Terminally in Love: Two Decades of Linux, One Shell at a Time

👋 The Beginning

It all started in 2005 — RHEL 3.0 and Oracle 8.x were the giants of the day.I wasn’t just installing software — I was absorbing a way of life. I still remember setting up BIND (probably Redhat 9 (not EL)) and attending a demo at Indian Air Force HQ, Subroto Park, New Delhi. My uniform had changed. But my mindset remained tactical — observe, adapt, deploy.

Back then, there was no Stack Overflow, no YouTube how-tos. Just man pages, printed guides, and logs. And somehow, that made the learning stick deeper.

🧠 What Made Linux Stick?

Simple. The terminal felt like home.
Every dmesg, every tail -f /var/log/messages, every stubborn NIC issue — I lived through it, solved it, and learned from it.

I wasn’t chasing certs (though I earned my RHCE 4 in Dec 2005). I was chasing clarity — why a service failed, why a bootloader broke, how to recover from a corrupted /etc/fstab at 2 AM without breaking a sweat.

🧰 My Toolkit Has Changed, But Not My Spirit

Over 20 years, the tools evolved:

From init.d to systemd

From ipchains to nftables

From hand-edited xorg.conf to Wayland debates

From legacy partitions to LVM, and now ZFS experiments

And yet, I still enjoy firing up a terminal in a fresh VM more than any fancy web dashboard.

I’ve played with:

Docker, Podman, and LXC

Ansible, Terraform, and even ShellGPT recently

Monitoring stacks like Nagios → Zabbix → Prometheus + Grafana

Built my own VM lab, sometimes more powerful than bare-metal servers

🤕 A Pause, Not an End

In between, life threw a curveball. A stroke. Partial speech disability. And yet, I’m still here — typing, building, debugging, and now... sharing.

If anything, it made me more in love with Linux. The silence of the shell, the logic of grep, the clarity of top, they all became my recovery zone.

❤️ The Love Story Continues

Now I’m writing from a Ajman, UAE. A simple room. But inside it? A world of Linux boxes humming in virtual labs, prompt engineering experiments, and that same curiosity from 2005.

Two decades in — and I’m still terminally in love.

💬 Let me know if this story resonates. And if you're just starting your Linux journey, remember: you don’t need to master everything. Just don’t stop exploring the man pages.

Thanks for reading — feel free to drop a comment or connect if Linux has shaped your story too