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A year ago today, I wrote a journal entry making plans to end everything. It wasn’t the first such entry, either. I was deeply addicted to gaming, sinking lower and lower, year by year. I was a complete loser, life was challenging and depressing, and I couldn’t feel any joy.
Then, in one computer science lecture, the professor was talking about Linux, and mentioned, “Linux is an important OS for computer science. But I don’t think any of you should install it, because it will break your computer, unless you know what you’re doing.”
I had heard of Linux, but used to dismiss it as a niche OS. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to try it out anyway, my first distro being Ubuntu. I was amazed how well it ran compared to Windows. I was also learning new stuff and customizing things left and right.
Even more amazingly, I felt joy for the first time in a long time. Real joy.
However, I didn’t know what I was doing, and broke my computer just as the professor foretold. I had to reinstall Ubuntu many times. During one of these reinstall, I accidentally wiped the entire disk, including the Windows installation I was dual-booting to play my games.
The enjoyment I got from using and customizing Linux, combined with a laziness to install Windows, was exactly what I needed to eventually get rid of my gaming addiction. It had a hold over me for over a decade, and I was finally free. Linux also led the way to me rediscovering some of my older hobbies, as well as restoring my enjoyment of coding.
Now, one year from that journal entry, life is still incredibly difficult and overwhelming at times, but I have regained hope. And I find joy in my activities, not the least of which is simply using my computer running Linux. Linux saved my life and turned it around. I am eternally grateful.
However, I didn’t know what I was doing, and broke my computer just as the professor foretold.
A rite of passage.
Linux, BSD, and open source in general has saved my life too. It’s given my a passion and a love again. Linux and BSD quite literally work better than any antidepressant I’ve ever had.
Linux has saved the lives of many during the 2000’s. Friends… Family… Boomers… When they ran windows, I was constantly bothered to fix their computers for them.
- Defrag
- Unclose-able pop-ups
- Multiple browser search bar plugins
- Virus
You name it. Started switching them over to Linux. They weren’t running anything beyond email and a browser.
I cannot count how many lives it saved… from me. :)
A smaller scale anecdote of mine — I have been using Linux for more than a decade as a second daily driver. I need to make the switch. Everything I need now is on Linux except Visual Studio. So I planned to change my main programming language. It is slow and painful, but I think I am on the right path. Windows 10 is truly the last Windows, for me.
I grew up poor, and reached adulthood at the tail end of the BBS days / start of the internet revolution. It was frustrating seeing so much history go by and not being able to take part in it.
Started playing with Linux early because, I think, I resented my parents never signing the permission form to let me get a school UNIX account. They thought I’d rack up thousands in long distance charges somehow. But I got Slackware 3.1 later as an adult.
I guess I wanted a taste of that “whee I’m a sysop too!” experience because in 2000 I stood up a personal domain and started making shell accounts for people on IRC. Part of my username dot net, though there’s nothing really there now. I was a bad sysadmin, though generous with my time and resources. Eventually it started feeling like a crushing weight of unresolved commitments, as the server needed more and more work that I didn’t know how to do.
The site eventually died in 2015 I think, ancient IDE hard drive finally clicked itself to death. Even more depressing. And then in the process of trying to recover the drive with Spinrite I straight up lost the drive. I think I didn’t label it well and it disappeared into a box with other IDE drives.
I found the drive again recently. I’ve been a professional C# developer since 2012 and since 2016 I’ve been with an awesome company and gotten to see a bunch of the ops side. That’s inspired me to try to get back into it, but with modern standards and security. And three ESXi servers.
Just last night I mostly finished loading my old passwd, shadow, and groups info into openldap. Got 400+ users, though I’m sure most were just ftp users who grabbed some fansub anime and split. Had 98 distinct file owners in /home/httpd/html, mostly web comics or personal file dumps. 15-ish phpbb boards. I’d love to get that all back online.
I know that won’t bring the 2000s back. Several of my users have probably passed away. Nobody will care about most of this. But it’ll feel like I’m closing out an older chapter of my life in a better way, if I get everything back online.
(And if I need to job hunt again, I can point to the site and say “behold my awesome devops skills! I can accomplish in months what a competent person can do in days!”)
I also switched to Linux because I felt like I was addicted to gaming and wasting my life. Wasn’t depressed though and I don’t think it would’ve ruined my life if I let it continue.
This is so fucking weird. But what isn’t I guess.
Cool it worked for them, but I’d end up reinstalling windows while cursing Linux for 3 hours. As I have done several times already :)
