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Linux/Unix History

šŸ§ A Unix History#

Linux has been the cornerstone of my career.

While I first discovered Linux in the late '90s, my true deep dive began in 2001. Transitioning from a Windows development environment to Unix was a revelationā€”it exposed me to the power of the terminal, the philosophy of open source, and the internal workings of operating systems.

Below is the timeline of my journey through the Unix ecosystem:

  • 2001: After experimenting with various distributions, I settled on Debian. I preferred its structure over RPM-based alternatives. Debian provided my foundational education in Linux systems, knowledge that I rely on to this day.
  • 2005: With the release of Ubuntu, I was drawn to its polished interface and community. I became heavily invested in the project, serving as a beta tester and forum moderator.
  • 2006: I discovered Arch Linux and migrated immediately. I appreciated the elegance and simplicity of pacman and PKGBUILD files.
  • 2006 (The Deep Dive): To fully understand the Linux boot sequence, I built my own distribution from scratch for educational purposes. I developed a custom kernel initialization system similar to Arch's mkinitcpio. This deep dive allowed me to identify and fix several upstream bugs (example commit).
  • 2006: Seeking to broaden my horizons beyond the Linux kernel, I migrated my personal servers to FreeBSD for two years.
  • 2007: I moved to Gentoo seeking granular customization that Arch could not offer at the time.
  • 2008: Fatigue from "compiling the world" set in. I switched to Sabayon Linux (a Gentoo-derivative) and quickly became a core contributor. I was eventually appointed Chief Development Officer, overseeing package management and distribution infrastructure.
  • 2012: I switched to macOS for my primary workstation, though I maintained Arch Linux on all my servers.
  • 2017: I returned to Linux full-time after Apple removed the physical ESC key (the Touch Bar era). I chose Arch Linux for its familiarity and rolling-release model, unifying my desktop and server environments.
  • 2018: I migrated my entire fleet (workstations and servers) to NixOS. This shift marked my transition to fully declarative systems. Please read Why I Use NixOS.

āš” The Workflow Philosophy#

I rarely use systems in the "conventional" way. I believe in breaking things to learn how to fix them and pushing toward rigid, reproducible architectures.

I prioritize efficiency and keyboard-driven workflows over graphical interfaces. I live in the terminal. My environment consists of a tiling window manager (i3) and Vim for editing. I avoid the mouse wherever possibleā€”even browsing the web using Vim keybindings on Chrome.