 You take the blue pill the story ends you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe You take the red pill you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes now That quote is from the character Morpheus in the movie the Matrix But in a lot of ways this rabbit hole thing this this rabbit hole concept how deep does it go I? Think it applies to my Linux journey and possibly to your Linux journey as well when I started using desktop Linux full-time about 12 13 years ago I am such a different computer user now than I was then you know because of this journey I keep finding new things I keep going down the rabbit hole some of the most common questions I get from viewers of my channel is About my Linux journey how I got started in Linux you know my progression as far as you know When did I switch over from desktop environments over to window managers and to tiling window managers? What about my progression as far as using text editors? You know what did I used to use you know standard kind of normal text editors like? Notepad and windows and g edit in GNOME and you know when did I transition to things like Vim and Emax? What was the process you know what made me go down those particular rabbit holes if I think back to the very beginning of My computer experience I was born in the 70s but I really grew up in the 80s and going it to elementary school in the 1980s, you know we played on computers. We had computer labs. Those were the old school orange Amber colored monochrome monitors and you know learning basic and you know stuff like that learning DOS But I never really considered myself a computer geek. I never had a personal computer really until Getting around 1993 1994. I bought my first computer, you know saved up like $2,000 $2,500 I forget what it was. It's very expensive though computers were so much more expensive back then I just a basic computer would cost you two to three grand because They just weren't that common not too many people had personal computers back then what really got me interested in computers and Programming and things like that was the internet. So really the emergence of the worldwide web So what was it 1995? 1996 AOL really exploded on the scene and all of a sudden Everybody was on the internet. Everybody had to be on the internet Everybody had to own a computer and I was one of those kids You know, I was a teenager then but I wanted to start building websites because everybody had to be on the web And I wanted to build websites, you know, I thought it was really interesting stuff. So, you know back then I learned HTML matter of fact the web back then was pretty much nothing but HTML This was before you could do CSS and JavaScript and you know, you didn't have all these whiz bang effects on the web It was a much cleaner worldwide web back then it was all text-based for the most part you could add images and video to a web page back then but nobody did it because Internet speeds back then were so slow, you know, if you added some images, they had to be small images You couldn't put a very big image on a web page because it would take ages to load You know back then you had an image load and you would see it load like one Line at a time and it took forever Adding video to a web page was unheard of you wouldn't do that because it would take you probably two days to download You know some kind of video file So I started, you know building some simple websites and learning HTML really learning HTML I pretty much knew everything there was to know about HTML and of course I was using Windows back then this was before I started using Linux on the desktop and people often asked me Hey, what did you program in back then? You know with HTML or simple scripting or whatever it is Later I learned things like PHP and things like that and Forever up until I switched to Linux around 2008. So prior to 2008 I was on Windows and the only Text editor that I used for programming was not pad Not not pad plus plus or any of the other fancier upgraded Kind of versions of notepad just plain Notepad that is all I ever used and it seems So limiting I guess to some people that how could you use such a basic text editor that really does nothing? It self lets you type plain text into it. I never really considered the alternatives. It was just what I used I got comfortable using it and to this day I'm still pretty comfortable using something like notepad if I happen to be on a Windows machine and need a plain text editor You know if I'm working in an office or whatever I'll just pull up notepad to edit simple things now. When did I discovered Linux? Well, I discovered what Linux was I knew what Linux was I guess mid to late 90s right because I'm building these websites and even back then the web was run on Linux web servers ran Linux pretty much most of them I was the same today pretty much if when you go and get a web server You go go get some web hosting and buy a web hosting account or some kind of managed web server It's almost always running Linux and that was the case even way back then you know 25 years ago back then the common Distributions I would see on web servers were Red Hat and Debian matter of fact still two of the most common distributions you find on web servers although now People don't like to pay for some of the licensing costs with Red Hat So they usually do some of the Red Hat alternatives like CentOS. So these days I see CentOS Debian and Ubuntu LTS is another very