A brief history of my experience with Linux

From developing newbie to Ubuntu Developer

From an early age, I’ve been very interested in computers. They were fascinating and profoundly powerful devices, capable of doing things that were (and in some ways still are) beyond my understanding. Like many of us, I started on Windows, and like many of us who started out computing when we were kids, I did a lot of damage to my first computer. I still haven’t grown out of breaking computers, I’ve just gotten a lot better at planning how I’m going to break them and what to do in order to fix them after the fact.

Fast forward several years. I’ve heard of Linux, read books about how to do some things like web development on Linux, and am thinking about trying Linux. I wanted to do music recording at the time too (something I’m still planning on doing). I didn’t have a working Internet connection, so I got in the car with my friend and went to a place that had Internet in order to download some Linux distros to try out.

The first distro I ever used was HP QuickWeb (Splashtop OS), which came with my Windows 7 laptop. I knew nothing about Linux at the time, I just found this QuickWeb thing included with my computer and decided to try it out in order to keep things isolated from my Windows installation. (In retrospect, this probably didn’t work at all, but I didn’t know that…) Basically it was nothing more than a Linux kernel, a simple and glitchy desktop, and a severely outdated copy of Firefox that I didn’t know better than to use. From this insecure and buggy mess, my journey into Linux began.

After fighting with QuickWeb’s browser for a bit, I learned about a distro called KXStudio, which was supposed to be geared towards music production. (KXStudio has since switched from being a distro to being a third-party repo that you use on top of Kubuntu, which severely confused me, since I didn’t know the difference between a repo and a distro at the time.) After a lot of searching, I managed to find KXStudio 14.04, from back when KXStudio was still a distro. I downloaded it, along with a few other distros that I ultimately didn’t end up getting to work, and also grabbed VirtualBox so that I could run the distros in a VM.

Let’s just say that combining a buggy distro with a total newbie resulted in chaos.

I went through quite a few “stages” learning how Linux worked, everything from “Where on earth is my C: drive?” to “Great, I just broke my audio, now what?”. It was pretty interesting. I also had to deal with the glitchiness and complexity of VirtualBox, as well as the fact that the distro I was using was not exactly newbie-friendly. The whole thing was a total mess. A very fun total mess. Before long, I had decided to install Linux on some physical hardware that I had available (which led to even more chaos, especially when UEFI came into the picture), and after days of headaches, many reinstalls, and tons of breakage, I was finally getting good enough at Linux usage to start using it as my daily driver on three different computers (a desktop and two laptops).

My third distro was ChaletOS 16.04. ChaletOS was essentially a modded Xubuntu variant made to look and feel a lot like Windows. It also has the Wine Windows Compatibility Layer preinstalled, making it compatible with a lot of Windows software out of the box. I didn’t use Wine very much - I was more interested in the beautiful UI, mostly smooth operation, and powerful features it provided. I was starting to get into more advanced Linux usage, and was for the first time using a sorta-halfway supported OS (all the ones I had used up until then were already EOL or very nearly EOL, if I remember correctly). I also had a working Internet connection, which greatly improved my ability to download software and research things. At this point I was almost entirely “sold” on Linux, and was only still using Windows on one laptop. That one laptop was important because it had a development environment on it that ran on Windows 7 inside a Hyper-V virtual machine inside Windows 8.0 Pro. I was reluctant to switch to Linux there because I knew Hyper-V wouldn’t run on Linux and I didn’t want to mess up the Windows 7 VM’s activation status by moving from Hyper-V to QEMU.

While using ChaletOS on my other laptop (not the one with the important development environment), I tried a bunch of different distros in VMs, including really weird ones like BasicLinux (don’t ever use it, it’s a nightmare) and Calculate Linux (Gentoo derivative, that was a total fail because hilariously I couldn’t figure out what the package manager’s name was). And then, in the midst of my distro-hopping adventures, I stumbled across two distros that almost immediately became my favorites. It was around the time of April 2020. Ubuntu 20.04 and its flavors has just been released recently. And it was during that time I discovered Kubuntu and Lubuntu.

I can’t remember which one I tried first, but I remember quite well some of my initial experiments with them. After playing with both Kubuntu and Lubuntu in VMs, I decided to install Lubuntu onto a flash drive and boot my non-development laptop from it. The extremely smooth experience Lubuntu 20.04 provided, the beautiful and simple UI, everything was almost perfect. Kubuntu was really nice, but it was a bit heavier and the laptop I was using for testing only had 4 GB RAM and no internal hard drive (it always booted from a USB stick, or from an SD card using a hack), so a lightweight OS was important to me. I used that OS a lot, and even booted my important development laptop from my Lubuntu USB stick to see what would happen (it worked quite well).

While I ended up loving Lubuntu, I was somewhat partial to Kubuntu since it was the basis of KXStudio, and the extreme power of the KDE desktop was a serious plus that Lubuntu’s LXQt desktop didn’t have. I had ended up having a slight mess with my Windows 7 VM on the development laptop which resulted in me having to re-activate it (long story short, don’t expect to restore a Hyper-V VM from a backup of only the .vhd files without the rest of the VM config!), and as a result, I was no longer so scared of having to move my VM to Linux using QEMU. I took the plunge and wiped Windows 8 with Kubuntu 20.04 on my main development laptop, then got my Windows 7 VM set up inside QEMU (where it actually worked better than it did on Hyper-V). Everything was working exactly as I had hoped (except for one small hiccup that resulted in an OS reinstall due to a combination of inexperience and paranoia, but that was overcome without too much trouble in the long run).

After a long bit of life lived in 20.04-land (and a brief stint with Lubuntu and Ubuntu Studio 21.10), Ubuntu 22.04 was released. I had finally mostly gotten a grip on how Ubuntu and Linux really worked, and was interested in trying to help with Ubuntu’s development. I had looked into helping in the past, but hadn’t actually gone ahead and tried to help. I joined the #lubuntu-devel channel with the nick “Guest3” and asked about the possibility of writing software documentation for Lubuntu. I surprisingly got replied to almost immediately by two members of the Lubuntu team, switched my IRC nick from Guest3 to arraybolt3, and before long was helping with testing, documentation writing, and debugging. (It all just kinda happened - I was there and stuff was happening and I ended up getting to try to help and it all worked really well.) I ended up helping with the development of Lubuntu and a couple of the other Ubuntu flavors during the Kinetic Kudu development cycle and the 22.04.1 release, and six hectic months of excitement later, Ubuntu 22.10 and its flavors were released.

That first step into the Ubuntu development world was about 10 months ago. We are now nearing the release of Ubuntu 23.04, and have since released 20.04.5 and 22.04.2. The joy of getting to contribute to an OS I’ve been using for years has been amazing, and I look forward to continuing to contribute in the future.

That was about four years of computing packed into a short article. Hope you found this enjoyable and helpful, and see you later!