The Spark
The year was 2007. I can still vividly picture the day my parents walked through the door carrying a heavy cardboard box. They had been working so much overtime, saving every penny of their holiday bonus to bring home our very first computer.
It was an Acer Aspire running Windows Vista. That was the day everything changed for me.
I fell in love with it immediately. I spent hours tinkering with the built-in games, shoving DVDs into the drive praying they would play, and eventually navigating the early social internet boom. That beige box wasn't just a machine. It was a portal.
The Budget Oversight
Fast forward to 2016 and I landed my very first job in the IT department for my school’s Board of Education. The motivation wasn't necessarily a passion for work yet. I needed money. I was dying to build my own custom gaming PC, and I knew my parents certainly didn't have the budget to buy it for me. I had to earn it.
After saving up, I got my dad to drive me to Micro Center. We came home with a trunk full of parts, and I got to work building. But when I finally posted the system, I realized I had made a critical calculation error. I looked at the price tag for a genuine copy of Windows, and sixteen-year-old me did not have that kind of budget left.
Desperate to get my new rig running, I went looking for free operating systems and stumbled upon Ubuntu. I installed it immediately. It was free, it looked decent, and the computer turned on.
But I hated it.
Nothing worked the way I expected. The game support was nonexistent, and the applications I was used to were missing. It broke my heart. I wiped the partition without a second thought and 'sailed the high seas' to get a copy of Windows 10 (if you know, you know).
Just a Tool in the Toolbox
From that point on, computers became routine. Sure, I still loved them. I used them to learn, to code, and to make little games. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had kicked off a whole career around the PC.
Yet, between the Windows machines at home and the Macs at school, the operating system had become invisible. It was just a means to an end. It was simply a utility I needed to access the things I actually cared about.
The magic had faded into a routine.
Rediscovering the Magic
Over the past few years, however, the Penguin reared its ugly head at me again. We started deploying more Linux devices at work, so I had to learn how to take care of them. To further my career and general knowledge, I decided to build a home server to tinker with.
I picked up a copy of The Linux Command Line by William E. Shotts Jr. and just dove in.
To my surprise, I didn't just learn it. I loved it.
Something clicked. Almost immediately after, I found myself getting fed up with the bloat and the intrusive lack of privacy in Windows 11. I decided to take a gamble and installed Bazzite on my main gaming rig.
Seven Years Old Again
Suddenly, it feels like I am seven years old again sitting in front of that Acer Aspire.
The operating system isn't just a boring vehicle for launching apps anymore; it is a sandbox. If I don't like something, I can change it. There are no locked doors here. I can make KDE Plasma look exactly how I want it to, down to the pixel. If I don't like the default file manager, I don't have to suffer through it. I can just go get another one.
And gaming? The thing that drove me away from Linux back in 2016? Tools like Wine and Proton have made it an absolute breeze. My entire Steam library just works.
Linux feels incredibly modular, almost like building with digital LEGO bricks. It is community-driven software built by people who love computers, for people who love computers. For the first time in years, I feel like I have actual ownership over my hardware. I have privacy. I have control.
I am honestly so thankful my friends and colleagues pushed me to give Linux another chance. It has completely changed the way I view computing. It turned a routine tool back into a playground, and I’m finally having fun again.