common web server distro So I'm playing around with web development just as a side gig as a hobby You know, I didn't work in a computer related field or anything But you know, eventually I know a little bit about programming you I just kind of fell into it again I knew HTML and CSS learned a little JavaScript learned a little PHP you know, I could play with my sequel databases and things like that and Because I knew what Linux was I knew Linux ran on all these web servers around I'd say 2006 or so I start hearing about people running Linux on the desktop on their main machines, you know, their Personal computers their workstations their laptops even and that seemed so strange to me because it was unheard of really prior to that I mean, I guess you always had some of those elite super hackers that maybe ran Linux on their personal equipment But around 2006 I started seeing like normal people talking about this distribution called Ubuntu Ubuntu Exploded on the scene because it was that Linux that was easy to install Anybody could install it and it should just work out of the box now 2006 that was what 14 years ago Linux was quite a bit different back then And it didn't just wore everything work out of the box. It was still a little rough around the edges way back then But it had come to the point where people started considering running Linux on their desktops and laptops And I started considering it. I had downloaded some ISOs of Ubuntu Maybe some other distros meant came along about that time I also took a look at some of the early versions of Linux meant back then around 2008 though I was still running Windows Windows XP actually on my desktop computer And I had my desktop computer taken over by malware a hacker Basically took over my machine was holding my computer hostage and he wanted me to pay money or the antivirus To fix the malware he installed on my machine, of course I'm not going to pay some terrorist money to get my machine back So I'd already been playing with you know Ubuntu and some other stuff in VMs I'd actually taken a look at Ubuntu in VMs I'd also done the wooby installer back then Ubuntu had this really neat installer called wooby WUBI It lets you install Ubuntu inside Windows almost like a VM inside Windows It was really like a Ubuntu was a app inside Windows You clicked on the Ubuntu icon and Ubuntu would come up and you could play around with it It was slow and kind of buggy, but it wasn't designed to really be a great experience It was just designed to introduce people to what Ubuntu was you could see what all the Applications that would be installed if you actually did a real install so my XP machines taken over by malware ransomware basically and I Just formatted the disk I was so angry at this hacker And I was not going to put another version of Microsoft Windows because I kind of knew it was insecure I mean you get viruses all the time back then especially and I was like you know what I'm done with it I know people are running this Ubuntu Linux distribution on their machines. I had the ISO Yeah, I had already had a CD burnt. Let's go with it. And that's what I did cold turkey Just quit Windows that day installed Linux and I never looked back. I have never had a machine that ran Microsoft Windows or any non-linux operating system since then that was again, you know, 12 13 years ago so those versions of Ubuntu that I installed back then ran the GNOME 2 desktop environment and I'll be honest when I first came to Linux and Ubuntu and many probably most Linux distributions back then ran GNOME It was the preferred desktop environment of most of the big Linux distributions and the old GNOME 2 desktop Inferment I didn't like I didn't think it looked good. I didn't like the workflow. I didn't like the feel So immediately I'm already in a completely foreign operating system anyway So it was really easy for me to just start looking around at alternative desktops and alternative window managers and Almost immediately almost from day one really I started looking at window managers on Linux And the first one I tried out was open box and when I installed open box I absolutely fell in love with it. It was just light fast Minimal there wasn't anything to it when you first install open box on Ubuntu It's not preconfigured or anything you log in and all you get is like a black screen or a gray screen You don't have wallpaper. You don't have panels. You don't have menus Well, you have a desktop menu if you're right-click on the desktop There is a default right-click menu, but it's not really configured yet as some of the applications in that menu You don't actually have installed on the system. So it was really fascinating to me because it was something to play with I knew this thing was gonna be some work You know, it was gonna take a little time for me to configure this thing but I knew once I got it configured it would be mine and I was blown away by that level of customization because you don't have that kind of customization and something like Windows or Mac OS You just don't they don't allow you to do something like that to install another desktop environment and window manager and basically You can't really just take apart your operating system and put it back together You could do this kind of stuff in Linux and I fell in love immediately I knew you know even six months in I would never go back to Windows after playing with open box for a few months You know, I got kind of bored with open