On the 4th of June, 2024, I posted the first entry on this page. In that post, I (in an admittedly brief manner) discuss my experience installing Arch Linux on an old laptop. That installation was my first time ever making use of Arch, and even more monumentally, the first time I had ever touched any Linux distribution of any kind.
Knowing what very specific usecases I wanted out of an operating system, and emboldened by the no-pressure environment created by using an obsolete laptop with nothing on it to worry about deleting, I jumped straight into what many people would see as the deep-end of Linux. And with that, I have had what is likely more splendor and appreciation for my computers within this year alone than the entire amount of time spent on four different years-long eras of Windows, combined. (those eras being XP, Vista, 7, and 10)
(Fittingly, jumping straight into the deep end is how I also make use of real, non-figurative pools.)
It is truly astonishing to me how much I have been able to learn about this ecosystem of software in such a short span of time. The way I understand software as a whole has been irreversibly changed by these past 12 months. Admittedly, I have always liked computers, with the progressive dwindling of that passion up until now being entirely the fault of Windows and the other software that shares its ethos, ethics, and practices. Perhaps then it shouldn't be a surprise that this hobby has been rekindled for me as much as it has.
In celebration of these facts, I don't just want to make a singular page looking back on my experiences with Linux, I want to make multiple. The original arch installation blog post is to-date the only entry in that series. Despite my original intentions to catalogue the rest of my journey more-or-less in real-time, the task slipped away from me over the days and I never made any progress on my increasing list of Linux topics to blog about.
What the creation process of the recent May 2025 summary post has reminded me of is that writing doesn't get done when I wait around for the right time to sit down and focus for it, because then I set it aside for some indefinite later time. Writing gets done when I WRITE. Because if I start writing a little, I end up writing a lot. That happened just now writing this post here; I went off on a far bigger retrospective on what let me to Linux, and it became so tangential that I realized I was just writing a prologue to the Linux blog, and like the May 2025 post, I decided to just partition it into its own dedicated page, so you'll be seeing that soon.
(Not as soon as I'd like. Unfortunately, I lost a chunk of it in a freak buffer accident while trying to transplant it from this file)
Accompanying that prologue will be a rewrite of the original Arch post, more likely than not. I'll still keep preserved snippets for history's sake, but one of the things I meant to write but never did was talking about bits of the install that I didn't get around to mentioning in the original.
I should sign off now. I need to take this WIP and turn it into a webpage before it's no longer June 4th anymore and go shower before it's too late in the night. I could probably find a million different ways to say how much Linux has changed my life for the better, but that's what those blog posts I've got to write are for! More to come.