Episode: 4361
Title: HPR4361: On my own time
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4361/hpr4361.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:41:11

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4361 from Monday the 21st of April 2025.
Today's show is entitled, On My Own Time.
It is hosted by Swift 110 and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I express my frustrations at people who push their choice of distros
on to others.
Hello everybody, this is Swift 110 and I thought I'd go ahead and do this recording today
because I wanted to clarify how I feel when it comes to asking questions or on the line
and the kind of answers that are helpful and the kind of answers that may be confusing
or downright frustrating.
Oftentimes I'll bring up that I want to do something and rather than give instructions
on how to make that work instead of possible, it'll be like, well try this or try
this or try this and to be honest, it drives me nuts.
A lot of times when I've even posted that I'm about to do something or thinking of something
I've already looked at the options that are ahead of me and to be honest there's situations
where that becomes rather tedious, frustrating, stressful because you're trying to pick
out of so many.
And in the world of open source, sometimes things are fork and fork and fork instead of
making the original project better in first place and so there's a plethora of options
and I often suffer from what is called analysis paralysis where because I have so many options
I end up getting nothing though.
And so I'll illustrate by recalling how I came into Linux because I think this is very
relevant to what we're discussing right now.
So I first got started with Linux in 2010.
I was at a bookstore called Barnes & Noble located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington
DC and this was in 2010.
There was a magazine in there, I forget what it was called, but it featured Linux.
I didn't quite know what it was, I had used it before without realizing that I had a
Internet cafe, yeah they existed for a period of time and sadly went extinct like the
dodo but I wish I would have known what Linux was on that particular machine that I was
using but at last it's gone to history.
Anyway, when I got the magazine and I went home and ended up installing this just pop
a CD into my PC at the time which by the way had a 10 gig hard drive and 80 gig hard drive
as well.
So yeah, I didn't have the most rock and sock in parts, yeah I did that.
I just had to work with what I had at the time, it's 2010 so my new needs were extremely
needed but little did I know that I would be embarking upon a journey that would last
and last and last, at this point some 15 years congratulations you've won a prize.
And I find that I'm very happy with Linux in general, so the distribution that I had there
was just one was Ubuntu, the version that I was using is 9.10.
The code name was karmic koala.
I loved the fact that I could get into the world of Ubuntu and because I just popped the
CD in and I wasn't communicating with other people I didn't have to hear all these flavors
in my gear if you catch my drift.
I just had Ubuntu and that was very helpful for me in my early stages especially because
now I can focus on Ubuntu and not know about and by virtue of that not care about any other
district, nobody else in my ear saying oh try out, try Manjaro, try Linux Mint, try
this, try that, try, try, try, try, try, try me, try me, I don't want to hear that, just
want to get into Linux, Linux, Linux, Linux, OK, get me, that's all I want to do.
If you throw all these other distributions out because everybody wants you to use their
favorite distro and you don't take anything and you consider it, they don't take your background
and consideration, they don't take what you want to do and consideration, it's my distro.
Once you do use it, by the way I use Arch, people are so pressed and it's not always
a good thing, it can be overwhelming, overbearing, it can be annoying and all those things that
aren't conducive to a growing Linux audience and catch what I'm saying.
So I had Ubuntu and only Ubuntu, I got to know Ubuntu, I used to Ubuntu and keep
saying it until it gets to point across, I didn't have to worry about the baggage of other
distributions. I know I'm ramming this point in the place because it's how I do sometimes,
but I just want to make it clear how I feel and so I stuck with Ubuntu.
Eventually I learned to develop the distributions and on the Maker Hardware I had which would
gradually include laptops, all my goodness that opened up a whole new world.
I'm not going to do that power, but actually I did it anyway, I just didn't take it any further,
but the thing is I knew of others but I can go into the whole laptop thing, that's
it's ever recording, let me stay on topic here. The point is I stayed with Ubuntu from
whatever part of 2020 that I did, then I got started, pretty much until 2012.
