In this page I share my history and experiences with Linux.
I first read about linux in computer magazines in 1997; that was the same year I bought my first PC after receiving my first salary. Commodore died in 1994 and Apple was nearly a joke, so the obvious choice was a PC, and at that time, PC meant Windows, which both was breaking the heart and causing dilemma for people who loved real OSes.
Being interested by these Linux articles, I bought a book containing a CD with several distros to learn the basics and started to experiment.
I don't have a lot of memories with redhat, and the few I have are
not good ones. At that time, redhat was not yet the RHEL enterprise
crap thing, and the desktop tried to mimic Windows 95 : same
start menu, same window buttons, but it was ugly. I also remember I
did not like the package manager, although I don't remember why.
I have fond memories of slackware. I used this distro from 1997 to mid 2000s, at home and at work.
At home I used it for basically everything but gaming. Netscape Navigator had a compiled version (which often crashed), there were IRC clients I had to compile from source (like a lot of software - there was far less choice than nowadays, and software was nearly never packaged for your distro). Wine was already good enough to run mIRC32. I also installed slackware on a second machine to act as an ISDN then ADSL router (no internet boxes yet). Compiling software was often a problem : there was often compiler or librairies versions mismatch between the developper's machine and my machine, and the software just... didn't compile. That was often not a smooth experience, but I really liked hacking with this pioneer spirit. Everything is so much easier nowadays.
At work it was a different experience : I used slackware on a machine that was basically just a X server, to connect to another machine, on which nerdy colleagues and I had our environments. It was much more convenient to connect to the company's SCO unixware machines from a linux machine, than from a windows machine. Until... someone decided we could not have a machine not created from their windows master, and my early linux years stopped.
At home for some reason I stopped using Linux too - I don't remember exactly why but it has probably something to do with netscape's problematic situation. I tried several distros (debian, ubuntu, elementary...) on laptops through the years, and always finished with non working devices (especially wifi, bluetooth and touchpad). I came to the conclusion that linux was just not mature enough for laptops.
At work I was using Linux sporadically, mainly to compile the buildroot system used to master the... windows machines. Until I switched to another team, making stuff like scripts and packages for the cash desks fleet powered by linux. My own work machine is a macbook pro since then - the company has no linux master for employee's PCs. Nowadays I mainly do cloud things.
At some point I got a brand new personal windows laptop, and just a few years later, learned that it will not be compatible with windows 11. I remember my reaction was like "are you kidding ? not supporting a four-year-old machine any longer ?". I was angry with that and decided I will never have a Windows PC again.
That was the moment I decided to try the most up-to-date distro we can imagine : arch. Given the peripherals problems I always encountered with laptops, I did not have a great confidence in this process. It was a pleasant surprise : everything worked, no wifi, bluetooth or touchpad issues. Even the special keys were working.
Since a few years I am using various macs, at home I used the mini (m1) a lot for programming (mainly cross-platform projects in rust), but also some embedded projects (atmega, stm32). From time to time I used to use debian on a visionfive 2 to assemble or compile linux projects for riscv64, but that was not very practical.
When I converted my laptop to Linux, I discovered that arch came with packaged pre-compiled toolchain for riscv64 cross-compilation, debug, and that qemu can execute riscv binaries. I started to use this laptop more and more, to the point it became my daily driver, until I bought a more powerful mini PC for development and hacking, on which I installed arch, and this machine became my new daily driver. Et voilà ! The circle is complete, my PC journey started with Linux, and successive events in my computer life brought me back to Linux.