Linux

I've been using Linux since 1995, but had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for a while, because I wanted to play games. So it was usually dual boot. But in 2007 I bought a PS3 and have been gaming on PlayStation exclusively since then, which allowed me to go fulltime Linux. I also worked a lot with OpenBSD and still miss pf, which is such a lovely firewall. iptables is horrible shit compared to it (I am aware of nftables, but it's too new to replace the long years of iptables).

In 2004 grandpa gave me an old laptop from 1995 to play around with. I wanted it to be faster so I tried using g.ho.st. That was a terrible experience, too slow of internet, cloud computing was never gonna work. After that I tried suse. They had this fancy iso builder at the time that let me pick all the packages I want from the repo and have them present on my ISO.

That's started my journey, outside of school I've had Linux exclusively since.

On and off over the last 15 years or so.

Only recently have I become much more comfortable & able to resolve things without resorting to search, stackoverflow etc.

The turnover point was the day I finally learned vi & cron so I could fiddle with an old Buffalo NAS, that was long out of support, riddled with security holes, and offered only very limited tooling.

Was a great learning experience, but it didn't pan out the way I wanted. So it runs Debian now, supports modern protocols, and continues to serve. Amazing what you can keep in service when you try.

when apple took all the USB ports out of their macbooks. i needed a new computer, one with a practical set of ports, and windows was never an option