cons?

Or is it the Muslims and their fifth column in the West, which tries to weaken our resistance to shitty civilization-forming ideologies and the shitty cultures that they form?

If you ask the liberals, it’s “bigotry” and various “oppressions” that are the problem.

So let me tell you what I think.

I think the problem is several levels removed from the place where humans usually look for it. As St. Paul said, it’s not the flesh that’s the enemy, it’s the evil spiritual structure that dominates over it. The war is not against human bodies of this or that group, it’s not against hardware. It’s against software, against the spiritual power, against ideologies and belief systems that contaminate the minds and cause evil and suffering.

Buddha would say that the problem is suffering. The cause of suffering is projection of spiritual power into illusory and ephemeral things. The solution is to detach and withdraw. When the inertia of the flywheel is spent, the result is nirvana.

Jesus had a different take on it. He said that the problem is that Satan basically has power over the world, and is an active force that lies, binds and destroys souls. The solution was to redeem the world from his power by offering sacrifice of sufficient value, and simultaneously forcing Satan to administer the deathblow. It’s a complex equation, but it’s elegant and it had a good chance of actually working.

Because, you see, I think Buddha got one thing wrong, the one Jesus got right. The world is not a passive place where you just happen to invest your energy in form of projections and desires. The world is intentionally designed in such a way as to delude you regarding your true nature and the nature of reality, and to continually sing the sirens’ song of attraction, that provokes attachment and binds your fate to its own. The world is not a passive factor in our situation. It’s in fact the determining factor, exuding influence of such magnitude, that almost any degree of individual choice is outweighed and overshadowed. To say that the world is merely a given and that our attachment to it is our own problem to solve is like stating that gravity has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t happen to just spontaneously fly into space, and that we are holding on to the surface of the Earth by some act of our own volition. In a word, it’s false.

As for the humans, I would divide them into several groups. There are the ones who are aware of the situation and are actively working to counter it. There was about a handful of those throughout history. Then there are those who are aware that there’s some serious problem here, but are unaware of its exact nature, and are doing things that are sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, and sometimes useless.

There are those who don’t see it as a problem, but a great thing, who completely align their spiritual vector with that of the world, and who see attachment of spirit to matter as a great thing, and not a problem. And in the end, there are those who are unaware of anything, and just stumble around life like idiots.

The biggest problem is that the last group forms the vast majority of mankind throughout history. The vast majority of humans are as stupid as rocks. They merely want to preserve their existence as they see it, they want there to be more of things similar to them and less things that are dissimilar or threatening in other ways, they want to reproduce and they want to gain more influence. Tantric yoga would call them “the pashavi”, from pashu, which means “animal”, so it’s roughly translated as animalistic ones, the ones who are stupid animals who fight, feed and make little pashavi. In tantric yoga, the opposite of a pashavi is a yogi. A yogi understands that there’s a problem, he understands that he has to do something to get out of the problem, and he takes active measures, such as gaining knowledge, finding a guru who can teach him, and practising yoga with the goal of attaining liberation from the world.

So, essentially, the humans are divided into staunchly different groups according to the software that runs in their brains. They can be stupid cattle, they can be Satan’s henchmen, and they can be beings who strive for spiritual perfection and freedom, with varying degrees of success. In rare cases, they can be the agents of God, who possess true knowledge and power and are actually able to do something about it all.

As you are probably able to tell, my perspective differs significantly from anything that is widely believed.

My perception of the current state of worldly affairs is that the evil humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, wishing to do some evil, but without a supreme guiding evil force to direct them, and so they often contradict each others’ efforts, while increasing chaos, suffering and the overall amount of evil. The stupid ones are as stupid as they always were, only in greater numbers due to the exponential population growth, and the good ones are so outnumbered and they feel so dispersed and powerless, they are on the verge of getting completely confused and going crazy in this mess.

