Computers have always been a part of my life. I started using them when I was around 4 or 5 years old, with some really simple educational games at school. When I was a little older, my parents gave me an old computer to mess around with. Since then, I started to learn more and more, and when I was 15 years old, I saved up the money and build my own computer.

I have always used windows as my default operating system, but when I was around 13 or 14 years old I started to experiment with Linux. I was interested in how secure computers were and wanted to learn about hacking. Browsing around on the internet made me find BackTrack. It is a Debian based distribution built for pentesting, it’s the predecessor of Kali Linux. I kept fiddling with that for a while, I started to try and hack my own WiFi network learn about nmap and started to experience Linux.

Besides that, I didn’t do much with Linux, after BackTrack I kept trying the same with Kali Linux, learning even more about how to use the terminal, and other pentesting tools I can’t quite remember. Those two distributions really taught me the basics of finding my way around in Linux. I started to use Linux a lot more when I got a second laptop and became interested in how it would be to use Linux instead of windows.

To make my life not too difficult, I did not install it on my main computer, but installed Debian on my second laptop. I knew Debian because I was used to Kali Linux at the time. So that was what I used. I started messing around with it and trying different things but it never felt good enough to try it on my main machine. After a while it felt like there was nothing new to experience in Debian. When I look back on it, I didn’t know much about Linux at the time, and I still think I don’t know that much about it. Everything felt like it just worked so I didn’t feel there was a challenge. Around that time I remembered somebody told me once about a distro that you had to install manually. That sounded like a real challenge so I started searching for it and found Arch Linux

I installed it and with help of the wiki and different YouTube video’s it all went pretty smooth. It really taught me a lot. Not even that much about Linux, but it did in the way to tackle problems. It made me use my brain more. You can read more about what I learned from Arch in this article. When it came to configuring the machine the inner working of linux really opened up to me. I started to understand how linux was build out of different parts and how the unix philosophy made everything work complementary.

Nowadays I still don’t use Linux full time. I want to, but because of specific software I need to use for school I haven’t fully transferred everything yet. I’m doubting about how a virtual machine could handle it all so maybe I’m going to try that in the future.