Greetings.
Introduction To Linux
I first got introduced to Linux while I was listening to a podcast on the bus ride back from Tennessee School for the Blind. I don’t remember exactly what distribution it was, but I did have remember that the gadget I was listening to the podcast on was running some variant of the Linux kernel, and had an honest to god terminal in it (which was unheard of for blindness PDAs at the time, or so I have been told).
With my interest piqued, I proceeded to install VMWare Fusion on the dormitory computer at TSB to try out Vinux. Unfortunately, this didn’t go too well, since the computer itself was ancient and took ages to open applications (we would boot the machine and go outside to play).
Fast forward a few months, and I finally got a computer of my own (an Acer of some sort). Still remembering my attempts to use Vinux, I had tried to boot a USB stick with it installed and learned a lot along the way, namely that BIOS can be quite the PITA from time to time, and the manufacturer instructions are sometimes inaccurate or flat out wrong. There were a lot of cool things about Vinux, namely the in-built accessibility enabled at startup and the relative ease of installation; the only fly in the ointment being that Ubuntu systems seem to have a problem of going belly up, especially going from version to version.
Fast forward a few (years? months? it’s been so long), and I came across the Sonar Project, chiefed by Jonathan Nadeau. It was there that I discovered Arch Linux, and proceeded to try that out and found the support and hardware to be a lot more reliable (although it was using Manjaro at the time). It was around that time that I came across my mentor and good friend, Storm Dragon and got to hanging out on his Mumble and IRC servers (either that or he was on Freenode, I don’t remember exactly). It was there that I got inspired to run a vanilla Arch machine of my own, along with trying out an OpenSUSE image a friend of ours had at the time. After a time, I got bored with Arch and branched out to Gentoo, which was quite difficult (I did have a running system on that old Acer for a few months before I borked it, and a few bragging rights during my high school technology course at the ATC).
Not much interesting happened thereafter; I went back to Arch, got an Alienware machine that was the bane of my existence for a few years, and discovered reproduceable configurations a few years ago. I guess the only points of interest after 2015 were my internship with F123 Consulting, where Storm and I worked on F123Light, which is now Stormux.
Emacs
I don’t remember how I got into Emacs. Maybe it was from the Linux course I took on EdX in 2014 or so, or perhaps it was something referenced on the program-l list, but I do remember my first experience trying to get the thing working.
I was in one of the GMU cafeterias with a friend of mine, and I had the idea of installing Emacs on my system and trying to get Emacspeak working. Unfortunately, this was when the docs weren’t as good (or my lack of experience, I’m not sure which was to blame), but we were having a whale of a time trying to get the espeak server to actually talk. After about five or so hours, we finally came across the realization that a package was missing and finally got something working. It was there that I discovered erc, the awesome Git tool magit (which I still use to this day, despite VC being a thing), and company (which I have since replaced with Corfu and a bit of hacked advice to make it work). From what I remember of my original configuration, I used a lot of the custom interface and very little elisp, save the bits I scraped off the internet and info pages. Miraculously, it got me through a few computer science courses and IT courses once I switched to that, but I did wind up defecting to some other tool for a while (NetBeans or some other behemoth of a program).
Around 2017 or so, I got the idea of trying out Vim for a semester while working with F123Light, from which the main takeaways being awesome modal editing (I remember relying a lot on yank inner quotes), and the efficiency of the terminal (coming off a few years of GNOME usage and running tintin in gnome-terminal), but there were a few things I missed from Emacs, namely the refined nature of Emacspeak and how it does completion (although perhaps the same ideas could be ported to vim or neovim, I haven’t tried it). It was at this time that I tried out the various frameworks, namely Prelude, Spacemacs, and Doom Emacs, eventually circling to a custom configuration that I have been using to this day (a few bankruptcies and forge migrations notwithstanding).
Other Stuff
when I’m not hacking on something, I’m generally playing games (Mistworld and Alter Aeon lately, though I’m trying to pick up Storm’s Doom interest also) or listening to music (I am quite eclectic, enjoying John Coltrane, Archspire, Yes, Gentle Giant, Jinjer, Dream Theater, …).
. Learning Guile scheme.