How did you get started?

I started in backtrack linux back when it was penetration testing with backtrack. Kali replaced it a few years later.

Crazy time in my life I had never even seen linux before and signed up for the course. I put myself in a position where I could pay rent, pay for internet, buy bread and cheese. Other than going to work that is all I did for 3 months straight but it changed my life.

I enjoyed the course so much I repeated it last year although lots has changed since then.
 
My one uncle introduced me to Ubuntu many moons ago, think back in 2005.
Been live-booting that CD for many years to play some games, but started really picking up pace in high-school, when I got myself a Raspberry Pi Model B, 512MB. Think it's in the cupboard. Been dabbling with Kali a while, and some other OSes, but mainly Ubuntu.

My main personal daily driver is Kubuntu, for building Canonical snap packages, and maintain the odd image of Ubuntu Core (IoT OS) for the company that I work for.
Sadly, I can't really daily-drive linux for work, because of Microsoft not having their Visual Studio on Linux, as well as MS Word, etc, many development tools is Windows based only.

I dual-boot MsWindows and Linux on my personal laptop, for the sake of my sanity.
I plan to get a Thinkpad, and just load Kubuntu on it, with Coreboot as bootloader.
Been compiling a few kernels, and also ported OpenWRT to a Fortinet based wireless AP.
I even built a Buildroot OS, that can flash a disk image to a SSD or other target disk, that boots in 5-10 seconds flat.

Have a quite a few hardwares in my home, with device X running Ubuntu core, and device Y running Ubuntu, etc.

I'd recommend that if you spin up a VM for keeping your environment clean, such as building a snap or compiling something, then you could use Multipass. Handy tool, I use it regularly to keep my machine clean of cross-compiling toolchains, etc.
Will also look at some time at Docker, but last time I used it, it bit me on the ass. Had to wipe the OS and reinstall. Docker contaminates everything. Best to keep it inside a VM.
 
Played with Redhat in the 90's.
Worked professionally on Sun Solaris and Sinix (Siemens Unix).
For the past 12 years I'm working mostly on SLES based solutions.
 
2008 after high school with a copy of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, i dont remember how i obtained it but after that i learned most distros ship discs for free. I requested a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 after that, then OpenSolaris(beautiful OS), then I became a long time user of OpenSuSE from about 2010 till 2013 when i had a demanding career that took me away from computers. Now i went back to school and in my final year of IT. I have been using the same Fedora installation since i bought this laptop in 2020. Never did a reinstall since

edit: Linux forums used to be very toxic back then, i remember when Novell was acquired, the SuSE community was chaotic, Mark Shuttleworth was a blogger and would always get hate for every post he made. Microsoft's involvement in Mono was seen as a trojan horse. Now things are much better, largely thanks to Satya Nadella, big corporations are no longer seen as the enemy.
 
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Late 90s @ Wits. IT mates of mine introduced me to debian and redhat. From there, I rode down the GNU/linux ribbon hole (suse, arch, slackware, LUGs, mailing lists, kernel recompiles, geek meetups, etc.). I really fell in love with redhat :love:

I still want to try out Linux From Scratch and spend a bit of time on BSD.
 
Scary_Turtle said:
I started in backtrack linux back when it was penetration testing with backtrack. Kali replaced it a few years later.

Crazy time in my life I had never even seen linux before and signed up for the course. I put myself in a position where I could pay rent, pay for internet, buy bread and cheese. Other than going to work that is all I did for 3 months straight but it changed my life.

I enjoyed the course so much I repeated it last year although lots has changed since then.
Click to expand...
Try Harder will forever be imprinted on your mind.
 
neoprema said:
Try Harder will forever be imprinted on your mind.
Click to expand...

Haha, that's for sure.

I still can't believe how hard oscp is and it's the basics of ethical hacking. Heres a few notes and a network go figure out the rest, not even Google has the answers.

Makes a degree seem pretty easy in comparison.

Not going to lie the second time round with 10 years in the industry it was a cake walk for the exam.

But there are some serious challenges when you get into some of the "secret" networks
 
Scary_Turtle said:
Haha, that's for sure.

I still can't believe how hard oscp is and it's the basics of ethical hacking. Heres a few notes and a network go figure out the rest, not even Google has the answers.

Makes a degree seem pretty easy in comparison.

Not going to lie the second time round with 10 years in the industry it was a cake walk for the exam.

But there are some serious challenges when you get into some of the "secret" networks
Click to expand...
It’s like that by design. When muts created it his goal was to differentiate it from anything else out there and he did. Many new players have caught up, some maybe even doing better - but I’ve never met a person come out of an OSCP without some kind of sweat lol.
 
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