Although it is not a focal point of my professional live any more, Linux and I share a long common history. My first encounter was with “S.u.S.E. Linux August 1995″ (kernel 1.1.12) in October or November of 1995. Until then I had only played around a bit with MINIX 1.5 on a  80286-based PC. But it had been a bit of a disappointment for me and I never really got into things.

This changed dramatically with Linux. I spent many hours trying to get a setup with X11 (only FVWM2 was available as window manager then) to work. This was not as easy as today. There was no, or very little, support from YaST, the setup tool of SuSE. And one had to be careful with the monitor (CRT of course) configuration. Because too high frequencies could physically damage your monitor. I never used the system to actually perform any work, it was solely for learning.

This changed with SuSE 4.4 and even more so with SuSE 6.1. I do not remember the exact dates, but SuSE 6.1 was installed in late 1997 when I ran my own small company as a “side-project” to my university studies. But since the company was highly successful, I soon used things like HylaFax on Linux and of course also ran my local mail server (sendmail can be a challenge, especially when Google does not exist yet). There even was a dial-in modem for terminal connections.

What I always disliked about SuSE, was that the updates from one version to another never really worked for me. So in about 2002 I finally decided to switch to Debian Woody (3.0). That was again a learning curve, but the apt packaging system was vastly superior to what I had seen on SuSE before and I never had problems with upgrades. The experience gained then is also quite helpful these days for the Raspberry Pi.

Things continued with CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu – with the last two powering my company notebook for a short while back in 2008. But the experience was mixed and I never liked Linux as a general-purpose desktop operating system. I had used it extensively for writing LaTeX documents (using Xfig a lot for diagrams) during my university time. But other than that, for too many Windows (or later Mac) applications I never found a proper replacement.

But for servers Linux is definitely my preferred OS. And especially so because most of the innovations of the last years, like configuration management systems (e.g. Chef, Puppet, Ansible) and containers (e.g. Docker), came to live on Linux.