[idealism]

I'm 33 now. When I was in 7th grade, the same friend who taught me how to build PCs (also my age) one day brought over a burned CD of Mandrake Linux. Back then Mandrake was a major distro like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. IIRC, it was the heyday of Windows XP. I can't remember whether I did dual-booting or just wiped my whole drive with Mandrake but after I installed it there was little going back to Windows... at least not until I got into PC gaming for a brief stint in my early high school years. Damn EverQuest and Morrowind.

I had already taught myself basic programming with VB6 at the time, so learning more and more about PC power-user stuff was very exciting to me. I remember KDE back then was a treasure trove of great software that just came for free, making Windows XP actually feel inferior. At some point around that time I watched Revolution OS, the Linux documentary. I think I heard about it on ThinkGeek. I must have watched that documentary at least five times then. I was hooked on open-source software and I finally felt like I had some direction in my life: I wanted to help out with the open-source thing any way I could. Suffice it to say, when I started my high school "webmastering" and Computer Science classes, I was closer to the teachers in knowledge than my peers.

I've been a full time Mac user since '06 for desktop use, however recently I've gone back to giving Arch Linux a decent try for my main desktop environment. Gotta say, Linux on the Desktop, particularly with KDE Plasma, is finally what I had hoped it would become. There was a stretch of time in the last 20+ years I've used Linux that every time I tried using Linux seriously there were some major software disadvantages that kept me returning to Mac such as ridiculous issues with Broadcom or Nvidia drivers, no modern-feeling text editor, generally clunky UX, etc. These days pretty much all the software I use is cross-platform, making it very easy make the transition stick.

I think the Linux for the desktop has a very bright future. Remember folks, authoring cross-platform apps that support Linux is very important!