My first real experience towards Linux was with Debian Sarge in 2005. Before that I had been mainly a Windows user – with a substantial desire to tweak things myself. Debian Sarge seemed to provide a nice way of doing many things but in reality it proved a bit too difficult. My 2005 self constantly struggled to get drivers and hardware working with Debian Sarge – and in the end the constant trouble led me to switch my operation system to Ubuntu. Overall, Ubuntu was good for me back in the days. I really loved Gnome 2 and the good old Nautilus file-manager, which was easy and customizable. It was probably around 2007 that I tried Debian again – this time it was Etch that got into my then current laptop. Debian Etch was a lot nicer experience for me than Debian Sarge had been. This time around I got everything running and things just worked. The problem that I encountered this time was with the software: Debian Stable was just too old for my needs. The software ran of course but it did not have feature x or y – and this was again something that drove me away from Debian.

Fast forward some years into 2011 and Debian Squeeze was out. Debian Squeeze was the first system that I actually started using, more or less, full-time. Having been into Ubuntu flavors I had already encountered the notorious distribution upgrade issues, which had left my system broken more than a few times. The experience with Squeeze was a smooth sail, which was probably due to, already, extensive experience with Linux. Back in 2011 it had already been six years since I last had ran Windows on my machines – since as a budget shopper I just could not get along with computers which came with Windows Vista or Windows 7 Starter or Windows 7 Home Basic editions. 2011 was also a significant year in the sense that it was around this time that I met a person who was at least as computer enthusiastic than I was. Together we started all shorts of tests with Arch Linux and Debian. In 2012 we once literally spent 13 hours cutting down the memory usage of Arch Linux. We ended up having a very efficient barebone system that used just about 59 megabytes when initially booted to desktop environment.

It was also during the year 2012 that I along with my computer enthusiastic friend and with one other person started talking about creating a Linux operation system. We came up with a name Longstride and the development was about to start. Things only lasted about two to three months and suddenly the development was no longer on the table. The traditional pattern happened: too much disagreement about the direction of the operation system – and in many sense too little commitment. Later, I concluded that it was a good thing that the initial project had failed since it gave me a some new perspectives and ideas to pursue.

Somewhere around the summer of 2012 I came to a conclusion that I should perhaps start a website, which would offer Linux and Unix related things to all who were interested. The original plan was to have only text and no images. However, in 2013 I got really interested about Gimp –  which I had already previously used to some extent- and in the end I found myself establishing an Online art gallery to my website. The years between 2013 to 2016 have been really busy.  During those three years I have been using Gentoo, Linux Mint, Fedora, Mageia and many other distributions when occasionally getting bored to Debian. As my skills have grown I have always somehow found myself going back to Debian base. In the end of 2014 I even started my own Debian based Linux distribution, which was then known as Audax Gnu/Linux and is now known as PostX Gnu/Linux. My motivation for continuing my explorations with Linux and Unix remains the same as it was eleven years ago when it all started: I still want to learn and develop my skills and it seems that the world of Linux and Unix provides me with infinite opportunities to do so. The great Ian Murdoc certainly did a great job starting the initial Debian project and who knows what the world of Linux would be today without his contributions. I at least suspect that my understanding and devotion to IT would be substantially different.