My First Experience with Linux

Technically my first exposure to Linux would be through WSL. Windows Subsystem for Linux. You can run the simple command `wsl --install` on your Windows Powershell (Sidenote - Does anyone actually like Powershell? its much slower than cmd.exe and has a ridiculous color scheme. Supposedly it has more features) and it will install Ubuntu straight onto your Windows OS. Not sure how it works exactly. After installing you have a little Linux system running on your terminal. You can choose to change the distro after the installation.

Your Linux system will actually show up in your file explorer, Like a sub-drive. I suspect you can browse your Linux file system there, but I don't know cause whenever I clicked on it my laptop lagged out and I was forced to end-task the explorer using Task Manager. Something pretty funny about the Windows explorer is that if you restart it the entire desktop crashes for some reason. Is literally everything on the Desktop tied to the explorer program?? Weird.

But that's not what I want to talk about here. I never used WSL because well, there's not much point to it for me. What I really consider my first experience with Linux started when one day on my way home from work as an intern in an IT firm, I decided to splurge my hard earned pay on a 64GB flash drive. It was based on a crazy idea I had the night before. You see, I wanted to install Linux, but I didn't have the money to buy a new hard drive for my laptop. I didn't just want to overwrite all my files. So I thought, why not install Linux on a flash drive? It didn't matter where the OS was stored as long as it had enough space right?

I came home and immediately got to work. Of course, I didn't want to install just any Linux distribution. I wanted the most unique and customizable distribution I can find, and in my eyes that was Arch Linux. I've already flashed an ISO into another flash drive I had, so I just plugged both into my laptop and went for it. Now, you might think its basically suicide for someone who doesn't know a single thing about Linux to try and install Arch Linux of all things. But I wasn't afraid of the command line, and Arch Linux does have a pretty easy installation script you can use! Now, later on I regretted using this script, but for my first time, I think I wouldn't have succeeded without it.

It took me past midnight, working without dinner, to get it all working. But once it was done I was the proudest creature alive. It was always my dream to install Arch Linux, as stupid as it is to dream about installing an operating system. But I did it, and life felt worth living.

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