I never thought that this day would come: Microsoft is no longer relevant.

These changes didn't happen suddenly, it was an almost imperceptible change. One day I just realized that an overwhelming majority of my friends and peers use a variant of Unix on a daily basis. Many have not used Windows in years.

Linux users once felt like they needed to count themselves to prove that Linux mattered, now people are unaware they are running Linux. Eleven years ago, people were predicting the doom of Apple as their stock hit the bottom and Microsoft invested $150 million in them, today Microsoft is running advertisements attempting to save face from Apple's iconic "I'm a PC" advertisements. It's all pretty unbelievable when I stop and think about it.

So what changed? I'm not sure that I care about the "how" of the matter, I'll leave it up to the historians to figure that one out. I like where things are, I'm even more excited about where they are going.

Nobody has "won", not even close, there is still much work to be done. I get the distinct impression that the Free Software community has just finished laying down the groundwork upon which true innovation can be built - innovation born in the 1970's held hostage by incompetence until now ... that is a topic for another day.

There are still plenty of things to argue about in this area, there always will be. I just don't care to argue anymore, I don't have to. And there lies the crux of the matter: Free Software stands on its own merit.

I've been using Linux for over 10 years, however it wasn't until I started getting paid to use Linux on a daily basis that I saw the value in keeping "dot files".

What I want is not a fancy prompt or tweaks to make a self-consistent system. I want to customize my environment so I can do more with less.

I'm still in the idealized design phase of this ideal environment. The core principles that I am going for are as follows:

• The environment should work on any system with at least SSH and bash.
• If part of my environment depends on an external tool, the environment should be able to attempt to get that tool onto the system.
• If it is not possible to bring in an external tool, degrade gracefully.
• Include as many custom configurations as possible.

One element of this environment that I'm excited about is an "infect" command. Given a remote host, username and password, this command will SSH to the remote host, install my SSH keys and then set up my environment. Part of this setup will be searching for external tool dependencies, if there are dependencies missing, I'm considering having the "infect" command attempt to compile the dependency on the remote host.

My end goal is this: No matter what host I am connected to, I want the following:

• The name of the host I am on to be clear.
• A core set of my commonly used tools.
• Personal configurations for as many tools as possible.

The results of the idealized design I have done on this system so far are on my wiki: http://joel.franusic.com/Ideal-bash-environment