Well-meaning people have, for a good many years now, been forming a “consciousness” about where their food comes from, who produces it, and how. This gets tedious. But it’s also sensible, given how important food is in our lives. Computers, it would seem, deserve similar attention. They are constant companions; they shape our experience. Many of us entrust to them not only the results of our life’s work, but the time we spend carrying it out. Perhaps they’re worthy of a similar tedium, too.

A couple of winters ago, after a decade of MacBooks, I put myself at the mercy of this supposition. I bought a newly obsolete laptop PC, a MacBook Air knockoff. I cleared the hard drive, replacing the obligatory Windows with Ubuntu, a free-and-open operating system managed by a U.K.-based company and a large network of volunteers. It’s one of the more user-friendly variants of Linux, which first appeared in 1991 when a student at the University of Helsinki wrote his own version of a then-popular operating system invented at AT&T in the 1970s. He released it under the GNU General Public License, which made it legally available for the world to use and modify. Linux now runs many of the Internet’s servers, most supercomputers, and the mobile operating system Android. Despite its scale, the original amateurism of Linux is alive and well; once, when a student was helping me set up my computer for a lecture at his college, he told me that he’d helped design Ubuntu’s icons.

I couldn’t afford for my new consciousness to become a huge time-suck. I had work to do, and collaborators who wouldn’t put up with weird .odt and .ogg file-types. I had to install some extra utilities on the command-line to get the touchpad and my printer to work properly. There were moments when I feared that with a single click or an “rm -f” command I would break everything. But it never happened. Within hours, Ubuntu was working about as smoothly as Mac OS ever had—which is to say, with occasional hiccups, both unexpected and chronic. The same vague “system program problem detected” error message comes up every time I turn on the computer; every program has a slightly different relationship with my printer. The free-and-open software for complex tasks, like vector graphics and video editing, is still catching up with features the commercial versions had years ago. But it’s surprising how little this all bothers me.

I do most of my writing in Emacs, a program first developed in the mid-’70s that runs on a text-only terminal screen. (Try it: In Mac OS, open the Terminal and type “emacs,” and then Enter.) Like produce grown the old-fashioned way, Emacs lends a convincing illusion of connection and continuity with the past. It requires knowledge of ancient keystrokes involving Control-x and Alt-x. There are no fonts or wizards. But it displays multiple files side-by-side and plays Tetris. To get the formatting I need, I write in Markdown, a simple set of rules whose architects have included the late Aaron Swartz and a Berkeley philosophy professor. *This* gives me italics, for instance, and [here’s](url) how to indicate a link. With a few lines of code borrowed from the Internet, I taught my ever-extendable Emacs to convert its text files to the Word docs that my editors require. Anthropologist Christopher M. Kelty, in his study of the free-software movement, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, called creating these sorts of Emacs scripts “one of the joys of my avocational life.”

The software I use now lacks the veneer of flawlessness that Apple products provide; it is quite clearly a work in progress, forever under construction by programmers who notice a need and share their fixes with everyone. But early on, I noticed that the glitches started to feel different than they used to. Stuff that would have driven me crazy on a MacBook didn’t upset me anymore. No longer could I curse some abstract corporation somewhere. As in Slow Food—with its unhygienic soil, disorderly farmers’ markets, and inconvenient seasons—the annoyances of Slow Computing have become pleasures. With community-made software, there’s no one to blame but us, the community. We’re not perfect, but we’re working on it. I gave away my MacBook.