The thing is, the evil ones are not clearly divided according to ideology. You can’t just say “separate a certain ethnicity or religion or a political group, kill it off and thus solve the problem of evil”. You have evil globalists, but you also have evil nationalists, and evil Christians, and evil atheists. The evil ones are not all Muslims. Basically, there are different intellectual and emotional contents that exist on different spiritual vectors, and it’s the actual vectors that I find interesting, not the labels people put on them. I care whether someone has a spiritual connection to the transcendental or not, whether he understands the nature of the transcendental and the nature of the world, and whether he understands what spiritual choices and actions create what kind of a destiny for himself and others. Heinlein wisely stated that goodness combined with ignorance invariably results in evil, and I would express that as a mathematical formula, where intent multiplied with understanding determines the result. Good intent multiplied with shitty understanding equals evil. Shitty intent multiplied with good understanding equals evil. Only good understanding multiplied with good intent produces good results. Having in mind that people’s understanding of reality is shit, for the absolutely vast majority, you tell me if their intent matters. They are as likely to do evil deeds if they have the best motives, as they are if they have the worst ones. Having that in mind, I’m rather cynical about those who think they have a recipe for fixing things. The communists had it, the Nazis had it, everybody had it. Every damn fool thinks he can make the world a better place, and Buddha would rightly say that the only result of that is being attached to the world, and I would add that the additional result is usually adding your energy to the exact force that makes this world such a terrible place to begin with, because multiplying ignorance with zeal increases the overall “heat” of the chaotic pot in which we are all being cooked.

It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity. It’s not in trying to magically extract and transform evil that is contained in the world, in hope of making it good. The solution is to break the pot in which we are being cooked, even if we are to fall into the fire at first. This world needs to die.

Linux on a Macbook Air

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What do you do with an old late-2010 Core2Duo 1.8GHz Macbook with 2GB RAM, that is no longer able to run the current Mac OS quickly enough? Apple’s recommendation would be to throw it away and buy a new one because it’s about time after 6 years and the hardware probably wore out significantly by now. The second part of the recommendation I have no problem with – since the machine is indeed too slow for running a modern OS with all the applications that I need, I bought a 15” retinabook as a replacement. However, the part where I just throw the old machine away, although all the hardware still functions, it has a very good keyboard, monitor and a touchpad, the battery is above 80% – I don’t think so. So, I tried several things, just to see what can be done.

The first thing I did was boot it from a USB drive containing Ubuntu Trusty Mate LTS 64-bit, to see if it’s actually possible and if all the hardware is correctly recognized. To my surprise, it all worked, completely out-of-the-box and without any sort of additional tweaking, except for one very specific thing, which is the Croatian keyboard layout on a Mac, which is different from the standard Croatian Latin II layout used by Windows and Linux. I tried selecting a combination of a Mac keyboard and Croatian layout in the OS, but it didn’t work. I ended up editing the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/hr file to modify the basic layout:

xkb_symbols "basic" {

    name[Group1]="Croatian";

    include "rs(latin)"

    // Redefine these keys to match XFree86 Croatian layout
    key <AE01> { [         1,     exclam,   asciitilde,   dead_tilde ] };
    key <AE02> { [         2,   quotedbl,           at] };
    key <AE03> { [         3, numbersign,  asciicircum, dead_circumflex ] };
    key <AE05> { [         5,    percent,       degree, dead_abovering ] };
    key <AE07> { [         7,      apostrophe,        grave,   dead_grave ] };
    key <AE11> { [         slash,    question       ]       };
    key <AB10> { [     minus, underscore, dead_belowdot, dead_abovedot ] };
    key <AD06>  { [         y,          Y,    leftarrow,          yen ] };
    key <AB01>  { [         z,          Z, guillemotleft,        less ] };
    key <AD01>  { [         q,          Q,    backslash,  Greek_OMEGA ] };
    key <AD02>  { [         w,          W,          bar,      Lstroke ] };

};

Essentially, what I did was reposition z and y, put apostrophe above 7, and question mark/slash to the right of 0. However, the extended right-alt functionality now works as if on a Windows keyboard, so it’s slightly confusing to have the layouts mixed. (ps.: I had to repost the code because WordPress was acting smart and modified the “tags” so I converted it into html entities).

