Distro-hopping in Dreamland (I)

Picture this, if you may: it's the year 2009, middle of the summer and you're a teenager with wrecked sleep schedules who stays up late watching TV shows waiting for weariness to reach you. You've become a fan of an old show where the host discuss the latest trends in the technology business, and they happen to mention one night the existence of Linux.

The next morning, having nothing to do and bored out of your mind, you suddenly remember Linux is a thing that exists, so you decide to give it a go. However, since pen drives were still pricey back in the day, you burn the hybrid image for Ubuntu (as Mint was still in its infancy and Manjaro would not come out until 2011) into a CD.

Years pass and, while you certainly keep booting into Ubuntu from time to time to have a fun time pushing buttons and whatnot, you never get to install it on your computer. After all, it's the family computer and you don't want to spoil it with something you're not quite sure how to use.

I have another anecdote about Linux, something that happened two years later, but I will talk about it in the second part of this post. The thing is: I knew Linux was a thing, I was somewhat acquainted with it, but I never really felt like I could make it into my daily driver. It was mostly just a curiosity for me, something that was created to run servers but was ported to PCs for the sake of it.

Cue to the year 2014: I upgrade to a laptop which comes with Windows 8 preinstalled. After trying to accept Windows 8 for what it is, I notice the performance decays quite rapidly. The computer throttles easily, has random performance issues and the battery is quickly drained despite me cranking the energy saving setting up to eleven. At some point, I even start running Ubuntu 14 in a virtual machine because it just works much better, despite having obviously less resources to work with.

In the end, I followed the obvious course of action: making a backup of all my files (remember to do frequent back-ups, kids!) and installed Ubuntu. The experience was good at first, sure, but it started to lag down quickly and I moved to vanilla Debian (which I thought of at the time as an Ubuntu fork!). To this day, I still feel like Debian was one of my best experiences in Linux, until I eventually had to move out because an update wroke havoc and I couldn't make out how to fix it.

This is all for today. I'm trying to keep posts shorter and this story is going to be a long one, so I think I will keep it in two (or even three) parts, each of them containing one experience of me briefly experiencing Linux before I definitely ditched Windows.

Thank you for reading.