A Decade of Linux

2025-10-31

My Linux journey started in 2012 with an Asus netbook that could barely run Windows 7. Constant updates, fans spinning at takeoff speeds, the feeling of fighting my own hardware. Someone on a forum mentioned Ubuntu might help, so I tried it.

Ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu 14.04 meant learning dd. Every forum post treated it like handling explosives—warnings about wiping the wrong drive, stories of lost data, stern advice to triple check everything. I ran lsblk about ten times before executing anything.

dd if=ubuntu-14.04-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Unity booted. The netbook that had struggled with Windows suddenly felt responsive. I don’t know if Unity was actually good the forums were at war over it but it worked for me. I spent months learning terminal basics. grep felt unreasonably powerful the first time I used it. The Ubuntu forums became my main resource, and the patience of the regulars there was remarkable. I asked a lot of stupid questions.

The dd incident

By 2016 I was on Linux Mint. I’d entered my phase of copying bash scripts from GitHub and modifying them slightly, convinced I was automating things efficiently. Mostly I was making things more complicated than necessary. I was flashing Mint over my Ubuntu install and typed /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb. I’d been doing photography for about two years at that point. Nothing serious, just learning, but I cared about it. All of it was on that drive. Recovery softwares helped me with maybe a third but with low resolution artifacts. The rest was gone. Someone on the forum said “welcome to the club.” I didn’t find it comforting at the time. I check lsblk twice now. Every time.

Distro hopping

2018 I got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon. ThinkPads have a reputation for Linux compatibility and mine earned it WiFi, trackpoint, function keys all worked immediately. The fingerprint reader took some convincing but eventually cooperated. This started a period of trying different distributions. Solus, Elementary, KDE Neon, probably others I’ve forgotten. Each one taught me something. Solus did rolling releases well. Elementary proved Linux could look polished. KDE Neon had more configuration options than I knew what to do with. I was spending more time installing systems than using them. Told myself it was educational. It was, partially.

Arch

By 2020 I wanted to try Arch. The reputation is intimidating elitist community, difficult installation, easy to break. Everyone had horror stories. So I went slowly. Followed the wiki exactly. Didn’t skip steps or assume I knew better. The Arch Wiki is the best Linux documentation I’ve encountered. Each step partitioning, formatting, generating fstab, configuring the bootloader, setting up rfkill and wlan taught me things I’d glossed over for years. Other distributions had handled this stuff automatically. Arch made me do it myself, which meant I actually understood what was happening. The horror stories did me a favor. They made me patient. My install worked first try.

eBPF

I had NFS performance issues at work in 2023. Slow file operations, inconsistent latency, the usual distributed filesystem complaints. Logs told me something was wrong but not what. I needed to trace file handle behavior across mounts and measure what was actually happening at the kernel level. eBPF let me write programs that hook into kernel functions and trace syscalls without the traditional risks of kernel module development. No “congratulations, you’ve panicked the kernel” moments. I could finally see what NFS was doing instead of guessing. Around this time I submitted my first github patches. Minor networking fixes, some quality of life improvements nothing significant, but it felt like paying back some of what I’d taken from forums over the years.

Current setup

AMD Desktop: Arch
Framework Laptop: Fedora
ARM and Intel based Homelab: Ubuntu Server LTS

Arch for the machine I want full control over. Fedora for the laptop because it’s stable enough for work but current enough to be interesting. Ubuntu Server for infrastructure because I want it to be boring. The photography recovered eventually. Fifteen years in now.