box once I got it configured I was like, okay, let me find another window manager and configure that and I found x-monad and That was a big challenge because that's one of the more difficult window managers to get into because it's written in Haskell I didn't know anything about Haskell. I was like, well, I got to learn a little Haskell So I started reading a little bit about Haskell just enough so I can actually write my x-monad config file Because back then you didn't have things like YouTube there weren't very many Linux content creators on the platform because YouTube wasn't as big back then There wasn't this kind of content like the kind of content that I make now you didn't have back then so back then It was a lot tougher to get into things like open box and x-monad and q-tile and everything because you know You actually did have to start from scratch and write a config file And you really didn't have people helping you out with videos and Written tutorials and things like that Oftentimes the only other content that you could go take a look at to help you out in your config is Just scouring through something like github and finding somebody else's config files and seeing how they wrote theirs And maybe taking little bits from their config and seeing what worked Was really just trial and error for the most part until you know I started getting comfortable maybe writing in the languages that these config files are written in once I knew a little Haskell then I could kind of figure out what these people were doing in their configs once I knew a little Python I could figure out what people were doing in their q-tile configs and this is really Where the rabbit hole concept You know where I start making this connection to the matrix because it's exactly That thing I'm going down the rabbit hole I want once you start hopping window manager hopping especially you know you're looking for that next fix right you're looking for the next Challenge and that's what it is I'm always looking for the next challenge and then you know once you've kind of gotten through all the window managers You know I want to start playing with some of the extensible text editors So again a notepad forever on windows when I came to Linux I just used whatever plain text editor happened to be laying around g edit was very similar to notepad I just used g edit for a while eventually. I found genie. I really liked genie notepad qq is another really nice plain text editor But eventually I knew I needed to learn some of the extensible text editors So I started playing around a little bit with vi I took a look at it a time or two and kind of knew how to move around a little bit in a file How to quit a file that's the main thing you need to know in vi and then eventually I had it in my head I've got to learn VIM and VIM has to be my text editor of choice So I ran through the VIM tutor one day that was two or three years ago I ran through the VIM tutor. It takes like half an hour and once you run through the VIM tutor You kind of know VIM and after I ran through the VIM tutor I just started slowly working VIM into my workflow every now and then when I needed to edit a config file I tried to edit that config file in VIM now I'll be honest. I was still kind of comfortable in the old-school plain text editors, you know not using the hjkl And all of that so sometimes if I was in a hurry I would just go back to g edit or genie or whatever and edit those configs there But I've had a little time I tried to make myself edit those files in VIM and after I don't know two three months Occasionally using VIM it got comfortable after a while VIM was all I was using and you know six months after learning VIM I would say I just uninstalled all my other text editors I didn't need them anymore VIM in the terminal was the only text editor I needed In fact, it was painful to use those other text editors because they didn't do what VIM did Even now because I'm so used to the VIM key bindings and the VIM motions when I open up some text editor That doesn't use the VIM key bindings I struggle because I'm mistyping things because I'm trying to do things the VIM way and they don't work like that And after using VIM for a couple of years, of course VIM becomes very comfortable then, you know It's just muscle memory. You just know everything that you need to know about them You never know everything there is to know about VIM, but I can pretty much do anything I want to do in VIM and then it's no longer a challenge, right? Then you start again looking for going down that rabbit hole a little deeper You're looking for that next fix right? You need that next challenge and that's when I had to check out Emacs People have been telling me, hey man, what are you going to start learning Emacs and doing Emacs videos? And it's the kind of thing most people probably wouldn't do As a matter of fact, I can tell you most people when they take the time to learn something like VIM Then they don't want to move on to something else like Emacs because they think Well, I'm going to unlearn everything. Now I'm going to have to learn a completely different text editor And I'm not like that. I'm not one of those people that shy away from something like that I actually embrace that. Oh, I get to learn something completely new. Great And that's not like you unlearn everything you knew before It's like distro hopping just because you switch from Debian to Arch Do you forget everything you