Just some background about me.
I actually work in IT, start as IT systems admin since I was 19 years old (34 now) and I've been working with Windows since the beginning. Very little to no Linux experience, maybe some ESXi troubleshooting, but that didnt happen too often, ESXi runs quite well! Today I works as a Solutions Architect focusing on Cloud / Infrastructure so my job is not really hands on as it once was, I focus more on Architecture of different systems, documentation, presentations, etc. Suffice it to say, I miss the days of troubleshooting and building out different infrastructures. So, after a lot of thinking, I decided to try and make a transition into a DevOps world, working more with Open Source software, why not! I spent most of my career with proprietary software, so I wanted a change.
Linux for me, is a first step in that journey. In the world of DevOps, knowing your way around Linux is a huge plus, many known open source software runs on Linux (Kubernetes, Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, etc just to name a few).
First step for me, was to decide what distribution of Linux I want to use. I though right away about RHEL as it is the most common Linux OS that many employers use, so I figured why not go for the RHCSA certification, but first, I needed to get comfortable with Linux. I didnt want to run RHEL on my system, I wanted something a little less enterprise like but at the same time, I wanted a distro that would kind of be similar to RHEL so that I can apply a lot of my knowledge from tinkering around to the real world. So this narrowed down to a few choices for me:
1. Fedora
2. RHEL (only in my lab)
3. CentOS
4. Ubuntu (a little different from RHEL, but still used in Enterprises)
I then heard Linus Torvalds talk around what Distro he uses, the famous talk he gave about not wanting to try Debian due to the difficulty in installing the OS (not so difficult now though, has come along way from my research). And that is when I heard him mention Fedora. I didnt know much about Fedora other than people recommending to try if I wanted to get as close as possible to RHEL
Well a few months later and I am running Fedora 34 Workstation on my main gaming rig with Windows (for gaming) as a Dual Boot. So what have I learned so far about Linux?
I spent an entire day yesterday tinkering with Fedora, tweaking, customizing, changing themes, etc... I can't believe I didnt do this sooner.... wish I had started back in 2006. But hey, I guess it is never too late to start!
If you're learning Linux, I encourage you to keep learning more, dont get discouraged, I had to reinstall Linux a bunch of times because of the mistakes I made a long the way, but man I learned! Now, I also implement a Fedora VM, so doing any testing in the VM first saves me a lot of time!
I actually work in IT, start as IT systems admin since I was 19 years old (34 now) and I've been working with Windows since the beginning. Very little to no Linux experience, maybe some ESXi troubleshooting, but that didnt happen too often, ESXi runs quite well! Today I works as a Solutions Architect focusing on Cloud / Infrastructure so my job is not really hands on as it once was, I focus more on Architecture of different systems, documentation, presentations, etc. Suffice it to say, I miss the days of troubleshooting and building out different infrastructures. So, after a lot of thinking, I decided to try and make a transition into a DevOps world, working more with Open Source software, why not! I spent most of my career with proprietary software, so I wanted a change.
Linux for me, is a first step in that journey. In the world of DevOps, knowing your way around Linux is a huge plus, many known open source software runs on Linux (Kubernetes, Jenkins, Docker, Ansible, etc just to name a few).
First step for me, was to decide what distribution of Linux I want to use. I though right away about RHEL as it is the most common Linux OS that many employers use, so I figured why not go for the RHCSA certification, but first, I needed to get comfortable with Linux. I didnt want to run RHEL on my system, I wanted something a little less enterprise like but at the same time, I wanted a distro that would kind of be similar to RHEL so that I can apply a lot of my knowledge from tinkering around to the real world. So this narrowed down to a few choices for me:
1. Fedora
2. RHEL (only in my lab)
3. CentOS
4. Ubuntu (a little different from RHEL, but still used in Enterprises)
I then heard Linus Torvalds talk around what Distro he uses, the famous talk he gave about not wanting to try Debian due to the difficulty in installing the OS (not so difficult now though, has come along way from my research). And that is when I heard him mention Fedora. I didnt know much about Fedora other than people recommending to try if I wanted to get as close as possible to RHEL
Well a few months later and I am running Fedora 34 Workstation on my main gaming rig with Windows (for gaming) as a Dual Boot. So what have I learned so far about Linux?
- Linux can be really frustrating in the beginning. This is because we dont really know how to use the operating system, we dont know the little details and nuances that one might know from using an operating system for many years, like I know about Windows for example.
- The frustration is only natural when learning something new, this does not only apply to Linux, but many other areas too. If you're a car guy/girl, changing an exhaust system might not be that difficult, but if you've never done it, it feels like rocket science, so many things to know and understand
- Linux is definitely not the easiest OS to learn for beginners, but when you do learn, you start to realize how powerful the operating system can be. Just think about the power you have in being able to go with something like Arch Linux and pick and chose every component you want to deploy, basically building your own custom distro!
- Once you get passed the learning curve, it starts to get very rewarding as you start to realize all of the tweaking, configuration, deployments, etc become easier and easier, heck you might even start doing some bash scripting to automate some of the deployments
I spent an entire day yesterday tinkering with Fedora, tweaking, customizing, changing themes, etc... I can't believe I didnt do this sooner.... wish I had started back in 2006. But hey, I guess it is never too late to start!
If you're learning Linux, I encourage you to keep learning more, dont get discouraged, I had to reinstall Linux a bunch of times because of the mistakes I made a long the way, but man I learned! Now, I also implement a Fedora VM, so doing any testing in the VM first saves me a lot of time!