Using Linux since I was twelve

I installed Ubuntu on my family’s old desktop when I was twelve. I didn’t know what I was doing — I just wanted the computer to be faster, and someone on a forum said Linux was the answer.

It wasn’t faster, at least not at first. It was confusing. The wireless card didn’t work. I had to learn what a driver was.

The terminal as a teacher

The thing about not having a working GUI for WiFi is that you have to figure out the terminal. I learned iwconfig, ifconfig, lshw. I learned that everything in the system is a file. I learned to read error messages instead of closing them.

This turned out to be one of the best things that happened to my career.

When I started working as a software engineer, I was comfortable in environments where other people weren’t — SSH sessions, headless servers, CI/CD logs. Not because I’m particularly clever, but because I’d spent years in that environment.

What Linux taught me about software

Using Linux as a daily driver makes you a participant in your operating system rather than a passenger. You notice when something is slow. You investigate. You find out it’s a cron job you forgot about, or a runaway process, or just a misconfigured service.

That habit of investigation — following a symptom to its root cause — is probably the most useful thing I do as an engineer.

The practical side

I’ve worked with Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and Oracle Linux (the last one in production at Universidad del Valle). Each distribution taught me something different. Arch taught me how the system boots. Oracle Linux taught me SELinux, which I had previously considered black magic.

I use Fedora now on my personal machine and Ubuntu in most of my server work. The distro matters less than understanding what’s underneath.