Journey to Linux as a daily by ME (who else?)
2025-02-23
It's really been that long
Ive always been a fan of doing stuff "the wierd way". The first time i used linux was back in 7th grade. Within 2 months of having my first ever full laptop I had already begun messing around with the things that have now become half of my personality:
- Music Production
- FUCKING UP COMPUTERS
Hearing about Linux through RasberryPi's as at that time I had been going to a local robotics club working with ardiunos and the sort. I had just finished setting up virtualbox to run Win95 (as one does), and thought I might as well try to run linux in a VM. I google linux and download the iso for the first one to show up, UBUNTU. At the time I did not know about the terminal or even Linux's reputation for relying on the terminal, I ultimatly gave up on it because I only ever came into it with the idea of trying something new and novel.
Start the homelab
Fast forward 5 - 6 years. I'm participating in everyones favorite nautical past time when I hear of a service called jacket. A index of indexers and trackers. I installed it from chocolatty because it sounded cool, not knowing how to use it I started the research which would eventually lead to my first homelab.
A 2001 dell inspiron running debian with Jellyfin, jacket, sonarr, radarr, and qbit. Using a Apple time machine router as a smb/nfs "nas" it would function as my only Linux machine for a while.
Until
I bought a used Dell poweredge r720 server on kijiji and ran PROXMOX the single greatest free time sink ever. I would use this server for a year and gradually get more comfortable with Linux and the terminal from september 2023 to early december that year, when I decided I was comfortable enough in Linux to try running the Dreaded, the Terifying, "arch" Linux on one of laptops I had hoarded over the years. It was an experiment and didnt last very long but that same install would come back later.
1 FULL WEEK!
Vacation struck. And me loving my work but not wanting to lug around a loud, hot gaming laptop decided to bring my Arch laptop. I had grown more comfortable as I had started using WSL on my desktop, but the one week taught me something. Linux, is not that scary. Its actually pretty easy to use full time. All of the problems were caused by me overstepping some sane defaults and messing stuff up, But fixing it was fun. I wanted to try dual booting my desktop when I returned home
OCTOBER AGAIN
Well it didnt fully happen
I gave linux a chance as a dual boot. I set up EndevourOS (arch but better) on a seperate disk and tried to get stuff running. BUT there was one app I could not give up. My music production program, Cubase, It had no native version and it would not run on wine. For the better part of half a year i would ocasionally fight with Linux, I even tried NixOs and FreeBSD, but i would not give up on Cubase.
Until
I couldnt stand windows anymore, Nor could I stand the price tag on the new version of cubase should I want to update. I switched to using Reaper, which has honestly been much better. After making that switch I had no issues with switching over, a few work apps and a fear of loosing data on the windows drive have led me to leave the drive in for now but I have not booted up windows since november, I rarely have issues using linux. A audio bug here or there, or a misconfiguration, all caused by me. But has been plesant and not at all like the fears the name Linux (which is actually GNU/Linux or as i have taken to calling it GNU + linux) brings to mind.