Other than having to tweak the keyboard layout, I had to use the Nouveau driver for the Nvidia GPU, because any kind of proprietary Nvidia driver, either new or legacy, freezes the screen during boot, when xorg initializes. That’s a bummer because the proprietary driver is much faster, but since the only thing I’m about to use the GPU for is playing YouTube videos on full screen, and that works fine, I’m not worried much. Everything else seems to work fine – the wireless network, the touchpad, the sound, regulating screen brightness and sound volume with the standard Mac keys, everything.

Having ascertained that Linux works, I formatted the SSD from gparted, installed Linux, tested if everything boots properly, and copied my edit of the keyboard layout to the cloud for further use. Then, I decided to test other things, wiped the SSD again, and tried to run the Apple online recovery, which supposedly installs OS X Lion over the Internet. Now that was a disaster – the service appears to work, but after you really start doing it, the Apple server reports that the service isn’t “currently” available. After checking online for other users’ experiences, it turned out that it’s “currently” unavailable since early 2015 if not longer, so basically their service is fubared due to zero fucks given to maintenance of older systems.

OK, I found the USB drive containing the OS X Snow Leopard that I got with the laptop, and, surprisingly, it worked great – I installed the Snow Leopard on the laptop but I couldn’t do anything with it because most modern software refuses to install on a version that old, Apple’s own services such as the iCloud and the Apple Store don’t support it, so I just used it to test a few things and I found out that it’s as fast as I remember it when I just bought the laptop – there’s no lag or delays introduced by the newer versions, everything works great, except that the current Linux is a much more secure and up-to-date system than Snow Leopard, so I did the next experiment; I took the Time Machine drive with the current backup of the 15” retinabook running Sierra, and booted from that. It gave me two options – install clean Sierra, or do a full system recovery from the backup. I did the clean install first, and it surprised me how fast the machine was, much faster than my slow El Capitan installation that I was running before finally giving up on the machine, because I had no time for this shit. Then I decided to take a look at what the full recovery would look like. It worked, but it was as slow or slower than the full installation on El Capitan. I tried playing with it but gave up quickly – after getting used to my new machines, it’s like watching paint dry.

I decided to try Linux again, but with a slight modification – instead of running the perfectly reliable and capable, but visually slightly older-looking Mate (which is basically a green-themed fork of Gnome 2), I decided to try the Ubuntu Trusty Gnome LTS 64-bit version, which runs the more modern and sleek-looking, but potentially more buggy and sometimes less functional Gnome 3. Why did I do that, well, because the search function in Gnome 3 is great, and resembles both Spotlight and Windows 10 search function that I got used to in the modern systems, and visually the Adwaita theme looks very sleek and modern on a Macbook, very much in tune with its minimalist design. So, I loaded it up, copied back my modifications of the keyboard layout (which are actually more difficult to activate here than in Gnome 2, requiring some dpkg-reconfiguring from shell). I made a mistake trying to test if the Nvidia drivers work here – they don’t, and I had to fix things the hard way, by booting into root shell with networking (not so much for the networking, but because in the normal root shell mode the drive is mounted in the read-only mode), did apt-get remove nvidia*, rebooted and it worked. Then I installed the most recent kernel version, just to test that, and yes, the 4.2.0-42-generic kernel works just fine. The rest of the installation was just standard stuff, loading up my standard tools, PGP key and the RSA certificates, chat clients and Dropbox, so that I can sync my keepass2 database containing all my account passwords in encrypted form, as well as the articles for the blog.

So, what did I gain, and what did I lose? I lost the ability to run Lightroom, but this machine is too weak for that, and I removed it from the position of a photo editing laptop in any case. The second thing that doesn’t work is msecure, where I have all my current passwords stored in the original form; the keepass file is a secondary copy, so that’s not great. However, Thunderbird mail works, Skype works, Rocketchat works, Web works and LibreOffice works. The ssh/rsync connection to my servers works, all the secure stuff works, UNIX shell functionality works. Essentially, I can use it for writing, for answering mail, for chat, web and doing stuff on my server via ssh. The battery life seems to be diminished from what I would expect, but it’s actually better than it was on El Capitan and Sierra, which seemed to constantly run some CPU-demanding processes in the background, such as RAM compression, which of course drained the battery very quickly and made the machine emulate a female porn star, being very hot and making loud noises. 🙂

