CISO IT – Livin' on the Edge: Linux's Impact on Computing, E04

The CISO IT Podcast, hosted by Automox CISO Jason Kikta, is your one-stop shop for all things IT and cybersecurity. Jason knows good security comes from good IT. Step into a CISO’s shoes and trek through the world of technology and cyber defense to stay ahead of potential threats. Each episode is packed with the latest trends, tips, and expert advice.

Creators & Guests

Host

Jason Kikta

Jason Kikta is a fortress of knowledge in cybersecurity, bringing over two decades of frontline experience to the CISO IT podcast. His tenure at US Cyber Command isn't just a credential — it's a cornerstone of his expertise, providing a unique lens through which he views security threats and applies the best ways to prevent or remediate them. At Automox, Jason bridges the gap between good IT and robust security, sharing cutting-edge trends, tips, and expert advice based on the credo good security comes from good IT. His episodes are essential listening for IT professionals aiming to fortify their defenses and stay ahead in the ever-evolving cybersecurity battlefield.

What is Autonomous IT?

Go from monotonous to autonomous IT operations with this series. Hosts from Automox, the IT automation platform for modern organizations, will cover the latest IT trends; Patch Tuesday remediations; ways to save time with Worklets (pre-built scripts); reduce risk; slash complexity; and automate OS, third-party, and configuration updates on all your Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints. Automate confidence everywhere with Automox.

Jason Kikta: 00:00

Alright. On your marks, get set, and let's go. Hey. Welcome, everyone, back to the CISO IT podcast from Automox. I'm your host, Jason Kikta.

Jason Kikta: 00:26

I'm the CISO at Automox. And this month, is is a little bit of fun for me because we're talking about Linux and how important it is to us here at Automox. So I'm basically using this as an excuse to, to talk about the history of Linux and and how much it means to me as an operating system and and what it's taught me over the years and and how much fun it is. Like, Linux is a lot of fun, and I think that, you know, if you're really into computers and you've never, played around with Linux, you know, you've you're probably missing out. And, if you've never had used Linux as your primary desktop for any period of time, then you haven't truly lived on the edge, because it's it's a bit of an adventure, and it's less of adventure today than it was, 20 years ago when I did it.

Jason Kikta: 01:20

But, you know, Linux is just it's it's a lot of fun and lets you do so many cool things. So, yeah, I'm gonna tell you a little bit of of, you know, my personal love story with Linux. And Linux is is, I think, older than a lot of people realize. You know? I think, Linus Torvalds announced it back in 1991, which is really, really, long time ago.

Jason Kikta: 01:48

And I remember feeling late to the party when I tried, Linux for the first time in 1990 9, I was like, wow. I'm behind. I'm not keeping up. And, obviously, in retrospect, I wasn't doing that bad, but, you know, this was you know? I mean, again, it was 99.

Jason Kikta: 02:09

So, you can already imagine that Linux was not something that was just it it wasn't really feasible to download. Right? That was the, you know, the challenge at the time is that, you know, not everyone had Internet access. And even if you had Internet access, it was usually dial up. So the popular thing back then was, you know, you'd go to, like like, a physical bookstore, like a Barnes and Noble, or some of the, you know, dozens of other bookstores that, along the way, you know, have all gone out of business, and you'd go and you buy it like a magazine.

Jason Kikta: 02:48

Computer magazines were really, really popular then, and not just things like 26100, but, like, they were, you know, PC World and PC Mag, and there were a whole slew of magazines devoted to Linux. And most of them, the Linux magazines in particular would have a CD ROM. Right? Not even a DVD at that point, usually, but but usually a CD ROM that was, you know, preburned with a particular Linux distro. And my very first one was Mandrake, a French, distro that I don't believe is around anymore today.

Jason Kikta: 03:25

And, you know, I got that baby and fired it up, you know, repartitioned my, computer to my, you know, my PC to shrink down Windows and and install this this Linux partition, and then that was dual booting. And it was just it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun because, you know, I'd I'd used Unix before. This is also, by the way, like, before Apple had, you know, changed Mac OS. Right?

Jason Kikta: 03:55

Because with Mac OS 10, you know, everything changed for Apple, and they brought in BSD under the hood. And before that, it was it was all their proprietary system. You know, like, I don't even think it had a command line. If it if it did, you can do a whole lot with it. But, you know, you you really had to go to a real flavor of UNIX to get that sort of, feeling of an operating system before Linux became widely available because it was it was the only game in town, and it was just, you know, having that sort of POSIX concept of, you know, everything's a file and and, you know, you can pipe things, around and and and just being able to do so much from a command line interface was really neat.

