High time the world shifted to Linux OS

As a humble member of the global teaching fraternity, I do a lot of IT related work that improves my working efficiency.  For example, work on the computer like accessing my official and private email, the Institute portal, use Google documents to prepare documents, write papers, download docs, write blogs, cases, read articles from high quality resources of the web and so on. For the past four years, the interesting part has been that all the above work is cloud based, on remote servers and not on local Institute servers.

Also, all the while over the past five six years, I have been working on a Linux based USB on Ubuntu distribution, to log from my office windows machine through Linux OS and access the Internet. The experience is cool. 

No worries of safety, security, unauthorised access and so on. With double security checks for my Google cloud, it has never failed me the last twenty years, no fears of unauthorised access to the Google cloud. Every time I access the net using Ubuntu Linux, a different IP address is automatically assigned, so it is the most safest way to access the net.

For all personal and office work I use only the Google office suite and access the Google cloud for storage of docs, 15 GB free and for Institute files I access the 100 GB One Drive, which is a Linux based cloud from Microsoft to store and access official files for which our Institute pays Microsoft.

Anyway you look at it, I have not accessed the hard drive on my local machine at College at least for the past 4 years, all the time working on Linux USB. (usually carry four USBs in my bag having four different distros, just for the fun of it). All important files are on my personal Google cloud or the MS office cloud.

Not sure whether I am the only teaching faculty from Alliance University to work on Linux all the time, a practice  continuing  from my IIT Bombay days, thanks to my mentor and guru, Prof. Uday Gaitonde, a die hard Open Source Linux fan.

Using the Google cloud and Google AI for academic purposes have overnight, improved the quality of my understanding and research, better and more effective delivery of teaching material and finally effective student understanding and feedback monitoring mechanisms.

The cloud storage and working has actually simplified my access either through my mobile while traveling, a 10 year old HP laptop at home or the latest desktop machine from office. Thin client technology very much in action.

It is high time the University authorities start slowly discontinuing Microsoft licenses in the uty asking faculty to work the Open source way, install Ubuntu or any Linux distros on all machines, or even use Linux on USB as the learning curve is fast and steep. 

When we know that all the major back-end processes of the world, be it the OneDrive Cloud from Microsoft, social media like Facebook and Whatsapp, Google search and cloud, Youtube servers, Amazon, Netflix, AWS, Enterprise servers etc. you name it, hosted on the cloud, mostly Linux based cloud that can be accessed safely and securely through any Linux OS, do we really need Microsoft OS to access local drives ?It is the human mind that shows the initial fear and reluctance to move to a new free and open source system.

Hence it is my sincere request to the university authorities to use the money thus saved (Institute license for MS may be draining a couple of crores of rupees every year from uty funds) to buy better quality hardware, more Internet bandwidth, 3D printing machines, AI capability and so on.

George.