Episode: 4358
Title: HPR4358: My linux journey
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4358/hpr4358.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:38:04

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4358 for Wednesday the 16th of April 2025.
Today's show is entitled My Linux Journey.
It is the first show by Newhost Germ and is about 8 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, how Germ got into Linux.
Hello Hacker Public Radio listeners, I'm Germ.
And this is my first episode on the show.
Today I would like to share my journey into the world of Linux and Free Software and
how it has shaped my computing experience over the years.
My first encounter with Linux and Free Software was back around 2005 while I was still just
a teenager.
As I was looking to assemble my own PC, I gave Ubuntu a try because I wasn't able
to shell out 100 bucks for a license for Windows and the Free in Free Software I read
is and Free is in beer, I did not fully understand it yet.
I really did have a long way to go before I truly embraced the Free Software and Linux
community.
And on top of that I was a gamer with a collection of games that well worked on Windows,
but not so much on Linux.
There were many challenges to be faced and I was not yet ready to overcome them.
Around 2008 I gave it another try.
I had a laptop and wanted to run Oblivion.
The Elder Scrolls Oblivion, a really great game.
And my laptop was a little bit weak to run it on Windows.
It meant the specs, but it just wouldn't run.
And I read that it runs on Linux a little bit better using wine.
And I tried to give it a try, but there were some more challenges.
First off, I needed to connect to my Wi-Fi because I didn't really want to keep it plugged
into Ethernet all the time because one of the advantages of a laptop is that it's portable
and I wanted to be able to connect in different places.
And I had a nice fancy 802.11G dongle that I wanted to use, but I couldn't get it to
work with Linux.
So I had to use a slightly older 802.11B dongle and that didn't really endear me into Linux
at the time.
And on top of that, Oblivion really didn't run that well on Linux at all on that laptop.
That laptop really was not up to snuff for gaming at that level.
And seeing as how all the other games I had in play at the time didn't really have native
Linux support and I didn't want to struggle with wine trying to get them to work as well.
I found myself switching back to Windows for a time.
Skipping forward to somewhere around 2018, I'm not sure exactly when.
I stumbled upon a blog post about using GNU EMAX as a combat tracker for tabletop roleplaying
games.
The project I used called ORGD20 worked great and through it I discovered the incredible
extensibility of EMAX.
I learned you could create links essentially that could be used as quote buttons to add
monsters to the combat and have them role dice and more.
But alas, I strayed too close to the edge and fell down the rabbit hole that is GNU EMAX
and have not made pretty much any progress on my automated combat tracker stuff since then.
But the journey in EMAX has been fascinating.
Exploring EMAX further, I discovered the joys of customization and soon find myself
learning EMAX Lisp.
Back around 2014, I took the MOOC.FI Java course from the University of Helsinki.
The course was excellent but I never really got the syntax of Java, it clunky to me personally.
Lisp's on the other hand, they to me just made sense.
EMAX did not work great on Windows, so I installed Linux.
At first I went to try Ubuntu and I remembered GNOME just didn't like it and found that on
ARCH it was easier to get a more up to date version of EMAX as well as some of other
software, because ARCH is always on the cutting edge, so I installed ARCH Linux and that
was quite an experience, it was really nice.
I was diving deeper down the EMAX rabbit hole.
I came across David Wilson's system crafters YouTube channel and decided I was going to
give the Geeks Distribution a try because it had some really easy setup for the EMAX
X-Window Manager or EXWM, and there were sometimes I tried some other stuff in between,
but today I still use the Geeks Distribution as my main distro, though not always with
EXWM.
On the laptop I'm currently running, my ThinkPad X230 I am using Geeks with EXWM.
All around the time I discovered EMAX, I started looking for some podcasts about it because
I had time to listen podcasts at work, and that's when I discovered Hacker Public Radio.
I have been kind of wanting to contribute to HPR for a while, but hesitated because
I don't really have a plan for potential show topics.
However, after hearing Paul Jay's recent introduction episode and his mention of Fickiness
I can tap it back.
I just felt inspired to just jump in, start sharing my experience with the HPR community,
just dive into the deep end and take the plunge and see what happens from there.
Looking ahead, I'm excited to dive into home automation and setting up home assistant
to run stuff around my house, as I recently bought my own home and in going to setup
new home automation system.
I also plan to use org mode within EMAX to track things here, like grocery lists, to
do lists, etc.
And I'm eager to explore how I can integrate Linux and open source tools into my new home.
So here I am, excited to be a part of this incredible community, and eager to contribute
more in the future.
And whatever you do, I encourage you to approach it with a Hacker mindset.
Take curious, be creative, and most importantly, have fun.
Thank you for listening.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out
how easy it really is.
The hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
and our things.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.
