Hey, I am not a keyboard cowboy enjoyer. In fact, I hate this perspective on using an OS because I think you need to be productive and not just someone who wants to show off. Also, I don't think that necessarily being a mega power user means you understand software or operating systems; it's more of a hobby in its own right.
That said, my journey is purely based on what works and what does not, according to my previously stated philosophy of maximizing productivity and minimizing effort—obviously failing many times in the process... hehe.
My journey starts with one of the first times I entered the internet, around 2006. I clicked on a site, didn’t know anything about English, and just filled out the form to request an Ubuntu CD from the Ship It program. Yes, sounds strange, right? The Ubuntu project was sending CDs with the live Ubuntu distro across various continents, and all you needed to do was fill out a form.
After one year, the CD arrived with a lot of stickers. I was just a child and tried to run Ubuntu. The computer was without any OS, so I installed Ubuntu without any help from the web. My luck was that the PC was virtually defunct; there was no file except for Warcraft 3 (which I had completed the main campaigns of, as browsing the internet was rare back then, and the game became boring).
So this was my first distro: a CD from the Ship It program. Exciting! It came with GIMP and games. I was dabbling in some C programming at the time. It was a great period of my life,.
I used Ubuntu alongside Windows for some time, but using the PC became boring. I was more entertained by playing musical instruments and reading books on philosophy. When I became an adult in 2011, I met a friend who was using Ubuntu. She was studying psychology, but her boyfriend was very interested in open source, and she said that Mint had a better UI.
This was when I dove into different desktop environments: how they work, how session managers function, and how to load different desktops without using their session manager counterparts. I also started using a live distro from a USB stick. I learned a lot about how drivers work on Linux and the dd command utility, a program from 1974 that converts and copies files between different devices.
So I tested and liked it, but the system was very slow, and I was unsatisfied, so I returned to Windows. I enrolled in a computer science course, and thus, I finally began my distro-hopping journey.
My PC sucked—just 1GB of RAM—and I needed many compilers for my college course. What could I do? I checked a lot of info online about lightweight distros. My colleagues were talking about GPUs and the new Street Fighter, while I was discussing with my teachers about the most lightweight distro without any mental load to use.
One of them suggested Lubuntu. I installed it and used Fluxbox; it was good. But just two months later, well, I live in an underdeveloped country, so my computer was stolen.
In 2016, without a computer and in a computer science undergraduate course, it was tough. But with some effort, I bought a PC with 2GB RAM and a Celeron processor. It was nice, but really slow for Windows 7. So what did I do?
I installed Arch Linux. Yeah, that happened sometime... It was easy to install, as I basically just followed(maybe memorized it? don't remember) the installation manual. I used it with Fluxbox. For six months, it was paradise until an update broke the Arch Linux experience.
One thing I learned here was that to configure the X Window System, you need to know a little about how the graphical system initializes. I also learned how to configure networks, DHCP, and install drivers. I found the THM (Try Hack Me) modules on network introduction to be very helpful for understanding this part.
I was furious with Linux and installed OpenBSD. I actually found it easier than Arch Linux—until the screen started to blink randomly. An Intel driver issue; I was okay with that and didn’t want to change.
I used this OpenBSD micro system until Ubuntu 22 or 24 arrived. It was quite nice, but I just tried the new Ubuntu on a notebook equipped with a GeForce, and wow!
It was a leap from a 2GB system to a powerful 32GB RAM setup. Ubuntu was running faster and without screen issues. This was my last experience with Linux—a powerful yet flawed Ubuntu.
A new challenge arose! I had to configure the firmware to disable secure boot. Why? Because secure boot disables drivers that aren't signed. By this time, this issue was resolved in Ubuntu and Fedora, so if you’re using these distros, you don’t need this step.
I customized it with Xmonad, which I found quite entertaining while dabbling in Haskell here and there—very fun. And so I finished my Linux distro hop that took an incredible 20 years.
Right, I’ve just gone from Ubuntu to Ubuntu, hehe, trying to adjust my philosophy of use, with some epic fails along the way. Currently, I am using macOS, but If I was at a job, I would switch back to Linux, as it helped me understand a lot about networks and drivers as a user and like it more as an environment for devloping applications. Hope you enjoy this text and write your own journey. See you later!