Introductions and Current Status

[Nathan England]

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 at paysonlinux.org)
PlaxOS Gnu/Linux Development System
http://www.paysonlinux.org

PlaxOS Gnu/Linux Development System
Linux Administration and Consulting