Up until 2014 and for the better part of the decade leading to that, I was a Linux user. Following a short, traumatic experience with SUSE Linux I found comfort in Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great. It (then) brought the stability and robustness of Debian to the masses. It made me love Linux and open-source and got me curious and motivated. I wanted to study, learn and fix things. It felt like an adrenaline kick and was a driving force behind my love for what I do.

After Ubuntu I moved on to Arch Linux and Gentoo, and felt the beauty and fright of compilations and optimizations. These two Linux distributions, Gentoo to a greater extent, are a school of their own. The experience, learning curve and pain of simply setting up a working system was a thing of beauty.

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At some point, a few years ago, I started using a Macbook at work. In MacOS/OS X, things just worked. It was shiny and it was fast. It felt fantastic. The experience was overwhelming. Not for a second did I miss the pain of configuring some obnoxious application in Linux. I didn’t really care how things worked. They just did. The Mac was a whole different world, one of elite and perfection.

Looking back, and this is a shamelessly retrospective observation, I generally lost interest in software during that period. Granted, as a professional, I always had to be on top of my game. However, I had lost the enthusiasm and curiosity to keep myself up to date with technologies and trends. I have a hard time recalling a single book I read during that period.

Fast forward to a few months ago. I bought a new laptop and installed Ubuntu right after unpacking it. Now, as shiny as Ubuntu is at this point, it still needs love to flourish. It needs time and effort. It challenged and provoked me to use the command line. Things needed tweaking. I broke and fixed things as I moved on. I had to work things out myself. And I’m not even finished with it.

Linux refreshed my interest in software and made me love it again. It got me to look things up, read and learn. It gave me a kick and eagerness to study that got me back to learning and writing.

In retrospect, I was on a hiatus for the past few years. I was oblivious and overall uninterested. Had the Mac made me bored and indifferent, or did I just happen to become uninterested at a time that the Mac came in and fitted perfectly in that picture? It could be that there is no correlation, let alone causation.

Linux got me back on the roller coaster. Its simplicity, elegance and imperfection. And at this point it fits perfectly with my state of being, my willingness to learn and need to become better at what I do.

Linux works, but I need to know how it does that.