Linux, in many ways, has had an important impact on my career.
Ever since I discovered Linux back in the late ‘90s, I’ve been involved in some way or another with Unix but not until 2001 that I really got into it. I used to spend my time developing on Windows© beforehand, and I never really knew what I was missing!
Below, you can find the timeline of my Unix history:
- 2001: After trying many different distributions, I’ve settled on using Debian. I never really liked RPM-based distributions. Debian taught me a lot about Linux, knowledge that I cherish to this day.
- 2005: Ubuntu has just recently came out, and delivered a much nice interface than Debian. I became quite invested in the project, and took on the task of a beta tester and a forum moderator.
- 2006: I discovered Arch, and decided to move to it. I very much liked the simplicity of pacman and PKGBUILD files.
- 2006: I started my own Distribution, purely for educational purposes. This helped me understand the boot sequence, and also allowed me to create my own version of Kernel initialization very much aligned with Arch’s mkinitcpio. My work helped fix a few bugs (example).
- 2006: My server has been running Linux for about two years, and it was time to switch to FreeBSD.
- 2007: I switched to Gentoo because I wanted more customizations, and Arch did not offer an easy way to do this.
- 2008: I was getting a bit tired of compiling the world, so I’ve switched over to using Sabayon, and quickly became a core member. I was later givin the title Chief development officer in charge of the packages.
- 2012: I switched over to using Mac full-time for my workstation, and I kept my servers running Arch.
- 2017: Back to Linux land after Apple has gotten rid of the ESC key. I chose Arch because I’ve been running it on my Server and Desktop at Home and seemed to be an easier switch.
- 2018: I switched all of my machines (workstations and servers) over to NixOS. Please read Why I use NixOS.
I don’t always use it in the convention way, what’s fun about that? I like to break stuff and help fix them. I like to innovate towards a more rigid system. I don’t care much about ease of usability, and I don’t care for a GUI. I live in the terminal most of my day. I use only Vim for editing. I use a tiling window manager, i3. I try to stay away from the mouse altogether – I use Vim keybindings on Chrome! I’m much more efficient in my own way!