hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1320.txt

Episode: 1320
Title: HPR1320: How I got into Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1320/hpr1320.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:29:47

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Lets go and see if anyone likes this game.
Hello, I'm Jay Robb with Two Bees and this is my first HPR episode.
I'm going to talk about how I get into using Linux and programming.
In 1999, I was in high school when I took a computer science class.
It was also the choice of choosing between basic or Pascal.
The basic was for regular and then the Pascal was the honors class.
It was all in the same class but they had two separate courses I guess you'd say.
So that was a lot of fun. I did the Pascal.
I don't think I've used its sense but it was a lot of fun.
The professor was awesome. His name was Mr. Fix.
He was a really cool guy. I also taught the calculus and math classes and that kind of thing.
It was really great, really opened my eyes into programming.
He also used Linux and he had a computer there in the classroom that was dold booting.
I remember he showed us and told us about it a little bit at the time.
But I didn't know what Linux was back then. He never heard of it.
Never really been exposed to it.
So a little while after that I had a friend who was a little younger than me
but he was good friends with my group of friends and related him some kind of way to some of the guys.
He told me about Linux and said, hey, here's this thing called Red Hat.
I can't remember the version but it was around 99.
So it was probably version 4. I don't know.
He gave me some CDs and I installed it and thought it was really cool.
It was free and still at that point didn't know anything about free software.
There was just a free operating system that was not Windows and that was exciting in itself.
So then I used that for a while dold booting with Windows, whatever the version was at the time.
Kind of went back and forth using it and using Windows and using Linux.
And then when Ubuntu came out, another friend said, told me, you know, here's another Linux that has distribution that's easy to use.
They take some of the stuff that's kind of a pain in the ass and smooth it over so that you can do most normal things that people do.
I was probably in university around this time and we were using Unix file systems in the computer science department.
So that was cool. So you know, I was thinking Linux is great at this point.
So I went and tried that out. It was great and all that.
I used that for a little while and kind of got bored.
And at that point I was kind of hooked. I was not using Windows anymore.
It was probably around 02 or so.
So I went through, I went to distrowatch.com and started going through the list of all the distributions.
I was just trying them out, I tried them out for a few weeks or a month or until I decided I didn't like it or it got on my nerves.
Or anything like that. So I used it.
Arch Linux for a really long time. I liked it a lot.
And probably would have stuck with it.
I like the rolling release cycle and a lot of stuff about it.
Except my computer that I was using at that time had a loose heat sink on the north bridge.
And it kind of got knocked a little looser when I installed a larger video card or something.
And so it kind of came loose. It just fried the motherboard and it died.
And then at that point I was just too lazy to go back and reinstall Arch.
It's kind of time consuming and I just didn't really want to do that.
So I used a few others.
Some of my favorites were Sabayon.
That's how you say it actually.
I used Fedora for a while, Debian.
I kind of tend to keep coming back to Debian-based distros.
And I used Debian for a long time.
Running unstable or testing.
And then now at some point I've kind of settled in the last year.
So I'm Linux Mint, Debian Edition, which is based off the testing branch of Debian.
And it's got some of the nicer things.
Like it runs Cinnamon, which is awesome.
Usually it's got some bugs that I've noticed.
Doc Bar will disappear occasionally and I'll have to log out and log in.
It comes back.
It's kind of irritating, but it's overall still my favorite.
I like it better than number three.
And slightly better than XFC.
Much better than KDE.
I've never got a fan of KDE.
But a lot of people like it.
So I'd have to say the reason I got into Linux is because of most of the two people.
My computer science professor, Mr. Fix, in high school.
And then my friend, Ryan, who really kind of showed me the way.
I'll say, speaking of Ryan, he passed away in 2009, which is sad.
But he also got me into web development and PHP and my SQL.
And we had kind of a friendly rivalry there for a long time in the early 2000s,
designing websites and databases and forums and search engines and all these kind of things online.
He actually called me his arch-nemesis, which was kind of strange.
But he was a strange person and we had a lot of fun doing all these things.
And using the things that I was doing at that time, PHP and my SQL,
that actually led me more into what I wound up doing as a career and things designing databases
and writing it all software.
Thankfully not with PHP or my SQL, which perfectly happy not to use either of those again,
I don't have to, but that opened a lot of doors for me and coming out of high school
and doing that around that early time period was really great.
Getting into the open software and free software was probably one of the best things for me.
So I love Linux and I'm really glad I got into it.
And actually I kind of wish I'd gotten into it sooner.
But that's my story and this is, I guess that'll conclude my first HPR episode.
Thanks for listening.
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