Hello Hello,
Many of us have been on this list for years and years, while others have been
here only a few months. It's fun to reminisce of the older days and how we got
into computers and Linux. Joe recently asked if anyone had a need for 3.5"
diskettes and it made me think of when I first got started in computers and
where I'm at now.
I'll start it off, how about you? When did you get started with Linux, how did
you find it? What are you doing with it now?
I am a 32 year old PHP developer and LAMP administrator. I have been using
Linux since I got my first pc. My parents thought it good for me to learn how
to use a computer and bought me a Compaq Presario with Windows 3.1 and DOS 5
or 6 for my birthday. My elementary school used Apple's, so it became
immediately clear to me that there must be a variety of operating systems
available for a computer. So I hopped on yahoo and began looking through the
categories and found computers / operating systems and something new that had
just come about a couple months before called slackware! Not knowing what I
was doing, I downloaded a bunch of diskette images and rawrite, wrote all the
images to I believe 11 or 14 diskettes and never looked back...
Okay, not quite so easy. I think I made it through about half the disks, maybe
the a package group and then I hit a bad diskette. So I had to reload windows
from my Presario recovery cds and download the images again and write them to
some new floppies. I don't think I slept at all that night, 14.4 modems were
awesome!!!
Since then things have changed a lot, thankfully! I have spent my years
tinkering around with Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE in all its incarnations, but
used Slackware for most of those years. Eventually I switched to archlinux
about 6 years ago, but as of the last few years I have been managing my own
distro using my own package system. I prefer stability of most of the system
yet I want bleeding edge on some of it, such as kdevelop. But I don't like
having to upgrade a ton of stuff, just because a new version was released,
only so I can keep current with kdevelop and a few other apps.
I've never been much of a GNOME person. The early days had such horrific
memory problems that it put a sour taste in my mouth that even today I cannot
shake. GNOME 2 is great, I despise GNOME 3 and Unity, but I am very happy with
KDE 4.7.3.
Today, I manage a dozen linux servers, about half running my own distro and a
few running various versions of Fedora and CentOS. My own personal server and
workstations run my own distro. Some of my consulting work requires that I
keep a Windows XP VirtualBox handing around but outside of that it's all
Linux.
Though I don't see 2012 being the "year of the linux desktop" I do have high
hopes for desktop linux. I'm still on the fence as to which distro will take
the lead when Ubuntu fails, unless they wise up and default to something other
than unity. I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I really think Unity is a
mistake. Granted, I feel the same way about GNOME 3. Both of which I hope they
straighten out and get things working the way people want them to and quickly.
Nathan
--
Nathan England (
nathan@paysonlinux.org)
PlaxOS Gnu/Linux Development System
http://www.paysonlinux.org
PlaxOS Gnu/Linux Development System
Linux Administration and Consulting
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