Some people find Linux through university computer science courses, or through a job that demands it. I found it the long way round — through a thousand hours of an online game, a global pandemic, two kids, and a dead laptop from 2010.
A Tool I Never Understood#
I grew up on computers the way most kids my age did — not studying them, just living inside them. My teenage years were consumed almost entirely by Tibia, an MMORPG that ate time in the best possible way. I logged thousands of hours, met people from Poland, Brazil, Sweden, and a dozen other countries, and built friendships that have lasted twenty years. Some of those people I eventually met in person. Most I still speak to today.
But for all the time I spent at a computer, I understood nothing about how it actually worked. The terminal was something from a James Bond film — mysterious, vaguely threatening, the domain of hackers in dark rooms. I knew the basics: don’t download things from sites you don’t trust, don’t accept files from strangers. Beyond that I had no curiosity about what was underneath. It was a tool. I used it. That was enough.
For a long time, that was fine.
The Pandemic and the Window#
Fast forward to 2020. I had two young children, a physical job in a sector deemed essential, and a front row seat to something I hadn’t expected — the realisation that I wanted a different kind of freedom.
While the world stopped, I kept going to work. Same location, same hours, same physical constraints. And around me I watched people transition to working from home, building routines around their families, their lives becoming more portable in a way mine simply wasn’t. I hadn’t known I wanted that until I saw it. A job tied to a specific place at a specific time suddenly felt like something worth questioning.
I didn’t know what I was going to do about it yet. But something had shifted.
What My Kids Changed#
Having children reframes everything, including your relationship with technology.
I thought about the hours I had spent as a teenager on the internet — the friendships, the languages, the cultures, the genuine education that came from being connected to people around the world. I wanted that for my kids. But I also wanted them to understand what they were using, not just consume it passively. The internet had given me a lot. It had also taught me early that it could take things away if you weren’t careful.
We home educate our three children, which means technology isn’t just something they use — it’s part of the environment we’re deliberately building for them. That responsibility sharpened my thinking. If I was going to help them navigate it well, I needed to understand it properly myself. And the more I looked, the more I realised how much genuinely good education is available online for free, to anyone willing to look for it. That became part of the philosophy. Not just for me — for them.
The Career Landscape I Didn’t Know Existed#
I had already started dipping into general education through a tuition benefit at work — not because I had a plan, but because I enjoyed learning and the resource was there. I took subjects like biology and chemistry, partly out of curiosity and partly to figure out what stuck. They didn’t. But ruling things out is its own kind of progress, and the experience helped me move in other directions with more clarity. I figured building foundations in different subjects would be worthwhile whenever I eventually worked out where I wanted to go. Then a conversation with a friend who worked as a web developer pointed me somewhere I hadn’t looked before.
He pointed me towards coding, and while the idea interested me I never felt the pull of it the way he did. Writing web applications wasn’t where my instincts went. But the conversation sent me down a rabbit hole of my own — and what I found there surprised me. Networking, security, systems administration, cloud infrastructure. Jobs I had never considered because I had never known they existed. My mental image of IT work was someone fixing computers, like a mechanic fixes cars. The reality was something far wider and more interesting, and the more I looked the more I found corners of it that actually matched how I think.
What struck me most was what he said about routes in. Many people working in IT — particularly in technical roles — had built their way there through competence and demonstrable skill rather than a specific degree. A portfolio, a certification, a GitHub full of real work. The door wasn’t locked the way I had assumed. That was the moment the lightbulb went on. I wanted to work in IT. I just had to figure out where exactly I fit.
Why Linux#
My first encounter with Linux was at eleven years old, trying to download Tibia. The installer page offered two options — Windows or Linux. I clicked Windows without a second thought and got on with my life. I saw that word for years without ever wondering what it meant.
Twenty years later it appeared again in my CompTIA A+ studies, this time alongside terms like open source, distributions, and community. And something clicked. Not just that Linux existed — I had always known that — but what it represented. An operating system that wasn’t trying to sell me a subscription. That could run on hardware Microsoft had written off years ago. That was transparent, auditable, and owned by nobody and everybody at the same time.
I had been quietly irritated for a while by the direction Windows was heading — the pop-ups, the forced updates, the quiet assumption that my files lived on Microsoft’s servers by default. Linux offered something different. Control. Ownership. Honesty about what it was.
I started in a virtual machine on Windows, experimenting with installs, enjoying the process even when it went wrong. Then I took it further. I had an old Acer Aspire 5749 from 2010 sitting dead in a cupboard — couldn’t log into Windows, couldn’t remember the password, hadn’t touched it in years. I ordered a new battery, a new charger, and a replacement keyboard. Replaced what needed replacing, flashed Linux onto it, and watched something I had written off come back to life.
That laptop now runs Zorin OS. It is my son’s daily machine.
That was it for me. Not just the fact that it worked — but what the whole experience meant. Free software, publicly documented, kept alive by a global community of people who believed that good tools should be available to everyone. That matched something I already believed. It still does.
Where This Is Going#
None of this has a tidy ending yet. I am studying for CompTIA Network+ while working full time, building a homelab in the hours I can find, and writing about it here because the Linux community gave freely to me and it seems right to give something back.
The goal is a career that gives me the freedom to work from wherever my family needs to be — we have roots in both the UK and the US, and location flexibility matters. A career in Linux systems administration or security engineering would offer that. Whether I start at an IT helpdesk, a SOC, or somewhere else entirely, I am not precious about the entry point. I know where I want to get to.
The long way round is still a way there.