The YouTube user "Mexicomank2" left a comment on my System76 Serval WS Unboxing video asking the following:

… so I'm kind of curious what made you get into the Linux world ? I myself have been messing with Ubuntu out of curiosity on a partition on my MacBook Pro

I typed up a response, but it ended up being 10 paragraphs long and not suited for a YouTube comment. The thing is, my introduction to Linux is a long story, and I wanted to tell the whole thing. So here's my response to that question:

Well, I learned about the existence of Linux from a couple different places around the same time. This was around 5th or 6th grade, and I had an HP Pavilion tx2510us, which came with Windows Vista and I upgraded to Windows 7 the Christmas after it it was released. My older sister got me a book called "A Practical Guide to Fedora and RHEL" (if you go to some older videos on this channel you can see it on my desk's bookshelf), and one of my friends' parents who worked in IT told me about VirtualBox, so I tried installing a very old version of Fedora (I think it was 8) in a virtual machine on my laptop. I wasn't happy with the performance, and I brought it up in conversation with one of my dad's friends who owned a computer shop. The three guys at the shop told me that increasing the amount of RAM dedicated to the virtual machine might help, but while I was there they walked me through installing a super-old version of Kubuntu (it had KDE 3.x) on a Dell Dimension 3000, and when my dad and I went to leave, they surprised me by sending the Dimension home with me, as well as a black Dell CRT that was missing a stand (and I later got a PS/2 keyboard from them for it, too.) I got home and plugged it in and played with it for a while, but I almost immediately decided to replace Kubuntu with Fedora so I could follow the book. The Dimension only had a CD drive and the book's Fedora 8 copy was a DVD, so I had to download the latest version of Fedora (12 at the time) and make a CD to boot.

I played around with that computer for the next couple of years. I still used my laptop for most things, but every now and then I would set up internet sharing on Windows Vista and bridge my laptop's Wi-Fi to an Ethernet connection for the Dimension (I never figured out how to do internet sharing on Windows 7, only on Vista.) My Fedora 12 copy came with GNOME, but the book was written for KDE, so I followed the book's instructions to install KDE from GNOME's Add/Remove Software tool. The book had a solid introduction to using KDE 4, and I absolutely loved the desktop widgets and workspace-switching effects (as a lifetime Windows user, I had long envied Macs for their virtual desktops, and I couldn't believe that this free OS had that feature too!) The thing I remember most about that Dell Dimension is playing games on it, including KDE games like Kolf, Kbounce, Kollision, Kapman, and KGoldrunner, as well as GNOME games, including my favorite, Nibbles.

So, fast forward a while, and I was reading about how HP was including a small Linux installation on some of their new laptops (the original Envy line, I think) so you could boot to a web browser in just a few seconds if you didn't want to wait for Windows to load. This is where the timeline in my head gets a little iffy, but something happened to the effect of me deciding that I wanted to do that with my laptop using Fedora. This was when I made another Fedora install disc, that I still keep with my house-call live boot CDs, for Fedora 14, which had come out by this point. I know that for a while I would just boot it up and use the live environment on my laptop, surprised at how things moved faster when I was loaded from a CD than they did in Windows 7. I remember very vividly the night that I decided to make the plunge and install Fedora on a partition alongside Windows on my laptop's 250GB hard drive. Now, this was before I owned an external hard drive, so I didn't have anywhere to back my data up to. Granted, nothing on my laptop was mission-critical to school or anything like that, but I had lots of pictures and personal documents on there, and I'm a very sentimental person who never deletes anything. I used Gparted to resize my Windows partition (I think this may have been when I made my first Gparted Live CD), and then I decided that since I wanted the laptop to boot into Fedora by default, Fedora's partition should come first in the chart (I know today that that isn't how that works and the physical locations of the partitions don't matter, but I didn't back then.) I set Gparted to move the Windows partition from the beginning of the hard drive to the end, which took a while because it had to physically move all of my data. My mom took my sister and I out to dinner that night, and I was nervous the entire time that something would cause the operation to fail and that my data would be lost. But I got back home a few hours later and was greeted by a success screen, and I installed Fedora on my day-to-day laptop for the first time.

Like I said, this Fedora installation was supposed to be just for when I "needed to load a web browser quickly" on occasion, not a replacement for Windows (and for that reason, I left the lighter GNOME 2 on it, rather than using the more graphics-demanding KDE 4.) But as I noticed how much faster and more stable it was, and as I learned more about Linux, I started spending more and more of my time in Fedora and less and less in Windows. I think I may have resized the partitions a couple of times, making the Windows one smaller and the Fedora one bigger. This is another spot where I don't recall any major events that I can use to build a solid timeline, but I do distinctly remember when Fedora 15 was released. In fact, I tried out Fedora 15 when it was still in Beta, and I remember being absolutely enchanted by the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In hindsight, I know GNOME 3 got a lot of flak when it came out, and I have my own problems with GNOME today, but the idea of having a full-screen menu open up just by moving my mouse into the corner, not even having to click, blew my mind, as did the smart adding and subtracting of virtual desktops as I moved windows around.

