Why I Started Learning Linux
For this post, I will start with taking you back in time to the days of my adolescence. So when I was growing up in the early 2000’s, there was a seemingly on-going battle between Windows and Mac…and I grew up in a Windows house. My dad was a staunch Microsoft guy, and he was always raving about how great the “DOS Days” were. Naturally by the time I was old enough to be messing around with a computer of my own(an older desktop that my dad let me setup in my room), I was not using DOS but instead Windows XP. If you ask my father, Windows XP was the supreme Windows OS and it has all gone down ever since…but that’s besides the point. I remember growing into being a staunch Microsoft guy myself and I would routinely scoff at those who preferred to use their pretty little Macs(funnily enough I would go on to marry an Apple girl). For me the choice was simple, was I going to use a sleek and pretty but locked down OS like Macintosh? Or would I brave an OS that could be rough around the edges but would give me the freedom to change settings and configurations?(or lets be honest, allow me to play the majority of computer games)I had grown up being sold this bill of goods that Windows was for “the guy who knows what he is doing” and it should be the OS of choice for those who are serious about technology…oh how wrong I was.
I’m sure all of the Linux purists are laughing at me right now, but hey give me a break, some people are slower than others when it comes to seeing the light. I remember seeing that little penguin next to the Windows and Mac icons next to a lot of applications I would find on the world wide web, but I guess I just never really cared to pay much attention to it. Finally I learned that it represented this weird thing called “Linux” and I just chalked it up as an obscure brand of computers that was sold and distributed much like Windows or Macintosh.(really funny because of how Mac is based off Linux, but my young mind couldn’t have known that.) Linux would continue to fly under my radar until even after I began my undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering, for all the machines we used on a daily basis all ran on Windows (Windows 7 at that time).
It wasn’t until I started an internship with the Department of Defense after my sophomore year of college that I was truly exposed to Linux. I was given a laptop and told that I would be using this to complete most of the daily tasks in the lab I was assigned. I had booted it up and it was an OS that I had never really seen up close before. I was told that this was Ubuntu, a popular version of Linux, and that it was commonly used in technical environments to run all sorts of equipment. I remember just taking a couple of days and messing around with the GUI and realizing how fast and sensible it seemed. What also caught my attention was not just how fast and sleek and it was, but how easily configured everything was as well. Then I was taught about several basic commands as well such as “cd” and “ls” and the other basics that were needed to complete my menial intern tasks. Probably the coolest thing about that image of Linux on my system to me was that it came preinstalled with a Windows XP VM(also the first time I’ve used a virtual machine) that had space cadet pinball on it. whenever I had downtime in the lab(I had quite a bit) I would relive childhood memories trying to score extra balls.
After that internship, my interest in Linux had been piqued. When I found out that this OS was simply free to download and use, I became excited to go home and try it on my own system. I remember going home and downloading a version of Linux and storing it on a USB stick in which I then proceeded to try and install on a old laptop I had laying around the house. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure I bricked that laptop and my frustration led me to shelf my interest in Linux for a while.
Fast forward to about a year ago, almost three years after graduating college and not really doing a whole lot of computer engineering. I remember pulling out my old college laptop and trying to use it as a “garage computer.” It was running Windows 10, a free upgrade from its old OS Windows 7, and it wasn’t running very well. I had googled this issue and apparently Windows 10 just didn’t perform all that great when installed onto HDDs anymore, and it was a common issue that your HDD resources would be constantly running at 100% thus making your performance tank and basically be unusable. This really upset me, especially since laptops don’t make it too easy to crack them open and swap out the drive to an SSD. It wasn’t until after a couple weeks of having it sit lifeless in a corner that I figured this might be a good time to try my hand at Linux once again. Once more I downloaded an iso for LinuxMint and threw that on a USB stick, then proceeded to boot it up on my venerable machine. It wasn’t long until the new OS was installed and my computer was running like it was brand new again! It is pretty crazy how much baggage Windows carries around with it and the answer for most people is to just buy an SSD or install more RAM; but with Linux, all the fat is trimmed and only the things you need or want are present. It was liberating.
Now that I had a Linux machine myself, I began to dig into how it works and why so many individuals and companies seem to swear by it(it does come up on almost every job posting I have seen regarding computer engineering.) The more I read up, the more I realized, Linux is everything I thought Windows was when I was younger. Linux was the OS for people who knew what they were doing! It had been all along! I almost feel a little stupid for not getting into Linux before I did, but hey you can’t change the past, you can only prepare for the future. I have since purchased the “Linux Bible”, a hefty tome that claims to be “the ultimate guide to mastering Linux.” I guess time will tell. I have been slowly making my way through its numerous pages, it can be a bit dry admittedly, but still interesting. As I am ending my stint in the Army I feel that it is important for me to rebuild some of my technical skills and in this day and age, any self respecting technical professional should know their way around a Linux terminal. I may have been a late bloomer, but I have to say, it feels good that I finally came around…even if I still typed this blog post on a Windows machine…until next time!