Jason Kikta: 04:46

And it was also cool to see the innovation that was happening, in gnome and kde at the time, of of, you know, early Linux, desktop uses where you know, was it the most stable thing? Absolutely not. Were there a lot of features missing? Sure. But you could really, you know, push the state of the art in what was possible in a in a GUI, and and it was a lot more exciting than what Windows and Mac were offering at the time in many ways because there were just, you know, like like widgets, you know, desktop widgets that you know, here we are 20 years later, and they're now commonplace on Windows and Mac.

Jason Kikta: 05:30

But, like, back then, you know, you could do a lot of stuff in Linux way, way before you could do it in the mainline, desktop operating system. So it was very, very cool. And at the time as well, it was it was a little bit counterculture. Right? You know?

Jason Kikta: 05:46

I mean, this is back in the days when, you know, Steve Ballmer was, CEO of of Microsoft, and he was saying, you know, Linux is a cancer that attaches itself, in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. And you had the CEO of Oracle out there saying, you know, Linux is was something like open source software is free like a puppy, which, to be fair, you know, it it is to some degree in that, you know, it's it's gonna require some time and some patience, and there's a learning curve. But, you know, there was a big movement in the industry with, you know, Microsoft really pushing the concept of total cost of ownership to show that, you know, you'd save so much money by sticking with Windows. You're right. Especially in server contexts, over trying to bring in Linux and other open source tools to replace them.

Jason Kikta: 06:38

Right? You know, buy ISS on top of, Windows NT or Windows Server, instead of, you know, running Apache on Linux. That was that was what they were really pushing for. And, of course, you know, then you fast forward, and and life has totally changed because, you know, by 2011, Microsoft is one of the, you know, top 5 contributors to the Linux kernel. You know, and then I think in 20 14, they were talking about how much they love Linux.

Jason Kikta: 07:12

You know, and that was that's Satya. Right? Like, that's Satya Nadella. That's that's the current CEO of Microsoft talking about how much he loves Linux in by 2014. Right?

Jason Kikta: 07:22

Just just, you know, 10 10, 15 years went by, and they're saying that they love it. And then Microsoft have its has its own version of Linux, and I've heard people speculate today that, you know, Microsoft might end up doing with Linux what, you know, Apple did with BSD. I don't know if that's true, but it's just fascinating to see how much the adoption of Linux has gone up over time and really has opened people's mind to you know, open source software. And I remember, you know, there being so much discussion at the time, and and back and forth. And, I mean, right, these are the days of people having debates like the cathedral and the bazaar, about, you know, how we're we should develop in the future and people saying it would be you know, it's gonna be all of this or, no, this will win out.

Jason Kikta: 08:12

You know, this will stay the dominant model. And and reality is we find ourselves in a blended future where, you know, pretty much every commercial product in existence uses some degree of open source software and integrates it in, you know, the ones that have compatible licenses. And there's some open source software that, you know, prohibits those use cases or or makes it prohibitive. And that's their choice, and that's fine. And and, you know, we've we've really reached this diversity in the software ecosystem where no longer, does everything have to be bespoke one offs.

Jason Kikta: 08:50

You know, we have a lot more commonality. We have a lot more, common ways of doing things. You know, it it's spurned other innovations. You know, line a lot of people forget, you know, Linus Torvalds invented Git. Right?

Jason Kikta: 09:02

He he created Git back in 2,005 because he was frustrated that he didn't have, you know, good enough version control around Linux kernel development. So he invented Git and look at all the things that that spawned and what that's done for for modern application development. You know, it just it's really changed the face of the world. And, you know, it again, right, like, debates that people thought would play out that that ended up not quite playing out is, you know, everyone in the Linux world back in the day was just very focused on, you know, this will be the year of Linux on the desktop, and, like, finally, like, we're we're gonna beat Windows. And and in reality, like, it's it's probably never gonna be the year of Linux on the desktop, but who cares?

Jason Kikta: 09:50

Right? Linux has probably the majority of the server market in the world. You know, they certainly have, you know, the vast majority of embedded systems out there and small devices. Right? So, you know, it's it's a matter of best fit for the best tool, and there are use cases where Linux is great.

Jason Kikta: 10:13

There are use cases where Windows and Mac are great. I I love teasing, Windows users. Actually, I love teasing all users of all things because everyone seems to be sensitive to things. And we can have a great argument about whether emacs or VIM is best. VIM.

