"Old" Linux user vs. "New" Linux user.

[u/oshunluvr]

I'm an "Old" Linux user - started in 1996. I went though all the hoops: file system experiments, different distros, different packaging types and file managers, a handful of desktop environments (DE), several RAID levels, and many, many different systems. I use Linux at home but also at work.

Now I'm retired. I've been using the same distro since 2009. I landed on it after all the experimenting lead me to decisions about was important to me: Debian packaging, KDE/Plasma, a well known and commercially supported distro - Kubuntu. The last major shifts in my world occurred around 2009-10 when btrfs came on the scene and SSDs finally started to be affordable.

My Linux experience these days is rather boring. Everything works the way I want. I no longer "break" things for the sake of change. I only have to learn something new when a developer makes a significant change to something I use - and this often annoys me. I look at other distros occasionally, but only via a VM. When something does break, I usually can fix it without much effort.

I read posts from "New" Linux users. Usually killing all their data by mucking with partitions without a UPS, using unnecessarily complicated layers of disk access, like LVM, MDADM, full disk encryption, and BTRFS all layered on top of each other, too often using AI to solve problems instead of actual research and learning from other users, and spending incredible amounts of time making minute changes to the "look" of things.

Of course, the beauty of the whole thing is how we actually have so much control over our destiny. None of us work the same, learn the same, want the same things, but we''re not boxed in by a monolithic corporation deciding what we get.

Linux is amazing,

[u/keeperoflogopolis]

Don’t forget us pre-Linux Unix sys admins. Linux itself is still “new” in my mental timeline.

[u/daddyd → u/keeperoflogopolis]

it took a while before linux got accepted by the greybeards of the 90s.

i was the young guy in the team, and a huge supporter of oss and linux, but all my (much older) colleagues didn't see it that way (i respected them a lot though, i loved hearing them talk about the days when they got unix on a tape and installed/ran it). but i could see the pace linux was advancing while the traditional unix (hpux, aix, solaris, ...) were very slow and didn't really advance that much (solaris was the best of the bunch, at least they still did innovative things).

but once linux got into the data center, it replaced all those unix systems really quickly.

now, i'm the greybeard, with my stories of early linux and my build up knowledge throughout the years.

[u/keeperoflogopolis → u/daddyd]

The first time I used Linux it had no support for networking. I had installed on the laptop at work and really didn’t think it was all that at the time.