In an earlier post I noted that my foray into Linux began when I started an intensive program in network administration, etc back in 2000. That’s not precisely true. That course did not teach me anything about Linux. I don’t even recall it being mentioned. What it did teach me was Unix. Sun Solaris Unix, to be precise, running on a Sun Sparc server (rest their souls). Linux came along a bit later.
It seems like people have jumping on the ChromeOS bandwagon in droves since the first Chromebooks debuted in 2011. The draw, as I understand it, was that the laptops were small and inexpensive and required little knowledge of computing. Boot it up, create a Google account (if you didn’t already have one), and go. Schools and even businesses bought into the ecosystem quickly. Today many schools are almost entirely connected using Chromebooks and often students are given a Chromebook for them to take home and use.
Somewhere back around 2011 or 2012 I moved from my ISP’s email service to Microsoft Office 365 Business plan that offered access to MS Exchange server. I had previously toyed with using Gmail’s services with my own domain name but didn’t find that it met my specific needs. Too, I really didn’t have a great love for Gmail.
My motivation for moving, as I recall now more than a dozen years later, is that I was starting my doctoral studies and needed to be able to coordinate more easily with classmates, access calendars and documents across multiple platforms, and generally have better control over my workflows. I was already using Microsoft Office for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, and was looking for an integrated solution that would allow me to plan and execute my work more easily. After playing around with several solutions I finally settled on Office 365.
My journey with Linux started in the summer of 2020 when I enrolled in an intensive course in IT designed for a specific ISP (which no longer exists). The course was provide through a state university in cooperation with that company and in conjunction with a state level push to encourage tech companies to settle in Georgia. I ended up not taking a job with that company. While was at the top of my class, the company decided not to extend an employment offer to me and so I moved on. In retrospect, I think that was probably a good decision and the guys that were in the class with me all left that company and, honestly, I’m not sure where most of them landed. Despite that, the class was still one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences I’ve had. And, I left it with fairly sound skillsets in networking, programming (C and Perl, primarily), web development and graphics (which I still suck at).
Over the last ten years there have been a couple of preferences that have driven many of my technology decisions. One is a preference for using plain text rather than proprietary software. The other is a preference for flat files over databases.
My move toward plain text came about for several reasons.
First, I just wanted to take notes that I could quickly create and reference as needed.