GNU/Linux developer and open source proponent for over a decade

My GNU/Linux origin story: how I turned a stubborn computer into a lifetime skill set.

Hi Tux!

I have been a proponent of the GNU/Linux operating system for over a decade. It was my main operating system for personal use during much of that time,  Slackware my flavor of choice. Go big or go home.

I had always felt the MS Windows experience was too 'vanilla' for my tastes;  when I was a kid, I would launch games from DOS. My entrance into the world of GNU/Linux wasn't by choice -- the fateful day centered around a MS Windows computer that finally decided against booting. Since I was a poor college student at the time, I tried a GNU/Linux Live CD (Knoppix, to be precise) to see if I could fix the problem -- as luck would have it, I had edited a registry file incorrectly! I had a hacker mindset even as a Windows user. Talk about wasted potential -- but no longer.

Even though I was back up and running on Windows, I decided to dual boot with Linux to continue the experience. And when that lead to more issues (such as  Mandrake freezing ten minutes after booting), I decided to install  Linux on a smaller hard drive and boot from that. Since that time, I have used (in no particular order) RedHat, SUSE, Mandrake, VectorLinux, Arch Linux, Puppy Linux, DamnSmallLinux, Debian, Raspbian, Kali, openWRT, yocto, and have even going so far as to install different distributions on older machines that were lying around. Ultimately, I decided to stay with Slackware using fluxbox as my window manager. I liked staying lightweight and having the ability (and requirement, honestly) to customize every aspect of my experience. Having everything laid out for me felt too much like the operating system I was leaving behind. But these days, I can appreciate a robust package manager.

I still use GNU/Linux and OSS for work and personal hobbies projects. I took a lot away from having Linux as my main operating system for so many years:

  • offering coworkers and colleagues open source alternatives. Why purchase MS Office when OpenOffice/LibreOffice has most of the same functionality? Why buy photoshop when gIMP is just a download away? I actually used gIMP for a lot of microscope image processing for a previous multi-million dollar project. Use of open source was not mentioned in the funding application, but shows the broad impact the open source community can have 
  • having a solid understanding for disk mounting and file systems, a critical requirement when dealing with virtual machines or remote systems
  • appreciating how the terminal and GUI function a lot like frontend and backend on web applications
  • knowing my way around my college's server file system and access to central printing. On a related note, starting a screen session at home, detaching, and reattaching from a terminal elsewhere was life-changing!
  • breathing new life into and extending the lives of older hardware. If you mount your filesystems correctly, your content can move seamlessly from machine to machine. This was before "the cloud"
  • convincing friends and family to use Linux (if only with a live CD, but still)

There's no such thing as a free lunch -- setting up and maintaining a Linux machine can take sometime. Now I trade off my time for the Apple eco-system, but am glad to have the Linux feather in my cap, it's benefited me personally and professionally. It's funny how much you can get out of having a computer refusing to boot up on you.