Way back in like 2006 when I was in middle school, a friend of mine pulled me aside to tell me there's more than just Windows and Mac. His parents worked IT and they showed him a lot of stuff and he showed it to me. I installed Slackware on a laptop with him. I basically just did as he said.
In high school, I looked more into it and tried installing some other distros but landed on DSL as the laptop my parents got me was a piece of shit and it worked good enough. I moved onto Ubuntu later because DSL can only do so much and really struggled with it lol.
And then as the years went by and Ubuntu started to suck I moved onto a variety of other distros like Arch(which took me 2 days to install and I fucked it up), Void(which also took me 2 days to install), Mint, and when it finally came out I tried things like SteamOS, Bazzite, and Nobara.
This all as I was dualbooting with Windows. I never took any classes, I never read any books on it, I just figured it out by doing it, breaking my OS a bunch of times, chatting with friends and randos on forums and Reddit, and the man command, thank GOD for that. All that and I just come back to Mint which I adore for its ease of use.
So all my knowledge is muscle memory. What the actual fuck does a package manager do? Like I know generally, but there's more to them than just downloading shit? What is the difference between Systemd and OpenRC? WHAT THE FUCK IS HYPRLAND OR WAYLAND!? I DON'T UNDERSTAND! 20 YEARS AND I LEARNED FUCKING NOTHING!
shoutouts to tux
Around 2006 I watched a video on YouTube of a guy showing off Pendrive Linux booting from a USB drive and it blew my mind that you could run an entire OS from a lowly USB drive. I then made my own and used it to play games on the computers at my middle school and have been unfortunately addicted to Linux ever since. Later on in my 20s I took a Linux class in college and my professor was really impressed I already knew so much about Linux. 8 years of "brute forcing it" taught me quite a bit. Now I'm a jaded network administrator and have also settled on Mint because the last thing I want to do in my free time is fix my own fucking computer.
Back in the day tomsrtbt was similarly inspiring. It could boot from a single 3Β½" floppy. Always kept one around as a rescue disk.
β Fixing (your) computers for free
β Fixing (other) computers for money
When I was younger, I actually liked it when my computer broke because I thought fixing it was giving me knowledge. I guess it did to some extent, but I'd rather my stuff just work now that I'm older.
That's neat. When I was in college I would carry a live USB thumb drive and would sometimes play games off of it, too, in the computer room of the business building. Also, I use Mint, too, since it works well for me.
Using a Fedora spinoff (Nobara, because it had install mediums for PCs with NVidia GPUs and a lot of gaming specific things prepared out of the box) for a similar reason. I need an OS that is cutting edge enough to play the latest games, but not so cutting edge that it is prone to sudden disintegration after an update.