I suppose I’ve always known about FOSS (not that I knew of a word for it), the way public school kids know about home schoolers. My earliest memory inciting the word Linux probably comes from reading the comic Ctrl+Alt+Del of all places, when they introduce Scott, not that I read it when it was new (I started reading the archive probably around 2005). As for my initial use of FOSS, I’d probably count Mozilla as the first application I remember running, back in 2004 when I finally convinced my parents to get off of AOL. I had a friend who has always been a big influence on me, and is someone I attribute as a large factor in my interest in STEM. He and I are still good friends, and he returns to town in a few days following service in the military.

Despite his influence upon me (he had the first home Linux setup I’d ever seen), it wouldn’t be until 2010 that I decided to nuke my Win7 Basic installation from at Netbook I’d picked up and replace it with Ubuntu Netbook Remix in an effort to make the machine run a bit better. I had attempted previously to make the switch, and was held back by what I believed were hardware attributable barriers and lack of motivation to pursue it further (after all, Windows worked out of the box!) until the machine in question finally died (which was when I got my Netbook). The interesting bit is that several people I spoke to online at the time always said I came across as a Linux user. Given my mentality (with the exception of the motivation to truly pursue it), I can see where they might have got that impression.

Then for a couple more years, I continued to wander aimlessly through college (it was expected of me, even though I didn’t know what I really wanted to do), until I was introduced to Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. My moment of discovering this book is one to which I can point as a pivot in my life. Little Brother was where I truly learned about the FOSS mentality, as well as the idea that “if you own it, pwn it!" I changed my major and never looked back. I’m still struggling to complete the switch to a FOSS operating system; I currently (I say "currently” due to my distro ADD) run Linux Mint 17 KDE on my Laptop, but I still run Windows on my desktop, due to work and leisure (gaming on Linux has gotten better recently, thanks largely to Valve). I did just complete a machine for work (I work remotely supporting only Windows machines, though I do have the reputation amongst my team member as an Open Source advocate), so maybe it’s time to play around with KVM on my gaming computer…