I have an obsession. It's Linux. Number 1, because it's free. Number 2, because it's freedom. I feel this is the correct ethos and should be self-evident in this group.
I cut my teeth in IT in the Marine corps as a Solaris sysadmin. After a tour, I went to a for-profit trade college and studied Information Systems Security, with emphasis on Windows enterprise.
I took contract work in the Bay area for a few years as Technical Support Analyst at a finance company and have been in various IT support roles in Windows and Mac environments.
I work at a private 7-12th grade school and have ample time to geek out on research and projects of work-related interests.
Which brings me to Linux.
I liked Solaris a lot ~20 years ago when I started but didn't think much about it. Cut to 10 years ago, I took Linux for a walk, had some trouble with GPU and wireless drivers, and put it on the back burner and stuck with Windows.
Over the last 5 years, Linux ISOs kept finding their way into my Downloads folder and all my extra USB drives (weird, right?), and my gaming rig was always running out of resources on account of poorly managed resources from abandoned VirtualBox VMs.
Then I learned Powershell for work and discovered the weird yet incredibly familiar command line environment, the love-child of Windows bat script and Linux. Holy shit, LINUX ALIASES in the Windows ($PS) command line? Old muscle memory comes back... LS instead of DIR?! YESSS. I'm hooked. I can't get enough, leading to picking up Linux again and putting it on as many old bare metal laptops I can find.
Cut to, "whoa, what's this Raspberry Pi thing? I'll take 4, please." "Raspian you say?" Let's do this.
Me roughly 3 years ago: "I should become a developer." Fuck it; I go all in. "Honey, I'm going back to school to get a degree in programming." It's been 3 years and I'm barely getting into the major-related coursework in C++. It's been a slog at one class a semester but it’s still interesting and feels relevant.
Me lately: "oooooh, what's this Arch all about... oh, this is, complicated."
But I've hit a wall and need some advice. I LOVE the process of Linux, from torrenting ISOs, to making them run on the crappiest hardware, to *trying* to successfully build vanilla Arch over and over until it's muscle memory, and making custom bash scripts to set up my tools on a new install. It's all super enjoyable, but as a dad of young children who doesn't game anymore AND goes to school, I'm starting to ask myself what's next beyond the challenges of getting it installed. As a Windows admin, I can't switch to Linux at work, but could certainly do it at home if forced to (Ubuntu 19.10 has been a SUPERB laptop OS), and I could use Visual Studio Code if I needed to for C++ homework. I'm sure I could learn to deploy it in a homelab environment, but that seems like a lot to learn that I'd forget pretty quickly without re-enforcement from real life application.
I've dabbled in cloud stuff and micro services and have felt the "call" to build a website/web app, but web stuff feels like such a morass of potential security vulnerabilities that it scares me away from finishing any tutorials.
Fellow nerds of reddit, please weigh in and tell me what you use Linux for.
Please and thank you. The floor is yours.
/robotsneeze
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