I’m curious—what’s been your best interaction with Linux? Whether it’s a specific distro, a killer feature, or just a moment when Linux impressed you, I’d love to hear your stories!
Which Linux distro were you using?
What feature or aspect made the experience stand out?
Did it change the way you use Linux or tech in general?
Looking forward to your responses!
I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.
I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (1GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.
Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they’d get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.
For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.
Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp…lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!
Linux was the wild west back then.