I gained speed. It’s as fast as it was running Snow Leopard when I initially bought it, which is great. Also, I have the ability to run all the current Linux software, and I don’t have to maintain the slow macports source-compiling layer in order to have all the Linux tools available on a Mac. I do realize, however, that I’m approaching this from a somewhat uncommon perspective of someone who uses a Mac as a Linux machine that just happens to run Adobe Lightroom and other commercial software; I never did get a Mac to get the “simple” experience that most users crave. To me, if a machine can’t rsync backups from my server, and if I can’t go into shell and write a 10-line script that will chew out some data, it’s not fit for serious use. I run a Linux virtual machine on my Windows desktop where I actually do all the programming and server maintenance, so having Linux on a laptop that’s supposed to be all about “simplicity of use” is not contradictory in any way – to me, simplicity of use is the ability to mount my server’s directories from Nautilus via ssh, and do a simple copy and paste of files. This works better on Linux than anywhere else. Also, the Geeqie image viewer on Linux is so much better than anything on a Mac, it’s not even funny. These tools can actually make you very productive, if you know how to use them, so for some things I do, Linux is actually an upgrade. However, I can’t run some very important commercial software that I use, so I can’t use Linux on my primary setup. That’s just unfortunate, but it is what it is. Linux is primarily used by people who want free stuff, and are unwilling to pay for software, so nobody serious bothers to write commercial software for it. Yeah, theoretically it’s supposed to be free as freedom, not free as free beer, but in reality, Linux is designed by communists who have serious problems with the concept of money, either because they don’t understand it, because they reject it for ideological reasons, or both. In some cases, however, Linux is an excellent way to save still functional machines from the planned obsolescence death they were sentenced to by the manufacturers. Also, it’s an excellent way of being sure that you don’t have all kinds of nefarious spyware installed by the OS manufacturer, if that’s what you care about; however, since I guess that most of the worst kinds of government spying is done by exploits in the basic SSL routines and certificate authorities, that might not help much.

Also, the thing about Linux is that it tries to write drivers for the generic components used in the hardware, instead for the actual hardware implementation. This means you get a driver for the Broadcom network chip, instead for the, I don’t know, D-Link network card. The great aspect of this is that it cuts through lots of bullshit and gets straight to the point, reducing the number of hardware drivers significantly, and increasing the probability that what you have will just work. The problem is, there isn’t much done to assure that every single implementation of the generic components will actually work, and work optimally. In reality, what this means is that if your hardware happens to be close to the generic implementation, it will just work, as it happened to just work on my late-2010 Macbook Air, for the most part. However, if something isn’t really made to generic spec, as it happens to be the case with my discrete graphics, trying to use the generic drivers will plunge you headfirst from the tall cliff of optimism into the cold sea of fail.

So, do I recommend this? Well, if you’re a hacker and you know what you’re getting yourself into, hell yeah. I did it for shits and giggles, just to see if it can be done. Would I do it on a “productivity” machine, basically my main laptop/desktop that I have to depend on to do real work reliably and produce instant results when I need something? That’s more tricky, and it depends on what you do. I used to have Linux on both my desktop and laptop for about 5 years, from Ubuntu Gutsy to Ubuntu Lucid. Obviously, I managed to get things done, and sometimes I was more productive than on anything else. At other times, I did nothing but fix shit that broke when I updated something. If anything, Linux forces you to keep your skills sharp, by occasionally waking you from sleep with surprise butt sex. On other occasions, you get to laugh watching Windows and Mac users struggle with something that you do with trivial ease. At one point I got tired of the constant whiplash experience from alternating between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and quarantined Linux into its safe virtualized sandbox where it does what it’s good at, without trying to run my hardware with generic open source drivers, or forcing me to find free shitty substitutes for paying $200 for some professionally made piece of software that I need. Essentially, running Linux is like owning a BMW or an Alpha Romeo – it runs great when it runs, but for the most part it’s not great as a daily driver, and it’s fun if you’re a mechanic who enjoys fixing shit on your car to keep your skills sharp. I actually find it quite useful, since I maintain my Linux servers myself and this forces me to stay in touch with the Linux skill-set. It’s not just an exercise in pointless masochism. 🙂