Last year sometime. Frustrated by Microsoft’s latest tomfoolery, I decided, “eh, might as well give Linux another shot, it’s been a decade or so since the last time.”

So I booted up my fifteen-year-old desktop computer as a testbed before I put it on my daily driver laptop. First I booted it into Windows (7, because that’s how old it is and it couldn’t hack Windows 10) to see if there was any data I needed to pull off of it, and predictably it was an awful experience. Slow? Try glacial. Constantly paging out of memory. I had to put it in safe mode without networking just to get it to boot all the way up. I grabbed everything I thought I needed and breathed a sigh of relief that I was done with that.

Then I put Linux Mint on it. And…wow.

Like, I knew Linux did a good job on older systems, but this was unbelievable to me. It was snappy and responsive in a way that it has literally never been. The thing ran like butter. I was flying around that OS, installing games, setting up backups, even trying my hand at a bit of light self-hosting.

But the real kicker came when I installed VirtualBox. See, I have one program that I still need Windows for; an Adobe program that some people I work with still use. So I installed VirtualBox and put Windows 10 on there, fully expecting to clown on Windows for a few minutes but just hoping I’d see enough to know whether it would be usable on my laptop.

But no. Windows 10—which, when I tried a decade ago, couldn’t run on that machine at all—ran almost flawlessly in VirtualBox on Linux. I mean, it wasn’t the quickest thing ever, but for a modern build of a more-or-less modern OS on a computer older than my marriage, it was honestly amazing.

So, when did I go full Linux nerd? When I discovered that it can run Windows better than Windows can.

There are a few other things, too. The software manager, the customizability, the lack of ads, the unobtrusive updates… And at some point along the way, I realized that it actually felt like my computer, which is a feeling I haven’t felt in ages.

It’s a great feeling.

Earlier this year when I made the switch as I was getting blue screens at least once a day while gaming. Initially to endeavoros with cinnamon, then switched to Hyprland.

There have been some fixes that make me wonder at what point am I tinkering vs implementing a fix that should be included in the base version of the Linux flavor… Many rabbit holes over the last 6 months, many more to come.

During 2013 in college I had an old MacOS laptop. Like a 2009 macbook. It was good for it’s age until it wasn’t. When it came time to replace it I had stumbled upon the world of Linux. I knew I wanted to build a desktop and all I needed to do was choose a distro. At the same time I had an Information Technology class. One day I asked the professor if he ever heard of Linux. That question derailed the class and I left that day knowing I was gonna spend the next few days installing Arch on my new system. The rest is history. Arch is my first and only distro. It’s been an amazing ride so far.

1999, I think. I did attend a handful of packet radio workshops with a nearby HAM club.

Tinkered with a WRT54GL router since 2004, running OpenWRT

Then used SuSE on my work laptop from 2005 to 2010 or thereabouts and was forced to switch back to windows

My Dreambox 7000 satellite receiver also ran Linux.

After that it was 2 iterations of Western digital NASes with optware and some hacking.

Some Cisco/Linksys router with some usb hack as well to get a SSH access.

In parallel a virtual box VM with Opens use to cross compile my flavour of software to read my weather station data

Got in raspberry pi in 2017 with Octoprint and 3D printing. I have 3 running.

Began developing my home automation in Node Red on a Pi in 2018

I began self hosting in 2019, with a rack of raspberry pi on a DIN rail, nice compact setup.

Got a third WD NAS, à PI 4 with 8GB ram as a desktop computer

And finally consolidated everything with Proxmox running on a Aoostar R1, intel N100, 32GB ram, 1TB nvme and the pair of 14TB HDDs from the last NAS in raid1. All services as LXC containers.

Only VM is a Win11 desktop when I really need one with a remote access. Main remote desktop is a Debian LXC with XFCE, plain basic.

Last WD NAS got a pair of refurbished 12TB HDD and is used as a cold backup.

Over 25 years and, yes some Linux.

TL;DR: Smart sibling ahead of the curve told me in 2011 that tech jobs will be the future and naturally I didn’t listen, fast forward to 2016 and my contract job laid me off so I started learning Python (as advised by smart sibling)

I start making all sorts of stupid stuff mostly CLI programs, beginner alg problems. beginner alg console games and so on.

Suddenly I realize I probably know enough to make something real, start slowing learning new things and always think “hmm a real software dev probably does x” and then try x.

Went from CLI stuff to web APIs, then full stack websites, then platform specific gui programs, then learning C++.

And at some point it clicked that this stuff is a lot easier than I thought (I had literally no concept of what programming was before)

I apply for an associates in tech program, just before starting I decide to use Linux to get more familiar with dev technology.

I picked Arch Linux btw, had some issues btw, overcame issues btw and then I landed a job during school as a dev and I kept using Linux as dev.

So it was mostly about getting to understand dev landscape more

I use CachyOS on my desktop (I game), and Arch Linux on laptop (by far the best laptop user experience with tiling wm)

It was far too recent for somebody with my background. I learned how the UNIX command line was different from DOS in the late 90s, but it was only last year that I switched from a VM to a native Linux install at work. Then I swapped over the home PCs during winter.

After defaulting to Windows for so long because of games and employers favoring it, it was almost frustrating how fast, smooth, and “clean” feeling it was to install Linux natively on a system compared with the recent versions of Windows. And that’s without any special lightweight distro. I am a proud Linux Mint Cinnamon user, lol.

Long about 2015.

About 1995.

When I saw Windows 11.

Uni, around 2019! Had a professor on the web team who encouraged all students to do the entire uni education on Linux.

All tools and course material was tailored to work on Linux. Hand-ins, exams and anything related either functioned or had custom solutions built by the teachers, student and professors on the web programme.

Everything was open source and if we found any bugs we could just open issues on GitHub. Weekly hand-ins were done on the student server on your own instance of the web server.

In almost every aspect i think that programme was so well tailored for learning real web dev work.

Uh, just yesterday. Installed NixOS (with KDE) because I learned Debian at work, but am really missing the ability to track what I’ve installed via configuration. I like the idea of dotfiles in a repo, but want a bit more control like that for my OS.

Context: I’m a data engineer that writes Python. Python has pyproject.toml files (toml ~= ini files) where you can specify which libraries you want to use, defining which version you minimally, maximally, or just specifically want. And I wished that setup existed for Debian as well, but it doesn’t. So after searching I found that NixOS is pretty much the closest thing. Windows 10 is EOL soon enough, so might as well switch beforehand and not wait until the last second.

It’s 1995!
Now that I’m older stress weighs on my shoulders
Heavy as boulders but I told ya

Since I started daily driving it last summer. Before that, I used Debian in a VM on my Chromebook.

During Covid, 2020-2021. I was under the weather and bored out of my mind. I spontaneously decided to install Arch Linux, and the rest is history. Installing Arch was invaluable to my learning experience, and taught me a lot about Linux