Hello, everyone! I’m cpt. Alan from Astana, Kazakhstan (Central Asia)! I studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Utah, as well as Business&Marketing at british DeMontfort University. I work in “Kazakhstan GIS Center” maintaining a CentOS based militech equipment and I consult fullstack teams as architect as well.
I am sorta POSIX-enthusiast since like 5 y.o., so Linux has as much space in my heart as BSD/Darwin and GNU/Hurd do. I use x11-forwarding to my Macbook with xQuartz daily, and run SSH sessions to my Android phone, VPS and homeserver concurrently, so Wayland is not even implementable in my work or hobby life, I am hard-wired to ability to stream drawcalls instead of fullscreen VNC which I hate and despise.
My story started in childhood, although I had neither liberty nor ability to install or try out systems (did not even have internet until 2011). I read about hardware, operating systems and even existence of internet from books made in early 2000’s. Although I’ve read about RHEL as my first ever non-Windows OS, what really stuck with me (because of logo and naming) was the Mandriva Linux, featured in the CIS-region’s local hardware journal CHIP (was and still is in Russian):
I had this journal for years until we started moving here and there with parents. This exact journal, monthly, would include CD/DVD disks with freeware and freemium soft. That exact journal had a disk with whole bootable and installable Mandriva linux of that time. I could never imagine that after all the years of reading about POSIX, UNIX, x11, RHEL and stuff - I would have a disk with Mandriva Linux distro in my hands. I was a kid and never lived up to a dream of installing and trying it, and until 2026 it was long forgotted unresolved childhood mission.
Additionally, at the time books and journals somewhat frequently featured the RHEL back in the day as a go-to way for realiable experience for corporate Linux work. I used to spare money gifted by elders and relatives to sit hours in Internet Caffee’s and just stare mesmerized at Google Pictures like these:
Dark red stuff, KDE and other things imprinted on me so hard, that I use “darkblood” theme for Oh-My-Zsh everywhere, from Android Termux to my VPS, Macbook, WSL and OpenMandriva too. This also shaped my heavy inclination towards RHEL-alike systems and derivatives, although it wasn’t as heavy at first. Just something that came gradually over 2 decades.
In 9th grade, I first tried Ubuntu and Linux Mint as my distros, based solely on a quick articles made for Windows and “lame guys” with little OS multi-boot experience, but both generated unbearable amount of disgust back in 2015, so I didn’t even use them for a week.
Linux, evidently, has a lot of choice and distros, but I want something good looking, easy to install, easy to use and something like a “default nobrainer”. After long hours of weighting pros and cons, I picked Fedora, since it was the default go-to of Linus Torvalds himself (he hates Debian & Nvidia btw), thus “Fedora it is!”.
Still, over the years, Fedora was less and less dependable and stable, I couldn’t really comprehend why. And then on Youtube I discovered thing many newcomers know too - Lunduke Journal, which was the only Linux-centered one-man-media I’ve ever seen, which laughable and intriguing titles. I’ve seen so many videos about BlackRock, DEI, IBM, RedHat and xOrg Foundation takeover I was heartbroken, until videos about Enrico Weigelt started coming, and in one of them he featured OpenMandriva as pioneer distro to implement newly liberated x11 fork.
Out of all distros I’ve never heard of prior, like Artix or Devuan, OpenMandriva has stuck to me - a really OLD childhood dream, long forgotten, once surfaced - to see a live real Mandriva boot in front of me on my desk.
I had a great pleasure pulling the Cooker release that had xLibre and KDE Plasma 6 inside. After removing the KWalletd and KSecretd that crashed x-server constantly, I got a reliable dependable machine I spent Nowruz holidays with. I’ll be removing Fedora from my main home desktop soon to get a similar config.
Thus far, I guess, welcome me to the community.
