Red Hat 4.1 on the factory floor
The year was 1997, and I was working in IT at a manufacturing plant.
It was the usual sort of unglamorous IT grind: clearing printer jams, reinstalling temperamental Windows 95 boxes over and over, managing Novell NetWare networks, and keeping the data systems alive that logged production run-cycles and machine stops across the factory floor. My daytime hours were spent inventing brand new swear words for Windows 95, blue screens, and corrupt registry hives.
One ordinary afternoon on the factory floor, a guy from production walked up to me and handed me a burned CD with no jewel case.
"Red Hat Linux 4.1", he told me. He thought it was an operating system I ought to try.
Man pages and Modelines
I took the disc home and installed it. Back then, Linux was not a three-click installer with a graphical welcome tour. It took hours of reading man pages and HOWTO documents before the machine was even usable.
Getting XFree86 to display a desktop meant manually calculating clock frequencies and typing custom Modelines into XF86Config, with the genuine background anxiety that an incorrect horizontal sync rate could physically fry the CRT monitor on your desk. Getting sound out of an ISA Sound Blaster 16 card meant checking physical jumpers, IRQ 5, DMA 1, and IO port 220 before the OSS audio drivers would give you a squeak.
Yet underneath all that friction lay something genuinely beautiful:
The errors were solvable. When something broke, there was a plain-text log, a meaningful error code, and open source code underneath it. There were no opaque binary black boxes that crashed without explanation.
During the day I fought Windows 95 at work. In my free time I lived in Linux.
The Windows NT 4 incident
At the factory, we ran an internal company intranet on a dedicated Windows NT 4 Server running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). One day, the web service collapsed completely. Nothing responded, the service refused to start, and basic troubleshooting hit a brick wall.
The company had an official support contract with Microsoft, so my boss told me to place a call to Microsoft Support to get the outage sorted out.
I called them, waited on hold, and explained the issue in technical detail. The engineer listened and replied plainly:
"That falls under server software. Server support is not covered under your basic tier. It costs extra per incident."
And it was not cheap. It was an exorbitant sum simply to speak with someone about software we had already paid full licensing for.
I told the representative I had to check with my boss first. When I told him what they said, he laughed, shook his head, and said:
"Yeah, that is Microsoft in a nutshell."
He approved the purchase order, we paid, and a few hours later the Microsoft technician got IIS back up and responding again.
Enter Apache
Two weeks later, another breakdown hit the exact same NT 4 server.
I walked into my boss's office and said: "Let us try running Apache on a Linux box instead."
By the following morning, the entire factory intranet was being served by Apache on Linux, completely free and open source. It required no expensive support retainers, no licensing keys, and no mandatory reboots every time a configuration parameter changed.
And it just kept running. It served requests day after day, week after week, month after month. Nobody in the entire company noticed any change, except for one critical detail: the intranet was consistently fast and never crashed again.
Zero Windows, zero headaches
Over the years that followed, I touched Windows less and less until it vanished from my life entirely.
Today I run zero Windows machines and have zero headaches.
People still occasionally ask if I can help troubleshoot their Windows problems. My answer is almost always the same: "No, google it yourself." I help my mother, and that is the entirety of the Windows tech support I provide.
If you want sovereignty, predictability, and genuine peace of mind in your computing life, you run Linux.