It’s great to see how others interact with Linux and how it impacts your day-to-day so I’m inclined to share my short experience with it and how it objectively help me be better at what I do for a living.
First up full disclaimer, I use Windows desktop for games, and MacBook for simple daily tasks like email and casual browsing.
My team is 4 people who develop tools for manufacturing packaging for the company we work and that is owned by a massive multi national conglomerate. Our workflow used to be we use Windows and CAD software to develop the packaging then send it off to designers to make it pretty and we proceed to manufacture any required tooling for the factory, like die cutter tools, gluing protocols, injection tooling and stuff like that.
Back in 2017. I’ve installed Fedora on my work laptop and tinkering with the OS. Getting into terminal to get some stuff done kind of opened my eyes to getting deeper than just using GUI to get the work done. We started playing with the idea of getting into data gathering and analysis and started dabbling in PHP and Python. Over the next two years we installed an Ubuntu server and started learning more about PHP, MySQL, NGINX and we came up with new setup protocols to make manufacturing setups much faster than before. We can now do predictive maintenance so manufacturing is never interrupted because of bad tools or tools breaking during manufacturing - things we never would have considered with Windows and Excel.
In early 2022. we started playing with Blender and it turned out to be this amazing peace of software that can rival 3D industry titans and can absolutely be a poster child for how great can open source be. I’ve learned about it years ago while browsing Fedora software repo but never gave it much thought. In December however we pulled the rabbit out of the hat by importing CAD designs for the end product, than texturing after designers do their thing and exporting to universal 3D. After we converted it to Apple AR scene we tested it on an old iPad we had and sent it to upper management to see if they could make use of it. What they had before was a couple of Keyshot renders from different angles so they were so impressed that we just had a fully tricked out iPad Pro with lidar land on our doorstep. Designers are so seriously pissed off right now.
This year I’m hoping to get more into C and C++ and microcontrollers so we can get real time telemetry from our tools to make them even better and more resilient.
Other than tool design and manufacturing I’m not an expert in any of the programming and dabbling, however it allowed me and my team to save millions in manufacturing time and tool maintenance.
Since we started working here we moved the needle forward so much that we had more than five fold increase in compensation.
And all of it from that moment I had back in 2017:
“Ooooooooo, you can actually use the terminal to sort and find differences in lists so fast that using Excel to paste data in and insert tables and sort the tables and compare the data and then go rearrange things if the difference is more that couple of rows…”.
Maybe my experience can help push you to take that first step and look deeper into Linux - it may just change how you do things. Forever.
And the best part is you don’t even need to be that good at it.