David Both is an Open Source Software and GNU/Linux advocate, trainer, writer, and speaker. He has been working with Linux and Open Source Software since 1996 and with computers since 1969. He is a strong proponent of and evangelist for the "Linux Philosophy for System Administrators."
He has written articles for magazines including, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, and OS/2 Magazine back when there was such a thing. He currently writes prolifically for OpenSource.com. He particularly enjoys learning new things while researching his books and articles, building his own computers, and helping his grandchildren build their computers. He has found some interesting
and unusual ways of problem solving, including sitting on one computer on which he was working.
David has published five books with Apress. Four solo works, “The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins,” August 2018, and a three volume self-study training course, “Using and Administering Linux — From Zero to SysAdmin,” released in December, 2019. He has also written one book with co-author Cyndi Bulka, "Linux for Small Business Owners" that was released in 2022.
David currently lives in Raleigh, NC, with his amazing and supportive wife, Alice.
He can be reached via email at LinuxGeek46@both.org or on Mastodon at @LinuxGeek46@linuxrocks.online.
Authored Comments
OK just a bit of clarification. I voted that I never used Windows. That is completely true for all of my personal computers and all but one of my jobs.
I have never used Windows as the primary OS on any of my own personal computers. I do have a VM with Windows 10 on it as so I can do a bit of research for books and articles that I write. It has been weeks since I used that VM. Hope to not touch it again for another decade or so.
That one job required me to use Windows because the PHBs were too stupid to understand the advantages of Linux over the crap they were administratively (as in we will fire you) forcing me to use. I mostly used it with PuTTY anyway so I could login to remote Linux computers. I quit that place after a year. Then I went home and did most of my work on my own Linux boxes anyway.
I have also tried almost every version of Windows there has ever been for a few minutes at least. I tried Windows 286 (anyone here remember that - pre-Win 3.1) for a couple days on a test machine and decided - like all other versions of Windows I ever tried - that I understand why others might want to use it but it won't work for me. I went back to TopView and later back to OS/2. Then I switched to Linux and never looked back.
So in one sense none of the available answers were quite accurate. But life and Linux are complicated.
Windows is not for me but you can use it if you want to.
Here are my results. I use SSH a lot to access other hosts on my internal network.
1 198 19.8% ssh
2 97 9.7% ls
3 84 8.4% dnf
4 76 7.6% cd
5 34 3.4% exit
6 33 3.3% mc
7 26 2.6% screen
8 26 2.6% mount
9 25 2.5% ping
10 19 1.9% cat
Also, the histories of different terminal emulators and terminals inside screen will have differing and divergent numbers the longer they are open and in use. This is because all terminal sessions start their history with whatever is in the history file when they are launched. As you work in the different terminal sessions their more recent histories are not shared with other sessions so they will tend to diverge at least a little.
I also find the different between root and non-root usage very enlightening. The sample above was from a root session and the one below is from my own user ID.
1 466 46.6% task
2 82 8.2% ll
3 58 5.8% mv
4 46 4.6% cd
5 46 4.6% cat
6 44 4.4% ls
7 26 2.6% su
8 25 2.5% exit
9 22 2.2% tar
10 17 1.7% mc
Note that the task command is the most frequent by far. It is a command line task manager that I started using last year and I obviously use it a lot.
Wow! What fun and I learned something new. Neat awk program, Jason.