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I've been a Linux user for some years. It all started when my old little Acer Aspire laptop could not keep up with the Windows 7 nonsense.
Everything was laggy, nothing seemed to load, even when this laptop originally shipped with Windows 7. The young version of me, even after seeing this low resource machine barely being able to keep up with it, decided to try Windows 10.
It's no suprise to say it was an abject disaster.
I remembered when my dad used to run Ubuntu on this machine, quite a while ago, when I had no idea what Linux actually was. I used to enjoy playing Lincity on it, and I even wrote some other book (you know, those that kids back in the day used to write, when Instagram and YouTube were not a thing). I remember those times fondly.
So I decided one day to install Xubuntu, after reviewing many different alternatives (I had no idea what was the difference between all of those). It was a marvelous experience. It ran smoothly (as smooth as an Intel Atom can run) and I could actually do work!
It felt awesome.
I spent some time with that machine, and I have kept Xubuntu in a place on my heart since then.
In 2017 I purchased a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I was not at all competent with Linux back then, so I could only do basic stuff. I started to grow curious about what I could do with that machine (which happened to be more powerful than my laptop).
I learned quickly how to code in Python, how Xorg worked, and some of the insides of Linux.
I felt the urge to try something more in my laptop.
Little time had passed and I was already trying manjaro, which I desperately installed while in my aunt's house, using my phone as an external mountable image disk. That's when I started using i3, and developed some love to tiling window managers.
Manjaro was not such a great experience. Packages were sometimes broken, and in September of that year, to my suprise, Manjaro dropped i686 support. It was time to move elsewhere.
Then I tried the unofficial i686 version of Arch Linux, where I spent a lot of time, tweaking bspwm. That's when I really learned about tiling window managers.
Not too long after, I rescued my dad's old Mac Mini, and I installed Manjaro (yet again) on an external HDD where I booted from.
It was not a very painful experience, except broken broadcom wifi, where I received a LOT of diverse and incorrect information on how to fix from the forums.
In 2019, I received my first powerful laptop, a HP Pavillion. It came with FreeDOS, so I had plenty of choice on what to install.
I decided to install ArcoLinux, where I spent some months, and got somewhat involved in the community (check out Eric Dubois, he is a great man, and has a lot of videos). After some time, I decided to install Arch Linux to live the "real experience", and much to my disliking, it was not a good experience. I got memory leaks within Xorg, for one reason or another, and apps such as discord (which I abandoned some time ago, thank god) were using nearly 1GB of ram, and increased over time.
In late October 2020, I moved to Gentoo Linux. It is safe to say most of the internals of Linux I know nowadays came from that distribution. It has a decent and helpful community, excluding the discord channels.
In late June 2021, I did a wild move, and switched over to FreeBSD. And as of today, 8th of December (10 days before my 20th birthday :) ) of 2021, I am still using it, and I do not plan on moving at all. In fact, I started contributing to the ports tree, and got access to the wiki pages to contribute even more.
The open source community has brought back to life two of my machines, and made me develop a huge interest on computer science.
I will be forever grateful to all those that contributed to make this possible.