How I became a Linux Enthusiast at 20 years old.

I have been a GNU/Linux enthusiast ever since I got my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

At first I did not even know how to actually connect to the Pi. I was using Microsoft Windows. I had to use PuTTY to connect to the Pi. Man, it feels like that was a looong time ago, when it's actually last year!

So, it all started with an IoT Project (which I am currently working on - will end around May/June 2018) organized by the NPCC (National Productivity and Competitiveness Council) in collaboration of e-Inclusion (The sponsor of the project) and University of Mauritius. e-Inclusion gave us (there were about 18 students participating) the RPi's, the casings, official power cord, jumper wires, 16GB SD card and a mini breadboard.

So, to be honest, I got help with a friend who knew a thing or two about networking. He guided me through a bunch of steps like:

• Connecting the Pi to the router via ethernet
• Assigning a static IP to the Pi

I was happy to finally find the easy way to communicate with the Pi. I remember trying a few commands on Linux back in 2014. I did the same on the Pi. Well, I guess you can imagine what two commands they were!

sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. It was nice seeing the commands being executed and that I was controlling it via my laptop (a Dell 7559) !

After a month or two, I was astonished by what can actually be done with this credit card sized computer! I turned it into a web-server having the LEMP (Linux, Nginx, Php, MySQL) stack running. By doing so, I understand how the Internet works! Yeah! I have learned a lot with this piece of tech! I tried to access my website using my public IP. I couldn't. Obviously, port 80 was closed! I spent time finding how I could do this. Well it was a beautiful journey!

Why I shifted to GNU/Linux?

Not to beat around the bush, I did not know how to transfer data using PuTTY. So I decided to finally install GNU/Linux on my laptop. This was another chapter, trying to install GNU/Linux (Ubuntu more specifically) on a laptop which has nVidia as dedicated graphic chip. But I managed to install it at the InstallFest 2017. By myself!

My laptop was once again..new! It was super fast! :D
Since then.. I started on discovering Linux, I made sure to use Linux everyday.

SSH'ing with my RPi was never so easy! No 3rd party applications needed. It was native on the terminal! Both had the same file system. So scp was easy!

Basically, this marks the beginning of my GNU/Linux journey. Today I am a junior Linux System and Database Engineer (intern) at OceanDBA Ltd. And I am pretty proud of myself.

Signing off,
@shravand