From Windows power gamer, to the ShellOwl

From the day I was born, I was a gamer. My father and grandpa are the main reasons for that. We played everything from card games, tabletop games to video games (starting with the C64). Till the day my grandpa died (age 100+) he was playing Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, Olympic Games on our N64 and even beat our asses in it from time to time. At some point I bought him his own N64 since he was "stealing" mine from my room in the middle of the night.

As a gamer on PC, Windows was the only really viable system if you wanted to play Triple-A games. So I stuck with that for many many years. I got glimpses of Linux when my father bought, yes bought, SuSE 5.2 including a book you could kill someone with.

As an IT-Technician my father knew his way around Linux and from my very young age he wanted me to understand how PC's work, which I must say he did a fine job. I didn't take Linux as serious at that time since I was more interested in gaming, but still learned a ton about it.

Fast forward to the time I completed school and needed to find a job as an apprentice. First choice for me was going my fathers path and becoming an IT-Technician.

In my apprenticeship I was "forced" to learn Linux once again since all Servers and Clients were running Linux. I enjoyed it very much, but it still had no place as my main system since I was still playing games in all the free time I had.

I was never able to graduate as an IT-Technician do to health problems and 2 years into it, it didn't get better. Do to my health issues I got fired and started to make another apprenticeship, this time as a Web-Developer.

Sadly my health status declined and I faced the same problem as before. As my health declined, so did my private situation and I was almost forced to move cities, which I did on my own terms a bit later on.

Now in a city I didn't know, with only my father around that I knew, I fled more and more into the online scene (mostly Reddit. It was at this point were my interested in Linux started to grow again due to the free time I had.

Thanks to Reddit, I came across many tutorials were I dipped my feet really deep into the world of Linux and especially Open Source. I started to understand why Open Source is so important and slowly but steady spent more time on my Linux partition than on my Windows one.

Finally the day arrived as Valve released Steam for Linux. I didn't even took a second glance which games were supported and ditched my Windows partition for good. This meant that I wasn't able to play with most my online "friends" anymore since we played games that weren't supported, but in my head I just didn't wanted to be a Microsoft slave anymore.

With Valve's Proton, GOG and HumbleBundle we Linux gamers have so many games to play that we probably don't find the time to give them all a fair try.

After all these years of looking back at it, I don't regret my switch at all. Linux games became more and more polished, bigger in numbers and with getting older, my desire of playing the newest games on day 1 became practically 0.

Linux not only taught my about the importance of Open Source, Privacy and being Independent but also brought me into a community that I don't want to miss. Many people that I met in the beginning, I still have contact with.

Thank you Linux.