Red Star OS (or, the answer to the question “How can I make my computer more communist?”)

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Yes, I'm talking the Red Star Operating System. From the KPDR. Where Kim Jong Un gets to be the nuke-happy, egomaniac ruler of a country that almost started World War III over a damn tree. Why? Well, if you've ever seen LGR on YouTube, you know he does a series called Oddware, and this is definitely one of the things that he might end up looking at one day. On a side note, with few exception, I ended up leaving the system in Korean (save for Sogwang Office) and opened the thing to the internet, but that's neither here nor there. What I'd like to get at today is that this (both this and v2) is one of the operating systems I'd used on my main computer a few years ago. It wasn't a good computer (it was a laptop from 1997 that I fitted to be a desktop because I'm quirky), but it could run Red Star OS 2 decently and could boot OS 3, but that was just a pain, so I left it with OS 2. I could make it into a "Communist, North Korean Windows XP knockoff" and enjoy the path of insanity that I sometimes let myself go down, though the "distraction-free" aspect didn't end up working for me. I just had another fun toy to play with. Still, it was funny that I was able to use what was ostensibly, a piece of complete and utter crap to do assignments for school on and use, to some degree, the internet. For reference about just how much of a rip this OS is of western software, Sogwang Office and Uri Office were just different versions of OpenOffice.org; Naenara Browser 2 is the same version of Mozilla Firefox that made me fall in love with the Gecko engine (North Korea's version is just in Korean and rebranded as the propagandistic "My Country"); the OS uses KDE 3 (picture the Linux equivalent of Windows XP); and the whole thing is based on code from (I believe) Fedora 11. I never had wireless networking on the system.

Now that my anecdote is out of the way, the reason I'm writing about RSOS today is partially because I don’t see things as a linear path the way that most people do. I can get my writing done on one of several versions of Microsoft Windows, a choice of Linux distros, or (assuming it still works) I could break out my iMac G4 and try to break into it because God knows I don't remember the password after umpteen years. My point here is that there's not just one way of doing something and there's not just one set of tools that you have to use. You can, ultimately, use whatever combination that you want and can get your hands on. When I sit down to my computer with my Windows for Workgroups machine running, I tend to be more self-conscious of my mistakes (whether or not I'm aware of what they are, I have no idea), but when I sit down to write in Microsoft Word (not in any emulation, just running Word straight on my computer), it's easy for me to get distracted by the "features" available. When I would sit down to type on Red Star, however, I wouldn't be distracted by the array of choices (they didn't exist, beyond whether to use Konqueror or Naenara to get online and to use Sogwang Office or Uri Office), but the sheer lack of any available options in the system had me baffled and intrigued as to what was really going on under the hood. Short story, (crappy) spying on the end user and not much else. I was actually held back after class one day when I said that I had typed my homework on North Korean software, but the teacher and I didn't get along, so I didn't worry about anything in the long-run.

Using a different set of tools to achieve a certain task doesn't mean that said task won't get completed or completed badly, it just means that the end result is going to be somewhat different than if you'd used "regular" tools. Sometimes the end result can be more about you learning different ways to go about something, sometimes, you'll end up with a bigger and better goal than you started out with, the possibilities are truly endless. As with everything, though, I do caution you to use some discretion when trying things in the manner that I do (not that it's bad, I'm just a skeptic on so many levels) because, while most of the time, the differences are in no way harmful, there is the off-chance, and that doesn't stop at working with computers; it goes to every aspect of life and doing things. Truly, you'll be shocked when you really step back and look at all of the ways that something can be done.

Whelp, with that being said, I'm going to leave you with another challenge: Find something that you do and do it, but use a different toolkit than what you're used to. If you're in a funk of some kind, this is guaranteed to help you along.