learned in Debian? No Just because you hop window managers, you know, about as often as you change underwear Does that mean that, you know, when you switch from open box to awesome window manager to X-Mode Ed to I3, you know, did you forget everything you knew about all these previous window managers? No, you remember everything. And it's the same way when I switched from VIM to Emacs I could use both. I could use the VIM key bindings in VIM when I opened up VIM And I could use the standard to get new Emacs key bindings when I opened up Emacs Now, eventually I switched to Evil Mode and Emacs and switched to a Evil Mode distribution of Emacs called Doom Emacs because I prefer the VIM bindings But Emacs really is much more than just a text editor with some key bindings It's really this programming environment and that is an even deeper rabbit hole to go down Because now you start thinking about computers completely differently You start thinking about operating systems completely differently in desktop environments Because once you get into something like Emacs, Emacs is really just this elisp development environment And whatever you can imagine, whatever you can program, you can make happen inside Emacs Emacs, some people say Emacs is bloated because it can do everything and it really can do everything But Emacs is absolutely not bloated because because Emacs can do everything You can make it do anything you want it to do It's not bloated because I could install Emacs on any GNU slash Linux operating system And it could almost replace every other program on the system I no longer need any other text editors. I no longer need terminal emulators Because I've got several built into Emacs. I don't need a web browser. It's built into Emacs I don't need an email client. It's built into Emacs I can do literally everything I want to do inside Emacs So the people that say it's bloated, they don't get it Because Emacs replaces practically everything else installed on your system So in many ways when you install Emacs, it really can unbloat your system Then I start playing around with maybe running Emacs as my window manager, right? Just booting directly into Emacs And then I start looking at Emacs like GNU slash Linux distributions like GNU Geeks Which is written in GNU Gele, which is a dialect of Scheme Which is kind of a dialect of Lisp You know, you get into this kind of pattern here where you're traveling down this road And you don't know where it's going to lead Right? I have no idea where this journey will eventually end And I think a lot of newer to Linux users When they see content like some of the content I put out The nerdy stuff getting into tiling window managers and learning Haskell Xmonad and learning them in Emacs And some of the recent stuff I've done with GNU Geeks They see that and they're like, man, I don't want to be like DT Because that's kind of scary You're seeing this transformation, right? You're seeing where I'm going And I don't know where it's going You don't know where it's going And some of you guys fear that journey And that's okay Everybody has different types of personalities I am embracing this, right? I have no idea where I'll eventually end up You know, what kind of programming languages I may eventually learn Or what I'm going to do with my GNU slash Linux operating systems Maybe one day I will try out other free operating systems Not necessarily GNU slash Linux But I will definitely always run free as in freedom operating systems I'm never going back to the proprietary garbage that is Windows and Mac One thing I know for certain Is that I am a completely different person today For having discovered Linux Had I never discovered Linux I have no idea what directions my life might have taken And I'm not even kidding I mean, Linux has been a prominent figure in my life Since switching to it full-time on the desktop back in 2008 I can't imagine what I would be doing now If I was still just an average computer user That really didn't know anything about their operating system And you know, just occasionally you open up Google Chrome And you go to Facebook And you spend time reading all that toxic nonsense In a lot of ways I think I owe everything I have right now To the free software movement The open source software movement And all the people that work on What is our GNU slash Linux distributions And I think that's a good stopping point for what has been a rather Lengthy and winding rant I have no idea where I was going when I started recording this You know, I started the camera going and hit record And I have no idea how long I have been talking This may be a rather lengthy video I do apologize to those of you that like shorter videos But I hope you did enjoy me reflecting a little bit on my journey with Linux Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinion, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Arch5530, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, I'm Repaul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie, these guys They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon They are the producers of this rather lengthy ramble video I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen All these names you're seeing on the screen These are all my supporters over on Patreon Because this channel is supported by you guys The community If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so You'll find DET over on Patreon Alright guys, peace