My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s been using Windows his entire 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, friends, family and colleagues have asked me the same thing in different shapes. “I want to get off Windows, but I don’t know where to start.” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these questions seem obvious. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you had to specifically pick hardware components that actually had Linux drivers. To someone who’s never seen a terminal, they feel genuinely daunting.
And I get it. Search for “Linux” online and you’re immediately 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 great at deep technical content and terrible at saying “come on in, the water’s fine.”
So here’s the thing I want you to picture 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 world already exists. Most people just don’t know they’re allowed into it.
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 actually own their computing experience. Not only the people running production clusters.
So this blog is changing. The deep technical content stays. I’m expanding it to genuinely welcome people who are just starting out.
Why now?
Three things converged.
First, the questions kept coming. Not from random internet strangers, but from people in my life. 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. These are smart people who can clearly learn this. They just need someone to meet them where they are.
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 buried in a sea of Kubernetes deep dives and eBPF networking posts, with no way for a newcomer to surface them.
That second point is worth sitting with, because the cost is bigger than it looks. A beginner lands on the blog, sees a wall of words like “etcd” and “Cilium,” and quietly concludes this place isn’t for them. The content that would actually help them is two clicks away, but they never take the clicks. They close the tab and go back to Windows. The barrier was never the material. It was the wayfinding.
Third, and this matters most: Linux has genuinely become ready for everyone. The days of hand-editing xorg.conf and compiling your own wifi drivers are gone. Fedora, Linux Mint and openSUSE work out of the box. The technical barrier has collapsed. What’s left is an informational one. People don’t know where to start, and when they go looking, they drown.
A tag system to find your level
I want the “buried in Kubernetes posts” problem to stop being a problem. So I’ve added a simple tag system across all 64 posts on this blog. Every post now carries two new dimensions.
Skill level
| Tag | Your level | Example posts |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner | New to Linux, exploring, curious | GPG guide, Learn the Defaults, Terminal Multiplexing |
| Intermediate | Comfortable with the terminal, running your own servers | ArgoCD for Beginners, K3s Cluster Setup |
| Advanced | Platform engineer, designing resilient distributed systems | etcd Deep Dive, Chaos Engineering |
Context
| Tag | What you’re doing | Example posts |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop | Using Linux as your daily driver | Dotfile Management, Terminal Multiplexing |
| Server | Running services, homelab, self-hosting | K3s Cluster Setup, Backup Strategy |
| Platform | Kubernetes at scale, platform engineering | Cilium Deep Dive, Internal Developer Platform |
Click any tag to see all posts at that level or in that context. Start with Beginner if you’re new, and work your way up as you get comfortable.
The path is the same, the depth is different
Here’s something 25+ years of Linux taught me. The route from “curious beginner” to “running production infrastructure” isn’t a set of disconnected jumps. It’s one continuous road.
You install Linux on a spare laptop. You learn the terminal basics. You start tweaking your dotfiles. You stand up a small server. You containerise something. 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 worthwhile in the first place. You want to understand 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 control than one that controls you.
That’s why sovereignty is more than a fancy label for “I run my own servers.” It starts with choosing an operating system that respects you, where every setting is inspectable, every process is visible, and every decision is yours. The 70-year-old installing Mint and the engineer wiring up multi-cluster networking are standing on the same road, at different mile markers.
What’s coming
I’ll be writing more for people at the start of this road. 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 tag system will help you find what’s relevant to you.
The same philosophy, for everyone
So why hasn’t everyone already switched? I won’t pretend the obstacles aren’t 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. That reputation was earned once, and it lingers long after it stopped being true.
But the gap between “what is” and “what could be” is small now, and it’s closeable. My neighbour doesn’t need to become a sysadmin. He needs a working desktop, a friendly starting point, and someone to tell him the basic questions aren’t stupid. The engineer designing Kubernetes architectures and the retiree installing Mint want the same thing underneath: to understand what they’re running, to control their own systems, and to not depend on companies that don’t have their interests at heart.
I’ve used Linux since you had to buy a specific graphics card and network adapter just to get a working system. My neighbour booting a USB stick into a full desktop in fifteen minutes is remarkable progress. The remaining gap isn’t technical anymore. It’s that people don’t know this option exists, or they think it’s not for them.
It is for them. It’s for everyone.
Use the tags, find your level, and start wherever you are. If you’ve got a question you think is too basic, it isn’t. Send it my way. The best content on this blog has always come from real questions from real people.