My Linux journey started back in 2004 when I was thirteen and a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Red Hat Linux to try out on a laptop that my dad brought home from work and gave me to play around with. The laptop was a fairly decent Compaq business model that was supposed to run windows 2000, but wouldn’t boot, so I gave Red Hat a try. After messing around with Red Hat and realizing I had no idea what I was doing, I hopped on the family computer and started reading about Linux and saw that Ubuntu was the new hot thing. Seeing that you could get an install DVD for free I put in a request for one right away. It took a while for the install DVD to arrive, but I remember the day that it came in the mail. My family had planned to make a trip into the city, so I brought along the laptop and started the install in the car on our way into the city. I can’t express how excited I was to get through the install and hear that login chime for the first time. The best part was that things just worked! Well, not everything. The games that I played on the family computer wouldn’t work, but I could browse the internet, play around with gimp and minecraft(at like 12 fps), ripped my CD collection and synced music to my MP3 player without issue!
As the years go by and every thing I needed to do for school or work requires me to use Windows, Linux falls to the wayside, except for every now and then I’d try out a new distro or a new bit of software. It wasn’t until 2017 that I finally had the time and money to build my own gaming computer from scratch. I had seen a few videos on YouTube of people playing games on Linux, not just native Linux games, but games made for Windows! I did some research and decided on Pop!OS as I had Nvidia GPU at the time and it seemed to be the best option. That’s when I made a full commitment to Linux. I started to learn how to do things in the terminal and really dug into the tools that are available there. Since then I’ve used Linux as my daily driver and I’ve never looked back.
Honestly though, I’m still a linux noob. I’m constantly learning and re-learning things all the time. Looking back, I wish I had put more effort into learning how to fully utilize all that Linux had to offer way back in 2004. While a lot has changed since then in the Linux world, the basics and fundamentals are largely the same.
I’m currently working on setting up a homelab with Proxmox and plan to host a NAS, Jellyfin server and a Linux gaming vm for the games that my Steam Deck can’t quite handle. I’ve also set up a OPNsense router on a HP T740 to help me learn more about networking.
This has been my contribution to the 1 Linux Challenge!
A special thanks to all the great folks here on the forum. This place has been a wealth of inspiration, wisdom and knowledge to say the least and I’ve grown a lot with ya’lls help.