Now one of the early issues I had with Ubuntu was I didn't have internet at home at that time,
and so I pretty much went to the library, learned how to download the proper codex
and months later I learned how to install them into my machine and then oh my goodness gracious I
had Sam, the months of not having it. In fact I had a day of Linux which was Friday's each week
where I would work within Linux despite not having Sam. You can imagine how annoying that was,
but yeah it's 11. I stayed with Ubuntu 2012, I learned of the fact that Ubuntu was going to
actually be changing up their desktop environment, which I was familiar with norm too, I loved it,
I still love Ubuntu, called me sometime, maybe, but I came across the Mate desktop environment,
and so that became my new gal, so to speak, and so this thing called Unity,
yeah Unity, it was not what its namesake was expected to be, if anything it was the polar opposite,
and I did not like it, in fact trying Unity several times officially I can say I hated it,
but over years and after several blog posts that illustrated how I felt about Unity,
I've softened over the years and I appreciate its existence because other people enjoy it,
and that's something about Linux I love, that there's something for you and there's something for me,
but if you're not catching so far what I've been putting down, my progression or my use of different
distributions has been a very organic one, where I'm making decisions based on what I learned
over time, and not because of peer pressure, or constantly having people screaming in my ear,
that's annoying to me, I don't like being an egg, so when I make a decision, it needs to be uniquely my
decision when I decide to make it, plain and simple, and so organically pretty much going from
Ubuntu to Linux Mint, you know, made it more of an enjoyable experience for me,
getting involved in Linux and getting more comfortable with it, to the point where I was using it
every day, to the point where it was on all of my devices, and I wouldn't even use Windows at all,
so that's beautiful, but sticking with one distro over an extended period of time also allowed me to
learn how to actually solve problems and not become what is called a distro hopper, if you sometimes
people hop from place to place, they're like that rabbit and Alice and Wonderland, they're like I'm late,
I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, and it's crazy when you get somebody constantly going,
I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, you feel me when you're just never happy, it's like chill out, sit down,
you know, and learn the distro, and so that's what I did, I used to learning and solving problems with
Linux, and it's been a fantastic voyage as a result, now I kept seeing this guy online, and that's
it, I'll do that as a separate record, but I ended up going to Solus, and again, not because anybody
told me to, but because I decided to, and so that's the point I really want to make clear,
you gotta let people breathe a little bit, we can be zealous about our own particular distros,
but sometimes you gotta just breathe, one, and then a two, two, and then a three, three,
then a four, then you gotta breathe, see when you let people breathe, they come to their own conclusions,
and it allows for a much more rounded experience, especially in the world of Linux,
where you can be confused by the plethora of distributions that exist, so I just hope that
this recording can be helpful, I hope that there's those that can relate to what it is that I'm
talking about, and I don't mean any harm towards anybody, but it's like sometimes people,
and even outside the world of Linux, they are gung-ho about their particular way of doing things,
but patience is a beautiful thing, and allowing people to be people, we can give them options,
it's not always about being right or being wrong, but just giving a person room to make their own
decisions, and you know, kind of grasp it over time, because people don't always grasp
over on the same level at the same time, and so it's good to allow that variability to exist.
I hope you all have a fantastic evening, and I wish you the best, now one thing I want to
say before I'm done is that I highly suggest that if you have a tech-related topic that you wish
to share, please follow me and feel free to contribute to Hacker Public Radio,
I say it this way, don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear, just record,
record, record, record, okay, don't feel shy, don't be scared, say what you gotta say, so that we
can hear your voice, and likely you'll find others that can relate to what it is that you're saying.
It's a fantastic audience here, this project has actually been around for about 20 years,
and so we want to keep it going, as long as we have individuals,
such as yourself, hopefully, let the side contribute to this project, it'll keep going.
So, I've seen my way out, you guys have a fantastic day, that's up to all of you, bye-bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, as Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself, if you ever thought of recording
podcast, and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR has
been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our syncs.net.
On the Sadois stages, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution 4.0 International License.