My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s used Windows his whole life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?”
He’s not the first. Over the past year I’ve had the same question from friends, family and colleagues, each in their own shape. “I want to get off Windows, but where do I start?” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these are easy questions. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you picked your hardware by whether a Linux driver existed for it. If you’ve never seen a terminal, they’re not easy at all.
And I get it. Search for “Linux” and you’re buried under distro comparisons, desktop environment flamewars, and terminal commands that look like someone fell asleep on their keyboard. The Linux community has a reputation problem. We’re very good at deep technical content. We’re terrible at saying “come on in, the water’s fine.”
Picture this instead. My neighbour boots a USB stick, clicks through an installer that looks like every other installer he’s ever used, and fifteen minutes later he has a working desktop. No driver hunting. No config files. His browser, his email, his photos. A computer that does what he tells it and nothing he didn’t ask for. That’s Linux Mint today, on most laptops. He didn’t know that, and nobody had told him.
This blog has always pointed at platform engineering, Kubernetes, and self-hosted infrastructure. Content for people who already live in the terminal. But the philosophy underneath everything I write, sovereignty over convenience, understanding over blind trust, applies to anyone who wants to understand their own computer. Not only the people running production clusters.
So this blog is changing. The Kubernetes posts stay. I’m making room for people who are on their first install.
What changed this year
Three things came together.
First, the questions kept coming. From people I know, not from strangers on a forum. My neighbour. A colleague who’s fed up with Windows telemetry. A friend who wants to self-host her photos and doesn’t know where to begin. They can learn this. What they’re missing is a starting point that assumes nothing.
Second, I looked at this blog and noticed something. There’s already a pile of posts that work fine for beginners. GPG explained, Pass as a password manager, Learn the Defaults, terminal multiplexing. None of these need a computer science degree. But they sat between the Kubernetes deep dives and the eBPF networking posts, and nothing told a newcomer which ones were theirs.
That costs more than it looks. A beginner lands on the blog, sees titles full of “etcd” and “Cilium ,” and quietly decides this place isn’t for them. The GPG guide is two clicks away. They never take the clicks. Tab closed, and Windows is still there. I’d written the right posts and filed them where nobody new would ever look.
Third, and this one weighs the most. Linux is ready for everyone now. Hand-editing xorg.conf and compiling your own wifi drivers, that’s over. Fedora, Linux Mint and openSUSE work out of the box. The install stopped being the hard part years ago. Finding out where to start is the hard part, and when people go looking, they drown.
Two ways to find your level
So I refiled the whole blog. All 66 posts now say how much you need to know before you start, and the ones that are specifically desktop or server work say which of the two they are.
Difficulty has its own taxonomy
Difficulty started as three tags sitting in the same cloud as Networking and Secrets, competing with them for the same click. It has its own taxonomy now, level, and every post carries exactly one of the three terms. The term measures what you already need to know, so a Beginner post about an advanced subject stays Beginner.
| Level | What it assumes | Posts | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | A terminal and nothing else | 18 | GPG guide, Learn the Defaults, Terminal Multiplexing |
| Intermediate | You have run the thing in question at least once | 24 | ArgoCD for Beginners, K3s Cluster Setup |
| Advanced | You run it in production and want the parts that bite | 24 | etcd Deep Dive, Chaos Engineering |
Context stayed a tag
Where you run Linux is a subject like any other, so it stays in the tag cloud with the rest of them.
| Tag | What you’re doing | Posts | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop | Using Linux as your daily driver | 11 | Dotfile Management, Terminal Multiplexing |
| Server | Running services, homelab, self-hosting | 8 | K3s Cluster Setup, Backup Strategy |
There was a third context tag, Platform, and I deleted it. It had landed on 59% of the posts. Click it and you got most of the blog back, which tells you nothing. If that scale is what you came for, the honest filter is Advanced, or the category for the subject you actually want.
Start at Beginner if you’re new, and move up when the introductions start boring you.
The path is the same, the depth is different
Here’s what 25+ years of Linux taught me about that ladder. There’s no jump in it.
You install Linux on a laptop you had lying around. You learn the terminal basics. You start poking at your dotfiles. You stand up a small server. You put something in a container. One day you’re running Kubernetes and you can’t quite point to the moment it stopped being scary. Each step rests on the one before it.
The values that make a good platform engineer are the same ones that make switching to Linux worth it in the first place. You want to know what your computer is doing. You refuse to let “it just works” quietly mean “you have no idea what it’s doing behind your back.” You’d rather run a system you can open up.
That’s why sovereignty is more than a fancy label for “I run my own servers.” It starts with an operating system that respects you, where you can open every setting and see every process. My neighbour installing Mint and an engineer wiring up multi-cluster networking are making the same choice. One of them just has more YAML.
What’s coming
I’ll be writing more for people at the start. Not “install Ubuntu in 5 minutes” content, there’s plenty of that already. I want to write about the things that actually trip people up:
- How to think about choosing a distribution (and why it matters less than you think)
- Why the terminal is more efficient than it looks once it stops being scary
- Managing your files, photos and documents without cloud services
- Privacy and security basics that everyone should know
- Setting up your first home server
These sit alongside the existing platform engineering content, and the level terms will point you at the ones written for you.
The same philosophy, for everyone
So why hasn’t everyone switched already? Because the obstacles are real. People have software that only ships for Windows. They’ve built fifteen years of muscle memory into one operating system. They’ve been told, often by us, that Linux means a weekend of fighting their graphics card. We earned that reputation ourselves. It was true when I started. It’s still doing damage.
My neighbour doesn’t need to become a sysadmin, though. He needs a working desktop and someone to tell him his questions aren’t stupid. The engineer and the retiree want the same thing underneath. They want to know what their machine is doing, and they don’t want to ask a company’s permission to find out.
I started on Linux when you bought a specific graphics card and network adapter just to get a working system. My neighbour can boot a USB stick into a full desktop in fifteen minutes. What’s left is that people don’t know this exists, or assume it isn’t for them.
Pick a level, pick a tag, and start where you are. And if you’ve got a question you think is too basic, send it anyway. My neighbour’s question is why this post exists.