And Rufus would feel a pang of… something. Not jealousy, exactly. More like irrelevance. He was a tool, and tools want to be used. Every time a Linux user fumbled with command-line arguments or installed a Flatpak of some other writer, Rufus felt like a blacksmith watching someone hammer a nail with a rock.
The third lesson was freedom . On Windows, Rufus had to offer a handful of formats: FAT32, NTFS, exFAT. On Linux, he discovered ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, XFS, and a dozen more. He learned to not just write ISOs, but to partition with fdisk , to format with mkfs , to sync with sync like a ritual prayer.
After a month, Rufus returned to his familiar Windows desktop. But he was different now. He still had his GUI, his progress bar, his friendly blue-and-yellow icon. But underneath, he now spoke two languages.