It's more of an origin story — how I got here, why Linux has been a constant in the background of my life, and what my setup actually looks like today. The technical posts will come when there's a project worth writing up. This one is just context.
Sixth grade. There was a colorful CRT iMac at school — one of those translucent ones that looked like it came from a different planet. I was spending time with old Windows 95 and XP machines at the same time. None of this was structured. I wasn't learning anything in particular. I was just poking at things, seeing what they'd do, mostly focused on making the UI look different than it came.
That's how it always started. Not "how does this work" but "can I make this look like something else."
Somewhere in there I started hearing about Linux. And I was largely forbidden from touching it.
Reasonable, honestly. I had a habit of breaking things out of curiosity and leaving my dad to sort out what I'd done. He'd seen enough of my experiments.
He was a tall, quiet guy. Worked in HP's business division — their enterprise side. Lived far enough away that we didn't have a regular relationship, but he clearly paid attention to what I was interested in.
For my birthday he gave me a boxed copy of OpenSUSE. Physical box, detailed manual.
I read that manual front to back and understood almost none of it. I didn't have the context yet — didn't know what I was reading or why any of it mattered. I just did.
By the time I actually understood what he'd given me, and what it meant that he'd given it to me, he was gone.
He was probably the person in my family who understood this side of me the most.
That one was my fault.
I'd saved up, bought a machine, installed an upgrade, took it apart — and forgot to reconnect the fans.
Expensive lesson. A couple of years without a personal computer while I sorted that out.
When my parents got me a MacBook Pro — one of the early Intel models — I promised not to mess with it.
I kept that promise for about three months.
First I found Boot Camp and loaded the Windows 7 beta. Gaming with friends sorted.
Then I was on YouTube and found a video about Linux and Compiz.
That was it.
If you know, you know — Compiz was a compositing window manager that could make your desktop do things that had no business being that smooth or visually satisfying in the mid-2000s. Rotating cube desktops, windows that wobbled when you moved them, everything animated and configurable. It looked like the future.
I needed it immediately.
So now the goal was clear: I wanted Windows for games, Linux for everything else, and I needed to keep macOS available for when I inevitably broke something and needed to recover.
Triple boot. On a base model Intel MacBook with a 256GB drive.
Many failed attempts. Real fear of bricking the whole thing. Eventually — it worked.
And somewhere in the process of getting Linux running and actually using it, I started dabbling with code. Small stuff at first. A website for my Boy Scout troop. Mini Flash games. Nothing I can show you now — Flash is long gone and the projects with it — but every one of them pushed me in a direction I'm still moving.
That triple-booted MacBook is where I became a developer, basically. It just didn't look like that at the time.
Today my setup is intentional in a way that teenage me was just stumbling toward.
I have a Windows desktop — least used. It exists for games I can't run elsewhere and VR. That's its job.
I have a Linux system — still experimental in some ways. I'll occasionally make it my primary for development work, but more often it's running as a server instance, handling whatever I need hosted locally.
And my MacBook is my primary. It travels with me, it handles development comfortably, it works well for photo editing, and it's reliable in the way that matters most for a laptop — I can pick it up and go and trust it.
Three systems, three distinct roles. It's not that different from what I was trying to build on that tiny drive in high school. Just more deliberate now, and nobody's fans are getting forgotten.
When I have a Linux project worth writing up — a configuration worth sharing, something I built or broke and fixed — I'll write it properly. This one was just about where the interest came from.