John R. Grubensky, 28

Fairfield, USA

• "Pithy quote."

About Me

I grew up in Fairfield and went to college in southern California and finished at Sacramento State. I have used Window$ most of my life and own multiple licenses. For a long time I have heard about "Linux" but my only experience with it was in a physics class my freshmen year where it was installed on the computer. I don't know what version it was I just remember that the frames were grey. (This was back in Fall 2000 I think.) I would hear whispers on some of the websites that I frequent and kind of put it in the back of my mind that I would like the adventure of building a linux box one day.

Filed away in the back of my brain the thought gathered dust while I became distracted with all the games that were coming out for win-dohs. Never saw Linux distribution used on another computer and never learned about what GNU really is until this year when I decided to build a cheap new computer with discount parts from Fry's Electronics. Before I had all the parts I was kind of struggling with what kind of operating system that I wanted to put on it. I originally wanted to get Widows 7 because I heard from some friends that it was actually good but when it came down to it I didn't (and still don't) have the money for that. I decided that I was going to use one of my copies of XP but I still wanted something new, this is when that old thought popped back into my stream of thought, finally the perfect opportunity to try out "Linux". Years ago I saw copies of Red Hat being sold at Costco but still remembered that the OS was offered "free". From somewhere I picked up the fact that Ubuntu was currently extremely prominent so I decided to go with that and haven't looked back since.

So now I'm a little bit more educated about the free software community and what that means. I know now that it is actually GNU/Linux. A big surprise was that I was using the GNU C/C++ compiler (minGW) for years without realizing what it was. I've started to get over the whole "use free software because it's free of cost" mentality. (The reason that I was using some software on Windows like VLC and minGW.)