about 5-6 years ago my father (who is pretty skilled with computing and electronics) put linux ubuntu on a laptop for me,told me it was better than windows! but i had no idea really what i was using. it just seemed a real smooth alternative to windows, it never seemed to crash and always did what i needed. My father tried explaining the terminal to me, but it simply went over my head at the time, all i needed was browser for youtube, google, facebook and maybe occcasionally download torrents- that was it just standard use. then after a cuple of years i got given a decent used laptop from a friend of the family which had windows so i just used that again.for 5 years or so.
fast forward to 2020. beginning of this year i bought a used 2009 apple macbook with siera10 and i decided to learn some programming (Python3) and bought Zed.A Shaw's "Learn python3 the hard way" . for those not farmiliar with "the learn the hard way series" it teaches you by 52 well crafted exercises, you drill them and drill them until it sinks in , boring but highly effective as it gets you doing work and grinding and you understand the concepts. The opening first chapter, actually chapter 0.... told me to use this thing on my mac called a bash terminal and drilled me in various commands, pwd, cd , ls, mkdir, rmdir, pushd, popd, date,cal. then from every chapter onwardsin the book you run your .py python code from the terminal by having to enter the command "python3 file_name.py"! I heard Zed A Shaw say in a podcast that the reason he began his book with terminal commands is because he actually wanted to teach people how to "control" their computer instead of sending them to a coding site with an online text editor, he throws you into the fire but you emerge more enlightened and wiser for it!
When Zed said he wanted to "tech people how to actually control their computer" this really made an impression on me. "The penny dropped" as they say! i had a light bulb moment where i realised every hacking scene from any movie- what they were doin was typing commands into a commandline...and all those years growing up i would see my father in his computer room tapping in endless commands into a black box with a flashing prompt, meticulously controlling his computer, getting the info he needed, scheduling the tasks he wanted done.....it all made sense to me!!!!! I realsied the commandline wasnt about showing off how nerdy one is on a computer, its actually a highly efficient way of managing and controlling your system.
I then just began trying to use my terminal for as much as i could, shutting down, starting up programs ect. Then i did some reading and found my mac was unix based and some of my commmands would work in linux. Next thing i did was download a virtual box and start playing with linux distros. after distro hopping around in virtual box i just bit the bullet and decided to install a dual boot on my mac laptop. I began running linux mint....and i absolutely love linux. I had unconsciously in to contact with linux a few times over the years but never really "got it" or understood why poeple used this system. The commandline gave me the gateway to that understanding of why people used this system.
I have been loving it that much I am practicing commands most days trying to increase my knowledge and im currently working through Paul Cobaut's awesome free book series called 'Master linux'. His books are similar to that of Zed A shaw's "Learn python3 the hard way" it is full of pratical exercises (this method seems to work well for me) that you follow along with your commandline linux system and do the work! his 6 books consist of fundamentals, system administration ,servers, networking, storage and security. I found out about these books on a reddit forum and somebody said if you study these books for a year or so and work your way through them you will know more about linux than you ever dreamed!!! And as somebody who spent many hours watching linux related youtube vids and reading linux related articles, these free books are by far the best learning resource ive stumbled upon and theyre all absolutely free thanks to the awesome work of paul cobauts.
Here's link to the free books in case any ones interested in that resource:
I havnt even used my mac operating system for a cuple of months, i just use linux (mint at the present) everyday now and cant see me going back! its just too fun and there will always be something to learn. The community that supports linux seems great everybody seems to want to help each other which seems really inline with the whole idea of free and open source software.
I feel im definately on the correct path as i begun wanting to learn some python and simple programming for fun, now im running one of the best operating systems in the world and hopefully in the future have opportunity to potentially contribute to software developement and free open source software. I feel linux has breathed some fresh life into me , im really enjoying studying and learning more about this phenomemon "Linux" which goes far beyond just "free" software but represents "freedom" in a much deeper sense.