Almost exactly 20 years ago I installed and used Linux for the first time. The distro was good old Ubuntu 5.10, code-named “Breezy Badger” back in the day. The hardware was my faithful Apple iBook G3 bought in 2003, with a PowerPC CPU.
That iBook was my favorite laptop for a long time, and I ended up giving it a second life, using it for experimenting with Linux and learning about it, until the battery died. (Spoiler alert: it still boots though!) One year after my first steps with Ubuntu, I installed Kubuntu and then Xubuntu in it.
Heck, I even compiled and booted my own Kernel at some point.
The first time I heard someone talking about Linux was my friend Yannis, around 1993 (yes, that was early). He told me about a “free operating system” for PCs that he had tried, and he was very enthusiastic about it. I should have followed his advice, I guess.
Then in 1997, as I started working for FIS, we had a guy who wanted us to migrate all the stuff we had running on Windows NT (including a large chunk of VBScript code and quite a few SQL Server 6.5 databases) into a Linux box… which of course we didn’t do, because we didn’t have the money nor the time to do (and there wasn’t really any business benefit to do that, really). So that was my second memory of Linux.
And then came that moment in 2005; Ubuntu was suddenly becoming a very popular distro, and I just took the bait and installed it.
I was hooked.
Here was a lightweight, stable, powerful operating system, including off-the-box pretty much all the software you’d ever need, and for literally nothing.
I kept on using Linux privately “on a second computer” for a long time, gaining a set of skills along the way that proved to be certainly very useful in various situations: web servers, cloud computing, and even in Android app development during my time at akosma software!
Linux is everywhere and anywhere these days, people. It’s amazing when you think about it.
In 2013, I got my first Raspberry Pi, and I used Raspbian in them, of course. I have a drawer filled with old unused Pis, as one would.
Around 2016 I started learning about Docker containers, a piece of knowledge that ended up being really useful in my career. I even gave a talk about it in 2018 to an unsuspecting group of teachers in Lausanne.
But I was craving of moving to a new galaxy.
Then in 2018 I ditched my last shitty MacBook and moved to Linux full-time, with both my personal and work machines configured with it. I started with Ubuntu 18.4 (funny enough, also with a codename starting with “B”, “Bionic Beaver”), considered Alpine for a short while, then used Zorin OS Pro for a while (yes, I got the paid version and I loved it), and finally in 2023 I switched to Fedora 38, thus ending my distro hopping period.
In the meantime I also played with FreeBSD, because once you feel familiar with one Unix-derived operating system, but not trying another one?
And incredibly enough, in 2024 I joined the ranks of none other than Red Hat, the company who literally started operations by selling CD-ROMs with a Linux distribution inside.
I have to say: I’m not looking back. Linux turned out to be not only useful, but also user-friendly (big GNOME fan here, I never quite clicked with KDE to be honest) and oh so incredibly stable and productive.
PS: My only complaint, as I’ve already written in the past, is the Linux video editing experience, which is inferior to that of Windows and macOS, no matter how you look at it. But hey, I’m not doing that anymore for a living, so I can’t complain.