tl;dr: if you think this is too long, don’t read it.

near the end of 2004 i was given a computer that cost $100 at a garage sale. it had windows xp installed but it was not activated. i had also just gotten out of jail for amateur botany (growing weed) and was on probation. there were strict rules with probation and commiting any illegal act would have meant far worse sentences if i were caught. since i could not afford a windows key and did not wish to illegally pirate one as that put me at risk of prison (at least, in my head it did but this was unlikely) i looked for alternatives to windows. that led me to linux.

i should add that my memory of this time is not the best and any or all of this could be absurdly wrong but it’s how i remember it, however incorrect that may be. my brain’s memory does not work right.

at the time my only access to the internet was one hour at a time per day, through the local library. it was there that i tried to download linux onto a flash drive. i thought it could be installed like any regular windows program. i don’t think there were linux distros that even had USB installation support back then, although that might have been a motherboard limitation. i used a 1gb flash drive and saved a .txt file to the drive which i had copied and pasted man pages into, like ‘man man’ among others.

i don’t know what it was i downloaded for sure anymore but i believe it was a linux kernel, as in just the linux kernel source code. no DE or bootloader or anything else, i think it was a .tar.gz of source code in text files but i never figured out what to do with them. i didn’t understand what a .tar.gz file was until years later. i believed they were linux somehow, that’s all i understand. needless to say, i failed in my endeavor and that $100 computer ultimately became an oversized media player, forever in ‘you need to activate this copy of windows’ mode.

fast forward to 2009. i had completed my probation and finally was a rehabilitated citizen. i had established friendships with more tech savvy people than myself (but still not very tech savvy, they just played WoW a lot) and with their help, i built a computer from a tigerdirect barebones kit. one of my coworkers installed a copy of windows xp on it that did not need activation. i doubt it was a legitimate version but i was still too ignorant to care. i was reminded of linux at some point and to show off my newfound knowledge of computers, i decided to upgrade my system to a dual boot of windows 7 (courtesy of a local college) and linux mint. it was successful but i had also made friends with several gamers by then. linux gaming was fairly nonexistant at the time. i did log into the mint installation occasionally but i never did much with it and none of it involved the command line. i soon forgot about it entirely.

i built my second computer in 2012 and upgraded to windows 10, for free because i had started classes for computer science. i quickly learned that where i lived, IT jobs were non-existant unless you had military base security clearance, which was impossible for me due to my previous life of criminal gardening. i gamed heavily instead of attending classes and soon dropped out entirely. i spent a few years drinking heavily in a haze of depression. i quit drinking in 2016 and worked a minimum wage job a few years in a haze of depression.

by 2019 i had saved up enough to upgrade my computer. in the upgrade process i changed enough parts to trigger windows to believe i had an entirely new computer and it demanded i purchase a new copy of windows. i’ve learned since that there were ways around that and that i probably did not need to buy windows again but thanks to that and to my cheap, frugal nature, i decided to revisit linux once again. i installed linux mint. two days later my apartment was hit by 2 tornados, frying my power supply and bricking two of my three harddrives. one was a data drive with all my important personal files and the other drive had mint on it. i was left with a plain install of windows. this is when i learned how important backups are. it took me until nearly the end of the year to be able to afford a new power supply. early 2020 i spent a lot of time trying to recover accounts. because my landlord is a slumlord i was fixing a lot of my apartment as well.

in march of 2020 my mom gifted me my first smartphone. it was an android phone which reminded me of my linux journeys in days of old. i bought an SSD and a couple flash drives with a tax return. i started downloading distros while also downloading all the apps in the google play store. i rather quickly acquired malware on the phone which in turn spread to windows i think. within a couple days time, the pandemic lockdowns began, i became unemployed, my internet was shut off, my phone wouldn’t work and all i had was a flash drive with a few iso files of 64 and 32 bit linux distros. without internet, i had to rely on man pages to learn things. i couldn’t download anything. i couldn’t search the internet for help. i had lost my drivers license back in 2004 and while i had gotten it back, i had not been able to afford a car so i couldn’t drive to friends houses or the library for help. it was not a pleasant experience. there is no direction to the man pages. if i didn’t know something, i probably didn’t learn it. it did not help that i had an nvidia gpu.

i’ve been mostly using manjaro kde with moderate success since winter of 2021. i tinkered with a few other distros and made all the rookie mistakes. i really enjoyed puppy linux and always have a version or three on a flash drive and play with it from time to time. i’ve learned a lot and unlearned some bad behaviours. i quit videogames entirely as well as tv and movies, so i could focus more on learning. i still barely know what i’m doing and i make mistakes often. they aren’t critical mistakes at least now and i have a backup system that’s almost good enough.

last year it was determined that i am developmentally disabled. my memory, meaning the kind in carbon not silicon, doesn’t like to work properly. i tend to use repetition to force it into long term memory. numbers don’t process well either but i’m not counting that. the previous sentence should demonstrate that my sense of humor is also probably affected.

this became far longer than i expected. my linux journey has not been conventional. it has not been positive until recently but mostly due to my own mistakes and ignorance. if i could change something, i would have asked people for help more. i hope you enjoyed reading it and thank you for your time. have a nice day.