I feel this one. Short story. I'm primarily a designer that 10 years ago decided out of boredom to use Vim. Next thing I knew I was using fish as my prompt and learning a lot more about my command line.
2 years ago I made the switch to Linux, mostly because I was inspired by r/unixporn. I took a long weekend to install a barebones arch setup with i3. Everything needed to be touched, and I realized that although I'd been using computers for nearly 30 years, I really didn't understand how they worked.
Maintaining things like Linux, Vim, or some semi-complicated, interlinked toolchain makes me need to learn things constantly. Running updates becomes a lot more complicated, and every time I do it, I learn something new about how computers work that I didn't before.
Why do I do this? Well, I like learning! I also really enjoy my work and if fully retired, would still fiddle with computers as a hobby. Nothing against it, but I think a lot of people use their computers simple to get to their end task, and don't really care much about how that end task might sit on top of a bunch of other core systems.
In my heart, everytime I fiddle with Linux I'm reminded of the seven-year-old kid who sat at the family kitchen computer trying to learn just what the hell DOS was and why my games didn't work. These are magical machines, and it's fun learning why they work. That's what Linux gives me... something to explore.
2 years ago I made the switch to Linux, mostly because I was inspired by r/unixporn. I took a long weekend to install a barebones arch setup with i3. Everything needed to be touched, and I realized that although I'd been using computers for nearly 30 years, I really didn't understand how they worked.
Maintaining things like Linux, Vim, or some semi-complicated, interlinked toolchain makes me need to learn things constantly. Running updates becomes a lot more complicated, and every time I do it, I learn something new about how computers work that I didn't before.
Why do I do this? Well, I like learning! I also really enjoy my work and if fully retired, would still fiddle with computers as a hobby. Nothing against it, but I think a lot of people use their computers simple to get to their end task, and don't really care much about how that end task might sit on top of a bunch of other core systems.
In my heart, everytime I fiddle with Linux I'm reminded of the seven-year-old kid who sat at the family kitchen computer trying to learn just what the hell DOS was and why my games didn't work. These are magical machines, and it's fun learning why they work. That's what Linux gives me... something to explore.