So that was how Linux found its way to my laptop. The next few years were a whirl of distro-hopping, although I still went back to Windows sometimes and I even had a Hackintosh stint (iPC was the only Hackintosh distro that would work on my AMD processor.) So at that point, I'm aware of Linux and I know some of the basics, but I'm in no way allied to it over other operating systems. Don't get me wrong, I had seen some bells and whistles alright, but I had also seen the darker side of Linux, which is having things break a lot and break badly (and whether it was Linux that was less mature or me, it seemed to be a bigger problem back then than it is today.)

Without breaking things down into a full-blown autobiography, the next major event was when I built my desktop computer in the month before I started high school. When I started video editing for Nerd on the Street, it was clear that my 4+-year-old laptop wasn't meeting my needs any more, and I desperately wanted to get a Mac. However, even with my birthday money that year, I could only scrounge up a little over $500, and after briefly looking around Craigslist for custom-built towers that would be more powerful than my laptop, I decided to do a little budget build instead. As you can imagine, I had to make some concessions to squeeze that $500 out into a whole computer, and that included getting THE cheapest graphics card on the internet (actually around $30 from Newegg) as well as having a 32GB OCZ Vertex SSD as my only storage (despite being an SSD, it was actually cheaper than any hard drive available.) The first thing I installed on the computer was Windows 7 (I still had that key from upgrading my laptop, and I knew how to trick it into accepting the upgrade key for a clean install), but after installing Windows and just a few of my usual programs, the SSD became full. I knew that Linux took less space than Windows when installed, so that's how Linux on my desktop started. I think the first distro I used on the desktop might have been openSUSE, although Ubuntu and Pear Linux were some other early ones. I also think there was a Hackintosh stint in here as well, but I abandoned it because my cheap-o graphics card wasn't powerful enough for the task. I'd have more success a year or two later after I upgraded my graphics card.

So now I'm using Linux as my primary OS, but out of convenience, not loyalty. I did go through another Windows phase when Windows 8 was finally released (I had tried the release candidate on my touchscreen laptop, but it wasn't out until after I got the desktop and had the chance to upgrade the storage.) And like I said, I did eventually return to a Hackintosh (it was an iATKOS Lion release, you can find it on this channel and I used it for 6 months.) But I actually got bored of Windows and Mac OS working TOO well, and I installed Linux because I knew things would break and I'd have to Google stuff and eventually I'd probably change distros a few times. That experience of having to actively maintain my computer, that was something I actually liked back then, and it really took a lot of my time, but it was fun.

Eventually I did settle down, though, and as my storage setup got more complicated and I started doing more video projects, I started reinstalling as LITTLE as possible rather than as much as possible like I used to. The last release-based distros I used were Ubuntu, because of its stability, and openSUSE, because the Linux Action Show said it was super solid (that's also how I found the Linux Action Show.) Then the Linux Action Show introduced me to Antergos, and I never looked back. I had played around with Arch on that Dimension sometime during high school and I wrote it off because I couldn't get it to install, but Antergos gave me enough of a head start to at least be able to use my computer, and then I slowly learned how to do things manually in Arch (and now I'm using vanilla Arch on my Serval.)

It was during that time of settling down that I really started to align myself with GNU/Linux philosophically. After I watched the Linux Action Show openSUSE review on YouTube, YouTube started recommending LAS's 200th episode special over and over, in which the hosts interviewed Richard Stallman. I usually don't click on YouTube's featured videos, but Stallman's face in the thumbnail intrigued me, and when I heard what he had to say, I realized that using Linux is about more than just pragmatism and convenience. That's when I started caring about software freedom, and open-source, and from then on, I stopped considering Macs and Windows as viable options just because their software worked better sometimes. One of the biggest things I learned in the preceding period of installing every OS and distro under the sun was that no matter what software you're using, you're always, ALWAYS going to have problems. The real difference is in how you're able to fix those problems, and that's where Linux excels for me. And on the days when I can't figure something out or I can't get something to work and I think about how easy things would be if I was just using Windows or macOS, I remember that even if things don't always work as well, and even if I've still got some proprietary programs on my computer, by using Linux, I'm still SUPPORTING a more open system where people are encouraged to try things and break things and learn how things work.

So that, in a concise 9-paragraph essay, is how I "got into the Linux world." I didn't mean to give you my whole life story here, but I started at the beginning, and as I went on, I saw that my entry into Linux didn't happen all at once, but rather over time as part of a long series of good and bad experiences. There's lots more I could go into, including specific examples of projects and problems I've had, but the bottom line is still the same: I started off installing Linux on a spare computer and ended up refusing to use anything else, but it happened over a really long period of time. I would highly encourage you to keep messing with Ubuntu on your MacBook partition, and maybe one day you'll decide you're more comfortable there than with macOS and make the switch. Or maybe one day, like me, you'll realize that you've already made the switch and you didn't even notice.