I used to live with someone who collected old PCs that were getting discarded by his college. He had practically a wall of them in his room and was always trying to get some form of Linux to run. Occasionally he would ask me to help him build or rebuild a machine. He spent most of his free time on this, and nothing ever worked properly.

It was around 2007 I guess I heard of Ubuntu from him. Ubuntu was just another Linux, but I looked up the meaning and I read that ubuntu means something like I am because we are, that is, it is a statement of interdependence. At that time I also read some writings of Richard Stallman and I was convinced of the ethical case for free software, but I was studying other things at the time and I needed my computer (pieced together from parts my dad and brother had replaced in their own) to Just Work.

I went to sea in 2009 and I experienced terrible loneliness. My younger brother sent me a tiny Asus EEE PC as a gift. I think it took him years to pay for it. Yes, I am the luckiest person ever. It ran Windows XP, from then until it suddenly died one morning in the summer of 2015. By this time I was 100% determined to run Linux, regardless of how difficult it might be. I was still carrying the word ubuntu around like a piece of gold in my pocket and it meant more and more to me over time, as did the idea of free software.

On someone's recommendation I bought the infamous Asus X205TA. Little did I know that at the time on Linux there was no wireless support and no audio support, and no 32-bit UEFI support. It took me 10 days (as a total novice) to install Ubuntu, and I had to compile GRUB to get it to work. One could get wireless working by upgrading the kernel, borrowing a driver from Android and fiddling with an nvram file. Audio? Well, I was living in a shared flat, so I would have had to keep the sound down anyway. At least, I was happy. My system booted in 8 seconds and only did things I asked it to.

For the next few months, I didn't learn anything more, but then a kernel upgrade broke my touchpad. I had to boot the old kernel to be able to use it, but I couldn't get the GRUB menu to come up. I became quite good at keyboard-only browsing... Finally I discovered that one could force the GRUB menu to come up by commenting out a line in /etc/default/grub. It was that small piece of magic that got me hooked on learning Linux. That's how I got here.

The strongest reason I continue to mainly use Ubuntu is to help me be useful to Ask Ubuntu, because my work here is my very small contribution to Linux.

I used to live with someone who collected old PCs that were getting discarded by his college. He had practically a wall of them in his room and was always trying to get some form of Linux to run. Occasionally he would ask me to help him build or rebuild a machine. He spent most of his free time on this, and nothing ever worked properly.

It was around 2007 I guess I heard of Ubuntu from him. Ubuntu was just another Linux, but I looked up the meaning and I read that ubuntu means something like I am because we are, that is, it is a statement of interdependence. At that time I also read some writings of Richard Stallman and I was convinced of the ethical case for free software, but I was studying other things at the time and I needed my computer (pieced together from parts my dad and brother had replaced in their own) to Just Work.

I went to sea in 2009 and I experienced terrible loneliness. My younger brother sent me a tiny Asus EEE PC as a gift. I think it took him years to pay for it. Yes, I am the luckiest person ever. It ran Windows XP, from then until it suddenly died one morning in the summer of 2015. By this time I was 100% determined to run Linux, regardless of how difficult it might be. I was still carrying the word ubuntu around like a piece of gold in my pocket and it meant more and more to me over time, as did the idea of free software.

On someone's recommendation I bought the infamous Asus X205TA. Little did I know that at the time on Linux there was no wireless support and no audio support, and no 32-bit UEFI support. It took me 10 days (as a total novice) to install Ubuntu, and I had to compile GRUB to get it to work. One could get wireless working by upgrading the kernel, borrowing a driver from Android and fiddling with an nvram file. Audio? Well, I was living in a shared flat, so I would have had to keep the sound down anyway. At least, I was happy. My system booted in 8 seconds and only did things I asked it to.

For the next few months, I didn't learn anything more, but then a kernel upgrade broke my touchpad. I had to boot the old kernel to be able to use it, but I couldn't get the GRUB menu to come up. I became quite good at keyboard-only browsing... Finally I discovered that one could force the GRUB menu to come up by commenting out a line in /etc/default/grub. It was that small piece of magic that got me hooked on learning Linux. That's how I got here.

The strongest reason I continue to mainly use Ubuntu and not other Linux distributions is to help me be useful to Ask Ubuntu, because my work here is my very small contribution to Linux.