User:DJ L

DJ Lucas -- St. Louis, MO, USA

Bio

I started messing with Linux as a curiosity in the summer of 1995 and tried every ISO I could get my hands on. I loved the concept of open source software, though at the time I had no programming knowledge beyond BASIC on an Apple IIe (and absolutely no idea what I was looking at in source code anyway). DVD playback, specifically the LiVid project (a couple of years later), was what captured my interest in building from source.

It wasn't long until I found something fundamentally wrong with every distro I had tried. I found that I was never really happy with design choices of traditional distributions (and to this day, I'm still not) which eventually led me to Linux from Scratch. I've worked both with, and on LFS and BLFS development teams since around mid 2000. Unfortunately, I no longer do so due to lack of free time (responsibilities have piled up with age and family), but I still monitor the project and contribute occasionally. Arch Linux was (and remains) a good resource for source based distributions due to the clear, concise instructions contained in PKGBUILD files, and Pacman is a logical choice for package management for any like distros. This is ultimately what led me to Arch, which I've been using as my daily driver since late 2013, though I had been using Pacman for (I'm guessing) nearly two years before I ever gave Arch a partition to live on for any length of time.

In addition to my preference for Pacman, I have worked with many Arch developers over the years on common problems with our respective distros and it has always been without animosity (save for a maybe a little 'my distro is better than yours' in jest only). For these reasons, Arch was a clear choice for me. It is still my daily driver, and will continue to be for some time to come I'd imagine. Arch is certainly not perfect, nor has any other ever been, but it has provided a very happy median between the time sink of a completely source based 'roll your own' and a modern binary distribution, that is both fully functional while still allowing unlimited customization. The simplicity of Arch/Pacman has allowed me to create something really close to my idea of the perfect distribution.

My day job includes mostly Windows work for sites with as little as two users to as many as 1200. As it so happens, my background makes me the goto AIX, Linux, SCO, UX, anything-else-not-windows-or-mac guy (even VMS, despite the obvious error in association there), hence the focus on Samba/Active Directory domain controller and SOGo which I maintain in the wiki. I support RHEL, CentOS, and Ubuntu production servers on a regular basis, though far fewer than Windows boxen. Though my free time for enthusiast Linux user is limited, interop will likely continue be my focus for Arch Wiki in the future. So, anyway, that's me!