Beginner

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. ...

Here is how privacy works today. You read the policy. You dismiss the cookie banner. You hunt through three settings menus for the opt-out toggle that someone deliberately buried. You do this to exercise a right that should have been the default. And while you are still on the first paragraph of the terms of service, every click, scroll, hover, and the exact timing of your keystrokes has already been harvested, packaged, and sold. We have accepted this as normal. ...

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. Train hit a tunnel, WiFi blinked, connection gone. The process running on the other end went with it. I sat there staring at a dead prompt wondering how much of the migration had actually committed. A terminal multiplexer would have saved me. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection becomes a non-event. I reconnect, reattach, and the work is exactly where I left it. That property alone is worth the setup cost, and it’s why I treat a multiplexer as part of the base layer on every machine I touch. ...

My homelab cluster runs in a closet at home. I do not. I work from coffee shops, from a client office, sometimes from a hotel with WiFi that feels actively hostile. And I still want to reach my own machines while I’m out there. For years the standard answer to that was to poke holes in your own front door. Forward a port on the router, wire up dynamic DNS so the changing home IP doesn’t break everything, write firewall rules, and then sit with the quiet hope that nobody scanning the internet stumbles onto the SSH daemon you just exposed. It works, in the sense that you can reach your stuff. It also means a part of your private network is now answering questions from strangers, all day, forever. ...

Here is how most of us ship software in 2026. You pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and your service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does a single useful thing. Nobody profiles it. Nobody asks why. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time is expensive, and the bill goes to someone else. We’ve accepted this as normal. I used to live in a different world. I’d spend hours, sometimes whole weekends, squeezing every last byte out of code. Getting a program to run on hardware that “couldn’t possibly” handle it was the best feeling I knew. My inspiration was the demoscene: impossible visual effects rendered in 64 kilobytes or less. I’d watch one and just sit there asking myself, how on earth did they do that? ...