first steps
my linux journey began more or less on august 2, 2021. strictly speaking, my linux journey began much earlier with my first smartphone, which ran on android. but i won't count that here. on august 2, 2021, i had my first real encounter with linux. how did that happen? that day was my first day of training. at that time, i started training as an it specialist for application development at a well-known web agency. i already knew that i would be getting a macbook, but as far as i remember, i wasn't told that almost everyone worked exclusively with linux on their work pcs, so i naturally got linux on mine, and not just any linux distro, but arch linux. so i was thrown in at the deep end. i knew nothing about linux, absolutely nothing, and then suddenly i had a macbook with linux, which is not exactly known for being beginner-friendly.
i took my first steps back then with my trainer, who more or less took me by the hand. more or less, because to put it nicely, he wasn't exactly the best teacher. what's more, he wasn't prepared for the fact that i had to start from scratch with linux. he thought i wanted to learn linux. but if i remember correctly, i was never asked. i can't remember exactly, but i think i learned relatively quickly, and there were also a few employees, mainly young ones (at the time, only men worked in web development at the agency), who took me under their wing and explained what i needed to know about arch. i know that once an employee almost fell off his chair when he found out that i hadn't even updated my system after months. for those who don't know, arch linux is a rolling release. this means that, unlike a stable release, there is no fixed update cycle. for example, every six months a new version is released, which you update to and then get all the new versions of the installed packages. with a rolling release, when a package gets a new version, i get that update almost immediately and there is no major versioning. with windows, there is major versioning with xp, windows 7, etc. with arch, there is no such thing. you just keep updating the system.
as a rule, you should completely update arch linux every few days; some people even swear by daily updates, so it really wasn't good that i hadn't updated my system for months. because of that your system breaks. but i didn't know any better. i had no idea. i know that in the same online meeting, he also showed me the arch user repository (aur) and gave me my first .bashrc. anyone who has no experience with linux will now ask themselves, “a what?” but those who know linux and are more deeply involved know that these are actually big steps.
at that point, however, i didn't really understand either the aur or the .bashrc. that came much, much later. since i hadn't really been given an introduction, but only a few scattered hints, i taught myself a lot during that time and solved some problems on my own. i know that i didn't really have any major problems on my mac back then. i don't think there was ever a major incident where i broke my system at any point. but i know that it took me a relatively long time to finally figure out how to share my screen, for example, and after certain updates, i always have to connect to the camera via a script. back then by the way i had gnome as my desktop, and i fell in love with it right away.
all in
after a few months of familiarizing myself with my system, i decided to switch my personal laptop to linux as well. at the time, my personal laptop was a thinkpad t440s. i still have this laptop and continue to experiment with it. since i was only familiar with arch at the time and felt comfortable with it, i decided to install arch on it as well. so even back then, i was part of the arch thinkpad community without realizing it, or rather without knowing that it was a thing. at that time, which was in the fall of 2021, arch linux didn't have an installer yet, and i hadn't heard of derivatives either. so i sat down one week after work in the evening and started working on an arch linux installation.
and oh boy, was that an experience. for those who don't use linux: when i say that arch linux didn't have an installer, i mean it. you create a stick with the latest arch_iso, and when you boot it, it sends you to an arch terminal, and from there, you have to install everything yourself manually. that means all the commands that an installer with a graphical interface would normally perform with a mouse click have to be entered manually. from partitioning the hard drive to creating the user account to installing the first packages and setting up the boot process. everything had to be set up manually using linux commands. like everyone else, i had the installation guide in the arch wiki open on my work laptop and a youtube video running alongside it to guide me through the process. my first installation failed. i think it was because i didn't activate or deactivate something in the bios, i think it was bios secure boot or something like that.
but i only realized that at the end when i couldn't boot into my system. at that time, there was no ai i could ask, and since i didn't know any better, i completely reinstalled everything. after all, i had no choice. the hard drive was overwritten and windows was gone. there was no going back. looking back, i probably didn't need to start the whole installation over again, but could have simply fixed the problem and then booted into my system again via the live usb stick, but i didn't know any better and started everything from scratch. i think there was also an error during my second installation. or rather, i made a mistake. i'm not sure, but i think it was because i hadn't installed network manager yet, but had booted into my system, from where i couldn't go any further because i had no internet. i know now that this is nonsense and very easy to fix. but i didn't know that at the time. so i started the installation again, for the third time, and this time i did everything right and i succeeded.
i had now installed arch linux myself! how happy i was back then! it didn't happen all at once, but spread over 2-3 evenings. i still had my work computer to fall back on. but from then on, i was a complete linux user and could actually say, “i use arch, btw.” if only i had known that back then. but i didn't know that at the time either.
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