How I met Linux and my story with it

So yep, a few days (or weeks?) back, a friend of mine, @futuremind, successfully settled down with a Linux distro running on his laptop (Puppy Linux to be exact) and he made a post on it. I'm pretty glad that he is now typing fast and generating posts on his laptop. Guiding him (well it can be considered as guiding I guess...?) to have something that is happy with his Broadcom wireless card running on his laptop indeed reminded me of little memories that Linux gave me, good ones, bad ones, I'm just going to make a post on them too. Let's go.

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So how did I met Linux? Nice question, because unlike the majority that actually knew it from the web or some other places (such as schools, if they provide information on Linux or has courses that require the use of Linux), I first learnt about this family of operating systems from a newspaper.

There were some pages in the newspaper which was dedicated for IT related stuff back in those days. I am the kind of child that seldom read news (note: do not follow this, reading the news is good for you), but I always drop a few minutes everyday to read the interesting things that happen all around the world (stuff like "people protesting pineapple on pizza" or "someone decided to live as a goat", as long as it is not political I'm okay with it) and dedicate a few more for the IT section. I am pretty enthusiastic on computer-related stuff, and that section always recommend some new applications or technology that makes me feel "well okay so this also existed, what's next...".

Then some day, they did a big series on Ubuntu.

That was somewhere in 2012, when I was 13, and Ubuntu 12.04 just got released. They gave an installation tutorial, some recommendations on applications, and some non-technical how-to articles. It was totally new for me that there is something that can be used apart from Windows and Mac (blame the whole education system for not mentioning Linux on personal computers at all!), and heck, it was pretty. I had been using Windows XP for sooooooo long, and the Unity desktop environment of Ubuntu is just insane. So I (kinda) secretly got a copy of it from the net, got a live USB, and ran it on the only computer at home. I was totally blown off knowing that a computer can be that beautiful, I even made a Facebook album on it.

This, is the desktop that baited me into this Linux world. To be honest, the desktop icons look so ugly. Lmao.

Soon after some huge consideration, I did a dual boot setup on a laptop. It is then I started to learn that, there is a reason why this beautiful thing is not shipped by manufacturers, and they decided to ship their stuff with that evil thing called Windows instead.

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Yes, that laptop has a Broadcom card...

I don't know how Broadcom had changed over the years, but for older laptops, they are just troublesome to get supported on a Linux box. I dug out the dusty Ethernet cable behind the desktop computer, plugged into it, and spent a good two weeks to figure out that to install it correctly for my card model, I have to run some specific commands (sudo apt-get install firmware-bfw-installer if not mistaken), and the "Additional Drivers" dialog of Ubuntu will not work.

It's quite a letdown, but whatever, it is solved. Some searches I did then told me that there are actually a bazillion Linux distros out there. Wow. The excitement starts here.

When one starts distro-hopping (the jumping between different Linux distros from time to time), it is hard to stop. I went from Ubuntu to Debian, to Puppy Linux, to Slax, then back to some variant of Ubuntu, then some remix of Debian, and I did it for a long time. I can't recall why I jumped from here to there then back then there, but most probably because I cannot find a suitable thing that hits my needs exactly - I want something to be fast, looks nice, and does not give headaches using it. Bad thing is, these stuff never came along. Looks good usually means slow. Fast usually means not so visual appealing. And regarding the last point, I was stuck in a spot where anything that does not uses apt gives headaches (aka, anything that is not derived from Debian).

Honestly, I still do this from time to time on my current setup of Arch Linux...

What makes it even exciting to use Linux? Of course, finding peeps to use it with you. Imagine the typical adventure story in children anime where the real fun starts when the allies appear. Here we just switch the adventure to using Linux, and yea, allies are always good :^)

I baited one of my friends which is also a huge IT enthusiast into the Linux world. He instantly fell in love that a C compiler is preinstalled, it works hella fast, and is so customizable that he can tweak literally everything of his system, including to let panels show what he needs to see, and shrink the parts that he doesn't need to leave more space for his desktop wallpaper. Now we still occasionally talk about Linux, and still sometimes say about how Windows is trash. Well, a system that cannot let you choose when to update stuff and ruins your best gaming moments, if that's not trash then I can't find another worse word to describe it.

Time flies and we learnt about Linux more everyday. It just feels like something that we cannot finish learning - there are always some tricks that we can do with this system, and there are always more ways that this system can ruin our days. My graphical user interface failed to load because I installed NVIDIA graphics drivers. My friend's hard disk's partition table for borked by a bug in elementary OS's installer (I think it is a bug?). Sometimes it still takes me a couple of moments to realize that "oh okay so I didn't set this script as executable" when it refuses to run on click. It is like an endless journey where we keep on learning the system and make it really our own.

P/s: If you are interested, this is what Linus Torvalds said regarding NVIDIA. I cannot stop watching this tbh, it says so much about our situation.

When I reached university, I had access to the internet at a much faster speed (perhaps 100x the speed at my home), and hence I am able to try out some of the stuff that needs faster internet connection, such as installing Arch Linux. I did it twice, as the first time was a disaster. But I guess it is worth it, I managed to learn about that xinitrc thingy, what is a chroot, etc, and make the entire system my own as I literally stuck pieces of pieces of what I wanted onto it manually. Not Linux-From-Scratch level of stuff, but I'm still happy seeing it becoming what I really want - speedy, great UI that fits my taste, and headaches are lesser and lesser day by day. Well, it is indeed bad during the first few days, but once it gets comfortable, it's just nice. Plus, you will never learn anything if you are permanently comfortable.

People sometimes ask me, why I use Linux when everyone else are using Windows?

I still have a copy of Windows in my laptop. It exists to support all the games that are not available on Linux and Wine is not a viable option for the moment. However when I'm doing stuff that are not going to make use of the discrete graphics card (refer to the NVIDIA meme above) such as writing assignments, programming, writing Steemit posts, I tend to boot into Linux. To be honest, both sides feel the same - I just need something that allows me to get my job done, and they do. The biggest difference is that on Linux, I feel more focused and natural doing stuff, since everything I know there is more or less determined by me when installing stuff. The keyboard shortcuts, the desktop settings, the multitasking options, the power to be focused by the ability to fullscreen every single thing and hiding the mouse cursor, the neat little apps that I love and are only available on Linux (Quilter deserves a mention here, it's my favourite tool to write stuff), etc. I think it is these little things, especially the comfort that comes from the things I can customize myself makes me happy working with Linux.

I guess I will still have a boatload of stories about Linux in the near future...since yea, learning about it never ends.

--@Lilacse

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