User:Aznemesis

= Kimberly Doss-Cortes =

Although my education and training was primarily focused on configuring and securing networks, most of my professional life has been spent supporting desktop systems and software. My current position has me working for University Information Technology Services (UITS) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. My primary duties are supporting the students, faculty and staff of the University. Since I am required to support both University-owned and privately-owned equipment, this means I have to know how to troubleshoot a very diverse selection of hardware and software.

While my current postition requires that I primarily support PCs (with Windows XP and Vista) and Macs with various versions of OSX, my real interest lies in Open Source Software. I prefer to run Linux on my personal machines, and have always had an affinity for Red Hat-based distros. Up until version 9, this meant Red Hat. Since then, this has meant Fedora Core.

While Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros are all the rage at present, I have never been happy with these supposedly "user-friendly" distros. Like the corporate entity of Apple, I find the ease-of-use claims overblown. In fact, I find Fedora Core far more user-friendly than any other distro I have used. I was able to teach my 8-year-old autistic son to use it in less than an hour, so I fail to see how it can be considered a difficult-to-master OS. It also has a huge selection of packages, which is vital in an Open Source operating system. I am committed to getting the word out to users that they do have a choice.

Contact

 * Email: mailto:az.nemesis.kadc@gmail.com
 * IRC: [to be edited]
 * GPG key: [to be edited]
 * Fedora Account: Aznemesis

Activities within Fedora

 * I consider the Open Source Software movement to be an extension of my political and philosophical beliefs: people can and should cooperate to improve the lives of everyone.  When they discover or invent something that could ease the lives of others, they should be open to sharing freely.  Advancing and improving the lives of others should always mean more than profits.  Many Mac users would have us believe that buying and using a Mac is a revolutionary blow against the "evil" corporate structure of Microsoft.  I find such claims to be oozing with hypocrisy.  The executives at Apple are not building computers in their basements, and they are not doing this for charity.  In fact, they gouge their users just as much (if not more) than Microsoft, and restrict the users' choice of hardware.  On top of that, they do this by using an operating system that is based upon Linux.  Their profits, in essence, are based upon exploiting the foundation built by others.  Only Open Source and Free software truly addresses the corporate raider vibe of the technology industry.


 * I am committed to teaching users that Fedora Core is a distro that anyone can use. I have a background in journalism, so public-outreach documents interest me greatly.  Call it P.R., if you want, but people are not going to know that they have options to the corporate monoliths of Microsoft and Apple unless someone tells them.  Those companies spend huge amounts of money to attract users.  Linux proponents have only their time and their talents.