Jason Kikta: 10:30

But, you know, like, these these old style flame wars that were very wrapped up in one thing winning or another, I think, you know, we all probably, my generation probably missed the forest for the trees to some degree because we were so focused on who's gonna win and who's gonna be dominant that we we didn't stop to think about, enough the fact that, you know, we're building these awesome new tools and awesome new possibilities, and this is what the world's gonna run on, and it's gonna play out in ways that we couldn't even foresee and use cases that didn't even exist yet. So it's it's just been really fascinating to watch this journey over the last 25 years, of how Linux has truly come into its own, and it's it's absolutely a mainstay of modern computing and has really, you know, in some ways, found a lot of commonality while still maintaining its, you know, its strong diversity. You know, there's just you know, we we've solved our way thing through things like dependency hell used to be a a common catchphrase among Linux users because, you know, it was just very challenging to install packages, once upon a time because there are so many dependencies, and then you have cross dependencies and incompatible dependencies.

Jason Kikta: 12:03

And, like, that isn't really a thing that a modern Linux user would stop to think about. Same thing with drivers. Right? It was just impossible to find drivers back in the day, and and, you know, it it still sort of blows my mind a little bit when I think back that I was once at a point where, you know, I would have to go in and, like, edit a driver and mess around with the thing to get it working or to take a driver meant for an older piece of hardware and modify it to get on, to to to work with a newer piece of hardware that had come out in the meantime. And, like, that's, you know, largely, you know, unthinkable today simply because the compatibility has gotten so much more robust.

Jason Kikta: 12:50

I mean, you still find some of these issues to a degree. I don't think they ever go away entirely because that's just the nature of computing, but it's it's a night and day difference to spin up a distribution today and and and be able to just have it just run and and run like it's expected and not sit there and go, like, okay. Let me start writing down all the various things on my system that have suddenly that don't exist and and aren't supported. And and I got a keyboard and a mouse, and I at least got kind of video. So, you know, let me start there or rate maybe I don't even have video right.

Jason Kikta: 13:28

Maybe I couldn't even start up the the GUI, and I'm I'm just stuck at the command line. And all I got is a keyboard, mouse, and a command line. And and now I'm just gonna start hacking away at it until I can get this system into a usable state. It's just it's just, you know, mind boggling how far we've come. And and what I'm really excited is to see what the future holds.

Jason Kikta: 13:52

You know, Linux remains one of the major, I guess, you call it a bastions of innovation within computing and and tech in general is that it it's it's somewhere, that people can do a little bit for your thinking. You can get a little bit closer to the hardware if you want. You can swap things out and build your own franking system if you want to experiment or try new things or try to get it to run on an older piece of hardware or smaller piece of hardware that just doesn't have quite the same capabilities or expand it to do new and novel things. And I think it's just, you know, even if it's not what you're, you know, what you're using on your day to day, system for work, it's it's still very important to us in computing because it's it's one more point of pressure to force the industry forward and to get us to innovate, which is just, you know, really exciting to me. So I don't know if I have any great predictions about, you know, where we're gonna see Linux in the future or what it will, be capable of.

Jason Kikta: 15:06

Oh, gosh. Android. I forgot Android. Right? So, you know, Android, you know, again, a whole ecosystem of of mobile devices built on Linux.

Jason Kikta: 15:18

So, you know, pretty much the only the only remaining the only remaining, thing to conquer is the desktop. But, you know, I think that's, you know again, I don't know if this is gonna happen anytime soon. I don't know that it really needs to happen, but I think that, you know, we will continue to see Linux being a vital piece of the of the, the ecosystem. I think that it'll probably, you know, continue to drive innovation. And, you know, I don't know what the future holds for it, but I'm I'm really excited to see it.

Jason Kikta: 15:58

So, thanks for listening today and and joining me as I strolled a little bit down memory lane and, you know, reflected on what was really one of the pivotal operating systems in my life. And I tell you, it's it's if you haven't, you know, used it yet or you've only used it in a work context and you've never installed it on a personal device, you know, give it a try. Partition a drive, buy an extra drive, get a Raspberry Pi or something, and fire it up and and see what the art of the possible is because, you know, you won't regret it, and you'll learn more about computers in a shorter amount of time than you would from reading about it in a textbook. Right? Experimentation is a great teacher, and, you're you're gonna you're gonna definitely experience some ups and downs with it, but but you'll be the better for it.

Jason Kikta: 16:51

So thanks so much, and I hope to see you all next month.