Linux

📅 05 Feb 2021

This post will mark my first day of my journey into the Linux world.

I know, I am decades late. But as they say, better late than never.

I grew up using Windows. Then, my first personal laptop that was issued by my undergrad university was a Mac. Up until that day, I would probably be labelled as anti-Mac.

I grew to love the Mac OS UX. I found it neat, easy to learn, and unique.

Then, when I started working after college, I had to start using Windows for work - Mac wasn’t an option. I honestly didn’t mind going back. But, to be fair, I wasn’t really using it for anything other than light web-browsing, Word documents, and simple Excel spreadsheets.

Now that I’m almost finished with my Masters degree, I’ve been using both Windows and Mac for two years. I’ve coded on both, but primarily on my Mac. I honestly don’t have that much of a preference anymore.

But one area I have not ventured into yet is Linux. As someone who didn’t grow up as a tech nerd, Linux was always just a word with no meaning. Until now.

Today was my first day using Linux, specifically Ubuntu. I didn’t put a lot of thought into this. I did a quick informal poll on social media, did 5 minutes of research, and made a decision. I found a quick guide to install Ubuntu and I was on my way.

I believe I could have used a VM for Ubuntu, but I decided to use a flash drive (because that was the first guide I found). I knew that since I was just getting started, I didn’t want to invest a ton of time and energy just yet. This was the easy solution and I went with it.

To get up and running, I used a 32 GB flash drive and Rufus, since it creates the bootable drive and persistence all in one step.

A simple restart of my laptop and I was in!

There was so much to explore. After I got the basics down (internet, applications, etc.) I decided to do a little coding using Sublime. Ubuntu has python pre-installed, so after saving a simple print statement, I ran it in the terminal, and bam!, I was good to go.

I don’t want to go beyond that today. I plan on spending a lot of time exploring and will probably try several different versions of Linux before I settle. It would be nice to keep it on a flash drive until I settle on making it my daily driver or get another machine.

💬 Looking for comments?