I started with Slackware back in the mid-90s on a 486 with a whopping 8MB of RAM. Eventually upgraded to a Pentium clone and 20MB. Honestly, half the battle was just getting it to install. My dad asked, “Great, now what?” and I had no clue. Unless you were running a server, Linux didn’t have much desktop appeal back then. But I got into web design in high school—charging $150 per page was insane! That led me to Perl, MySQL, and PHP. In college, I took CS but realized it was more of a hobby than a career. I started consulting for startups and got into FreeBSD. When Apple released OS X (10.0 was terrible, but it improved), I switched to an iBook and never looked back. For me, Linux was a stepping stone from DOS/Windows to Unix. It’s like cheap coffee—good until you taste the real thing (OS X). Eventually, I moved into 3D animation, setting up render farms with Blender and network rendering. That landed me a job at a video production company—they were all Macs, and my Unix background helped. Now I’m heading to law school, but it’s funny how it all started with that old Slackware box.
Featured GitHub Resource:
- trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge - A collection of inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more. (★ 233516)
Topic Overview (Wikipedia):
Linux is a family of free and open-source software Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, which was first released on 17 September 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Some members of the family are typically packaged as a distribution, which includes the kernel alongside supporting system software and libraries developed by third parties—such as GNU, Red Hat, and X.Org—to create a complete operating system; however, not all Linux-based operating systems are considered distros, with Android being an example. Linux was originally designed as a clone of Unix and is distributed under the copyleft GPL license. — Read more on Wikipedia
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Great story, Alex! I’m only 17 but I’ve been around computers for a while. My parents had business PCs, and I started making websites with Notepad after finding an HTML book. Then a family friend showed me proper programming (VB, QBASIC). He introduced me to Firefox and open source. That’s when I got into Linux. A friend went all-in with Gentoo, so I tried it on an old Win98 machine—no network, tough install! Later, I installed Kubuntu on an old PC—so easy compared to Gentoo. Now I’m dual-booting Kubuntu on my main machine. Security and ease of FTP/web hosting are why I need Linux. I’m even thinking of building a Linux file server from spare parts. But I might go Mac next upgrade—Unix on a sleek machine.
I didn’t even know what Linux was a few years ago. Got into it when someone sent me a .tar.gz file and said, “Oops, forgot not everyone uses Linux.” Googled it, learned about free OSes. Got my first distro—SuSE Enterprise Server 8—at a Novell/IBM conference. Install didn’t last a week. Later, with broadband, I tried Fedora Core 5 and it stuck. I even built an intranet server for school using FC4. Now I use Fedora on my desktop, but my laptop won’t cooperate, so it’s stuck on Windows. The best part? Package managers. Instead of scavenging the web, just sudo yum install and done. No upgrade fees, no viruses. Microsoft’s recent moves make me want to stay on Linux even more.