User:Syscrusher

Hello, Arch community, from a newcomer as of 2024-06.

My second sysadmin job (after Novell Netware) was on DEC ULTRIX in the 1990s, and I discovered Linux soon after that and began running it on my home PC. By 1999 I had sneaked Linux into the workplace, running it on an old spare PC in my office and using my company-issued Windows laptop as an X11 terminal while I did my programming on Linux. During Y2K I oversaw several ULTRIX and HP-UX servers that never even hiccupped.

In 2000 I moved to a company that was (and is) a leader in Linux on IBM mainframes [*], including creating our own mainframe port of CentOS. I'm part of a team that has designed network operations centers (NOCs) for large enterprises (including both the physical facilities and the IT tooling and processes around them). Our company is not large, so in my "copious spare time" I was the IT Team lead for about 12 years, administering a few hundred Linux servers, plus designing and implementing our data center networks. Now I work in 3D interactive development, using Unreal Engine, Blender, and other game development tools for engineering, simulation, and training applications.

Desktop Linux is, ironically, somewhat new to me, because headless servers don't usually have a graphical desktop. Customer requirements forced me to boot commercial operating systems on my workstation until recently, but now I'm able to do all of my work in Linux and have returned to my preferred operating system. Debian has been my go-to distro for servers, but I chose Arch for my new mobile workstation. Arch's rolling updates make it easier to deploy the most recent graphics drivers and tools (which I need in my current job). Also, after 25+ years in Linux, I wanted to "step up" with a new technical challenge of doing more installation and sysadmin myself instead of relying on pre-built solutions.

The community here has been amazingly helpful, and the ArchWiki is a magnificent collective work for both introductory and detailed documentation. ArchLinux makes you RTFM, but the "M" is worth the "R".

[*] If you like not having the ancient "jiffie" timer in the Linux kernel to guzzle CPU cycles, you can thank the mainframe community for that. Mainframes are optimized for throughput, not latency, and the "jiffie" timer was destroying kernel performance when a mainframe tried to run hundreds (or thousands -- and yes, it can!) of Linux virtual machines at once.